The no-parking signs no longer stood sentinel against cars. With the incoming tide and the rising of the water level up to a good three feet in the former parking lot, they had become anchor points for people to tie their canoes up against. It was one of the benefits of living in a former city, everybody agreed--the sheer prevalence of signs for parking and driving and light poles and all the infrastructure that used to be used when the city still remained above the water and everyone drove cars as a matter of habit, without thinking much about it. The overpasses remained dry spots, good for anchoring below and walking up to trade goods, or for those things that needed to be done on dry land, or could be done best there. The houses had mostly crumbled as their foundations rotted away, but some of the brick houses still stood, as did the stone, and in a few cases, their upper floors were even livable and safe. Careful inspections were needed, of course, but the best hotels were in former libraries--and usually the books still were, too, those that the custodians had not decided to be worth moving to the drylands as the waters encroached upon their city.


Inspiration: Photo of a flooded car park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/terry-and-nikon/12328347314/
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Setting. Also, I accidentally typed "fantasy" here, which is an interesting idea. Take a sci-fi trope and write it as fantasy.

When the bay turned crystal-clear and inviting, and the sun shone bright, and the colors of all the buildings along the shore-front seemed to dance with color and brilliance, that was the time when all the old fishermen would suck their teeth and refuse to go out to fish. It was also the time when the tourists exited their hotels in droves and wandered through the city streets exclaiming over this and that and the other quaint shop or hidden alley or rustic street. The fishermen watched them go, and sucked their teeth, and refused to leave the stoop of their houses. The fishermen's old wives (who were of course about as old as the fishermen, or older in some case, the marital career of a fishermen's wife being what it might be) accused the fishermen of being lazy old men who just wanted to watch the young tourist girls in their short shorts and immodest skirts and long bronzed legs. The old men sucked their teeth at this, too, but if one of their wives started mentioning trips to market or errands, on those days, those days the old men mustered up some semblance of their youth and flirted their wives back into flustered indoor cleaning. When the bay turned crystal-clear and inviting, the police chief of the small town (who was young, and besides, did not have the luxury of sucking his teeth in his doorway) grimly called in all his deputies and prepared to send out search parties for the ones who did not return. There were always ones who did not return. He posted many, many signs warning that swimming in the bay was not allowed, but people could not resist dangling their feet. The children, at least, had their mothers to keep them away--their mothers who listened to old wives' tales, or in this case, old fishermen's tales--


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unicorn81/9412195349/
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Eh. Mostly setting. Nice to see it somewhere a little different.

She sank down into the blue-green waters and thought, "This is worth it. Being able to live here, being able to do this whenever I want, it is worth all the inconvenience and the trouble and the stress of the job." She hadn't swum this particular coral reef before, but it was far off from the major visiting areas and so she had some hope that it would hold some of the more shy and hard-to-observe species. After all, she told herself, there was nothing wrong with having a hobby, and hers was stilling underwater species in their natural environment. She'd managed to sell a few of her stills off-world for a sum large enough to buy out one year from her contract. Still twenty-six years left, but that wasn't so bad. Lots of people did worse. She was careful never to buy from the company store any of the luxuries that could have easily added even more time to her sentence--contract, she correct herself. She would probably have to bite the bullet, so to speak, in about twenty years when it was rejuv or head for the threshold beyond which you were nonrenewable. She didn't like the idea, but it didn't come standard as part of the contract, and it wasn't the sort of thing that--


Inspiration: Google "carved box skin" -> image of two angel skin coral carved Asian women.
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Could be a story, doesn't demand to be. Oh, and I'm pretty sure she finds carvings underwater, grown over or whatever.

We feared brain parasites in lake-water, but nothing really in sea water. We laughed at the tourists who wouldn't go in the water for fear of shark attacks, which were so rare as to be less risky than driving to the beach. We didn't think much of the jellyfish that washed up on the beach, simply tried to avoid stepping on them. When the glowing jellyfish began to gather in the shallows, we all went out with cameras. It was reported on the news and everything. I stepped on one as we left and felt a single sharp jab. I thought nothing of it until my foot began to glow in one spot.


Inspiration: This is what happens when you google "Ellen Datlow likes" (because of Fearful Symmetries anthology) and look at the pictures.
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Parasitic jellyfish living inside the human as they get larger. When they're mature enough, she will cough/vomit them up into the saltwater tank (eventually, after just killing the first few), and is a struggling model whose career takes off when this starts. Conflicty! Should maybe be male instead of female, to make story more transgressive? Possibly gay, to add difficulty adopting? Also note, the tone of this is all wrong for the story.

They'd been floating for three days when they saw the towers in the distance, and at first they thought it was salvation. Now and then, they'd sailed between islands and found one of these old structures left form before the great floods, or from during the forming, when Men tried to control how the world was shaping itself. Sometimes there were great stores of food inside, or technology that might still work if it had been sealed against the seawater and if it could accept the transformed power and if it wasn't dependent on the old world-net that had long since died and fragmented into a hundred tiny island nets, only a few of which were still connected by satellites. Every month or two, another satellite would plummet to land in the sea and then there would be old people shaking their heads and new islanders shrugging. The nets were designed for the break apart, these days, and one of their cargoes was data between islands, designed to plug in and update.


Inspiration: The photo above.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I just like the setting and the idea of all these little islands. So this isn't really a story idea as such.

I was a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of the ship Nasty Nancy, and nobody would hire me again. Either they thought I was a jinx, or they thought I was mad (I'd been foolish enough to tell my story true when I returned), or they thought I was a murdering cannibal, because what other explanation could there be for me being the only one to return aboard a deserted, drifting ship with blood staining the deck? I'd been in jail and interrogated for almost a year until they finally realized that nothing would stick, since they hadn't found me picking my teeth with the captain's shinbone. After I told the truth (mostly), and realized finally that I wouldn't be believed--which I only realized once I'd been allowed to shower and sleep and eat and drink enough water to--well, I don't like phrases like that anymore.


Inspiration: "Barrett's Privateers" - Stan Rogers
Story Potential: High.
Notes: This isn't a story, itself, but it could become a rip-roaring yarn!

The ship sailed in out of the fog, and the sailors on the port gaped at it. Never had they seen a craft so tall and strong, as tall as two city buildings stacked on top of each other, a weird green iridescence flowing over it's surface. They'd been going about their business all steady and normal-like, but at the sight, a serious breakdown in order occurred. Some ran for their cameras, to get pictures to National Enquirer or videos to YouTube. Some ran for th control room. Some ran for the weapons locker. The latter were not entirely incorrect in their aim, as it turned out, but they had no idea that the AK-47s and stun-guns stored there would do nothing--


Inspiration: "ship"
Story Potential: High--if I figure out the rest of it.
Notes: There have been a number of "ship from the past emerges from the mist/bermuda triangle" stories, and a certain number of "ship from the present ends up in the past," but not so many "ship from the future ends up in the present" ones.

The manta ray soared above him, and it was only when it kept going that he figured something was wrong. He began the long surfacing process. When his head broke above the sea, he stared. The fish, the manta rays, the coral reefs, all were inverted and swimming through the air with no apparent distress. He thought he must be hallucinating, or turned around underwater and confused enough to believe he'd exited the water. Very carefully, he reoriented himself and looked around. Empty water. Seaweed drifted past him, heading for the surface. Definitely underwater. Definitely alone. He switched his orientation and stared up.

Inspiration: This picture of a sting ray at sciencenews.org: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download/id/45316/title/jar_stingray.jpg
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: And it's all so polluted now in the ocean that humans will be forced to live there instead. Er. Boring.