Dares in Space!

If your story includes alien races, make one of them a real BEM: Bug Eyed Monster, or, if preferred, a LGM: Little Green Man.

Have a character who hates netspeak/chatspeak/txt-tlk.
Double points if the character attacks people who use any of it.
Triple if the character goes to the trouble of hunting down the person using it.
Quadruple if the character somehow manages to kill someone via text message or Instant Messenger.
Quintuple if the character gets arrested for mass homicide at one point, but released because no one can figure out how it was done.
Hextuple if the character is eventually killed by someone using txt-tlk as their weapon.
Septuple points if this is utterly vital to the plot.

Include a character whose religion is different from that of most the characters in the story; while this character's religious practices should not normally intrude upon their interaction with others, the fact that the character is actually in space, rather than on a planet, causes some kind of religious dilemma for the character, leading him/her to seek some kind of advice or accommodation from at least one other character in the story.

Bonus points if you can make this critical to the plot; double bonus if the character finds an elegant solution to the issue. Triple bonus if the solution creates some kind of interpersonal crisis which is either a) not permanently resolved by the end of the book or b) rendered moot by the death of one or more of the characters involved in said crisis due to other direct causes (such as mechanical or structural failure of a spaceship/spacestation/docking platform/planetary structure, getting killed by someone not in the argument, old age; etc.)

Also, bonus points if you can identify the real-life inspiration for this challenge, even if you don't manage to write it into your story.

Ooo, ooo!

I don't remember thon's name or gender, but there was a Muslim person on... I think the International Space Station who had problems because Muslims are supposed to face towards Mecca for the daily prayers. How are you supposed to do that when (a)you're circling the Earth and (b) the days vary in length like whoa?

Include a character who isn't sapient but who is still important to the story.

Bonus points if s/he/it is the viewpoint character.

Double bonus points if none of the other characters are sapient, either.

I dare you to write a novel set in Ancient Greece and based solely on scientific data available at that time. Bonus if said scientific data is no longer considered valid by today's standards. Double bonus if in spite of that limitation you manage to make your story sound logical and believable.

Have an alien that actually calls himself Sam-I-Am.
Bonus points if he's important to the plot.
Further bonus points if he's insane.

Have an alien that tries to take over the Earth by himself.
Bonus Points if he dies on his/hers/its first attempt.
Double Bonus Points if its in a fast food restaurant.
Triple Bonus points if the reason s/he/it was in the restaurant in the first place was because he thought the manager was the President.

I like simple dares that don't require your novel to fit into someone else's idea of what the story should be. So, my dare is that you include one or more of the following in your novel:

Robots.
An Incurable disease.
Cannibals.

I'm going to expand my previous dare: put in a BEM or LGM even though there are no sapient aliens in your story. I've already figured out how to put in a Little Green Man, and I'm working on my BEM...

A group of explorers lands on an alien planet and begins to survey it. It seems that it is uninhabited, but one by one the explorers begin to vanish. I guess you could call this a science fiction mystery.

I've read a book recently where all the Muslim people wore a watch/compass that always pointed toward Mecca no matter where they were in the universe.

Or a science fiction story with a cast of characters that suck at reading maps. :D

I come bringing dares:

Have a chronically horny robot on the crew of a spaceship
*BP: if he/she/it has no reproductive organs
**BP: if he/she/it is hitting on the captain almost every scene
***BP: if nobody can turn it off

Have a robot that thinks its a vampire
*BP: if it has no teeth
**BP: if nobody can turn it off

Have a robot that thinks its a ninja
*BP: if nobody can turn it off

Seeing a pattern?

If one of the aliens is a BEM, make him/her/it a benign character.

Have a chronically horny robot on the crew of a spaceship
*BP: if he/she/it has no reproductive organs
**BP: if he/she/it is hitting on the captain almost every scene
***BP: if nobody can turn it off

I'm so using this.

Okay, an easier one, but fun (I think) for a Sci-Fi and future-oriented setting:

Have a character that speaks in/sings/quotes movies and music from the 70's and 80's
Bonus points if that character is essential.
Bonus points X2 if at some point what that character is singing/quoting is in some way happening at the same time.
Bonus points X3 if it saves the character's life somehow.
Bonus points X4 for having a second character that simply notes what is being quoted/sang randomly

Have a chronically horny robot on the crew of a spaceship
*BP: if he/she/it has no reproductive organs
**BP: if he/she/it is hitting on the captain almost every scene
***BP: if nobody can turn it off

Hehe, I think I can do this one. . . *snicker*

Space-travel in a non-heliocentric cosmology? Sounds pretty entertaining.

There's a dare. Something set IN SPACE where stars rotate around their planets.

Dare: Have a spaceship that travels 1.0 x 10 to the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 power squared x c (the speed of light).

There are some cool ideas here!

Here's my dare: it's been done before, but it's not done enough.

Write a sci-fi story that violates absolutely no known physical laws. That means no FTL travel, no macro teleportation or time travel. No artificial gravity. No inexhaustible power sources. And please, no humanoid aliens.

If you're interested, look here: it's an article I wrote for a professional web site, about sci-fi themes that should be retired. http://kunochan.com/?p=19

For your info, artificial gravity, "humaniod aliens," and time travel do not necessarily break any physical laws (some astronauts are living in as much as .1 second in the future).

But oh well.

While I'm here, might as well post a dare: Um... have a character that has to disarm a bomb that can destroy an entire galaxy, or something like that.

Thekherham Said:

"A group of explorers lands on an alien planet and begins to survey it. It seems that it is uninhabited, but one by one the explorers begin to vanish."

12 Little Astronauts......; )

I love your dare. What far too many science fiction authors forget is that this isn't fantasy. Now I'm primarily a fantasy author, and I don't really write science fiction. This is because I admit that it's not my forte. I'm not even planning a true science-fiction novel with my steampunk novel this year. Mine should properly be called fantasy (some steampunk novels may be sci-fi). But actual sci-fi needs to have some kind of scientific basis, some kind of scientific believability. Sci-fi or combination sci-fi and fantasy publications often complain that they receive very little true sci-fi. It would be great to see more new names in this genre.

Writing SF that doesn't violate any known physical laws is a grand old tradition, known as "hard SF." It's my favorite form of SF, and I've written a number of short stories that way. My NaNo last year was what I'd call "semi-hard." Except for FTL travel, everything fit real-world physics, and I'm writing another book in that universe this year. Not that I'm taking the dare, mind you, I was already planning on doing it because that's the type of SF book I want to read.

Mortaine:

Excellent dare. Just general enough to work. Taken, with thanks.

Here's one: name a planet or ship with the name of a science fiction author, anagrammed.

Alternative: name a planet or ship with the anagrammed name of an author you dislike. Then blow it up.

I've done the second one. Very satisfying. ;-)

Sherry

surely time travel would cancel itself out if you went back in time. Because say you built a time machine and went back to, I don't know, say 1942. Your time machine wouldn't be around then so surey it would disapear.

I have a dare for anyone up the challenge.....

Make one of your main characters a parent. And keep the kid around for over half the story.
+1 if the child is well-developed an normal (no prodigies)
x2 if the parent is single-parenting for the entire book (other parent is dead, divorced, kidnapped by aliens)
x3 if you keep all romance away from the parent character
x10 if the child is under 3 and is potty training or in diapers and needs special accommodations (pacifier, diapers, bottle, nursing, ect)

Larry Niven pointed out years ago that if time travel is possible and it's possible to change the past, time travel will never be invented. This is because each time traveler will create a new future until one of them creates a future in which time travel isn't invented. At this point, things stabilize.