For a time I started on a personal project to sort of rewrite Harry Potter, changing all the character names and many descriptions, but keeping basic plot as similar as possible, except that instead of a magic school for wizards, it’s the kid’s school for a semi-posthuman hi-tech enclave that exists alongside but apart from the rest of the world (which is actually a recreation of the original Earth created by godlike AIs to examine what life would be like without a fast-take-off singularity, most of humanity is simply unaware and think they’re living a 21st century life). Instead of the Philosopher’s Stone, for example, the first book would probably be about The Last Cornucopia, a nanotech Assembler which lacks the built-in restrictions of most of the others in the world and can be used to do various restricted things…
Anyway I changed the Harry Potter analog into a girl (Hagrid’s analog was a human from a colony bioformed for a high-gravity environment, as I recall). Since I figured in a world where high technology is the equivalent to magic, nobody would really care about what gender you’re attracted to (and gender would be changeable anyway to anybody who really wanted), I didn’t bother gender-swapping any of her potential love interests- I mean, if she’s also gay (or leaning heavily in that direction), it doesn’t really matter, does it? And as I went on, it appealed to me more, even though I lost steam long before I ever got to where young romance was a factor anyway.
Sometimes I think about going back to it.
