Old setting, new ideas

Having finished the rewrite of my novel about riddles, I was casting around for the next project to work on.  About thirty years ago I wrote a novel set in an orbital shipyard, about a coder who created a sentient starship.  This was well before the Internet, and well before ordinary people were learning to code.

Time has caught up with and overtaken the world I wrote about in my novel.  I spent a lot of time trying to explain how the ship could have become sentient - all without an algorithm in sight.  I don't know if algorithms even existed when I wrote the original draft.

So there's nothing I can do with that novel right now. Sentient ships are very common in SF stories these days, and none of their authors spend more than a few brief paragraphs explaining their sentience. And the sensawunda my characters in that novel felt about creating this precious unique sentient ship is long gone.  

And yet there are things I still love about that novel.  I love the partnership of the coder and the ship. I love the coder's friendship with a security operative, and a kick-ass, grimy, irreverent, woman engineer.  I love the orbital shipyard setting, all six detailed decks of it.  I love the opening scene of the book, where the main character's solar sailor is sabotaged.

So there's a lot of stuff I want to keep, but how to re-cast it?  One of the things I didn't put in my original was big cats.  In more recent years nearly every novel I've written contains at least one, and they usually carry some consveration message too.  That was my in for changing the novel.  My main character is now a courier ship's captain, and she specialises in relocating, surprise, surprise, big cats.

I'm keeping the solar sailor attack, but this time it's a minor character who is attacked, a controversial conservation consultant.  That attack now becomes the inciting incident for my main character to rescue the consultant, and be sent on an investigation with her security operative friend to find out who did the sabotage, and why.

I feel a rush of excitement at getting back to original creation.  I have a good feeling about the project, and I think I'm going to have a lot of fun figuring out the changes I need to do.