This year's idea is a sci-fi novel set several centuries in the future, about 300 years after World War III and a century after the other novel I'm working on.
It's science fiction with a bit of mystery and some political-thriller vibes.
Basically, an alien ambassador dies, a second is forced into stasis, and the human ambassador is suspected of involvement.
The political environment is the Asian Hegemony.
After World War III, the surviving Asian governments and populations develop a political superstructure for coordinating resources and mutual defense, wrapped around a system intended to promote and protect the survival of their individual cultures.
That eventually leads to efforts to explore and establish human colonies in deep space, which are successful. Then a century-long galactic anomaly cuts those colonies off from Earth.
The Asian Hegemony survives and thrives—mostly—but also spawns a couple of other human super-civilizations and several parallel civilizations of its own.
The original foothold of the Hegemony colonists was a planet called Borealis Nova, which remains a major diplomatic center as well as an important source of ship maintenance and construction in the region.
The aliens have their own physiology, so they're not exactly "humans with random bits glued to their foreheads," and some of those biological differences will be part of the plot.
One of the protagonists is also a human-feline hybrid, developed over the centuries for various reasons. This particular one comes from a Japanese-derived culture and works as a protocol aide to the human ambassador.
She ends up working with a detective inspector on his last investigation as they try to figure out what actually happened. The legal system is a bit more like Japan than the West, though, so the working presumption is generally that the authorities probably know what they're doing.
Overall, my goal is to actually finish the thing in November—and keep it from getting completely out of hand in terms of length.
