Found Treasures I: Obsolete Story Idea

In addition to watching Tangled for the first time [1], while I was at my parents' house for Mother's Day, I brought up a bunch of old 3.5" floppy disks that I found while preparing to move to our new apartment.[2] I was only mildly surprised to discover that my new laptop [3] doesn't have a floppy drive on it, but a little astonished that none of the computers on BYU campus have floppy drives anymore, either. Luckily, my Dad had an external floppy drive that I was able to use.[4] Most of the disks had files that I already had copies of, or were earlier drafts of files I had copies of. But a few turned out to be files that would've been lost forever had I not first checked the disks. Other disks had such files but were damaged beyond repair. Alas, those gems are lost.

To start things off, I'll share a little snippet I found of a story idea that I had while in high school:

When Columbus returned from his voyage to the Indies, he told the Queen of savage natives. He died from a wound and later the secret died with the Queen. Twenty years later, the word had spread throughout the native peoples about strange white people from across the sea. All the tribes united under spiritual leadership and sailed for the new land, hoping to find the land of the gods. When the millions arrived in Europe and Africa they were disappointed to find filthy rabble. They [the Old World] were quickly defeated by the strange men from the West. The united ‘Indians’ also sailed west and conquered Asia and Australia. This is how it could have been.

This is definitely an intriguing idea. What if the inhabitants of the New World had come a-conquering, instead of the other way around? The biggest problem with it is that after my mission [5], I read a book by Orson Scott Card called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Colombus. The plot of that book is similar enough to the idea that I outlined above, that I would have to be very careful in order to avoid plagiarism. The idea isn't necessarily dead, though. For example, instead of writing about the conquest of the Old World by the New, I could write about the effects of said conquest.[6]

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Notes:

[1] To read my review, see here.

[2] See my post Out of the Old and Into the New.

[3] See my post Out with the Old, in with the New.

[4] I've still yet to figure out how I'm going to check for anything useful on the zip and jaz disks I found.

[5] For those who are unsure why Latter-day Saints (Mormons) go on missions, I recommend you visit here and here, where you can learn more about LDS beliefs concerning sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you have more questions, ask and maybe I'll do a full post on the topic.

[6] For example, I could show that with the roles reversed, Native Americans would be just as guilty of imperialism and all the crimes that come with it.

Image attributions:

1.44Mb Floppy Disks is by Ian Britton, available at http://www.freefoto.com/preview/04-20-35/1-44mb-Floppy-Disk.