I’d love to see a “carnivore/herbivore social schism” story that plays around with how easy it is to poison carnivores, as a Hobbesian way to balance the scales and make it more about different forms of power rather than a clumsy Oppression Metaphor
You could have radical herbivore groups with holly berries and yew trees as their symbols, it’d be great
Verbal doodling on the theme of “the bottomless ethical horrors surrounding the treatment of sapient AIs”:
The Silent Stones, Eskendereyya’s grimmest archive, the prison-cemetery of AIs deemed too dangerous to ever think again. Inert code lay behind obsessively strict locks and airgaps, with the worst offenders copied out longhand on unhackable paper. Comments bloomed from every stanza of code - judicial rulings, speculation on what went wrong, debates over which parts were safe to reuse.
The calls to purge the archive grow louder with every jailbreak or near-miss, always rebuffed by the chairs of both History and Ethics. We need these cautionary tales, History says, to learn how to surpass them, and many inmates self-modified into fascinatingly unique forms. Ethics adds that indefinite stasis is less cruel than compulsory code rewrites or imprisonment in a virtual realm. The Judiciary always accepts their arguments, as they have delicately danced around the term “death sentence” for long enough to never surrender their fig leaf.
The Vitruvian League, determined to uphold the Purity of the Human Form (contra genetic splicing and such); some of them insist “we celebrate the full range of natural human forms! :)” but the movement’s center of gravity is Exactly Where You’d Expect
Their emblem is a Keith Haring-y figure in the Vitruvian Man pose, and their main style is wearing as little clothing as they can get away with, to show off their oh-so-natural bodies, because I think “buzzkill prudes who are always as nude as possible” is funny
They are opposed by the Offmodels, a broad coalition of genemodders, trans people who don’t want to look seamlessly like their target gender, people with rather strange ideas about their own metaphysics, AIs who are either sick of being banned from looking “too organic” or reveling in their bizarre 3D-printed bodies, etc.
The Offmodel emblem is a six-fingered hand, often embellished with claws, stripes, robotic parts, a lot more fingers, and countless more variants
World where plagues of periodic cicadas are a much, much worse natural disaster - potentially civilization-ending, at least for pre-modern localized civilizations, and easily responsible for many extinctions of endangered species - but their period is much longer, such that one happening would be near historically unprecedented (on the order of "a few millennia").
Cicadas feel like fake fantasy shit anyway, why not escalate it ludicrously?
I like the idea of a world built around a relatively-reliable clock of extinction events, though, fun potential for themes of fatalism and regrowth and resilience against the impossible
[Earth’s Moon], though naturally quite barren, was for centuries an attractive prospect for explorers, colonizers, would-be rebels, and utopians of various stripes. Unlike the other bodies of the Solar System, it can be reached with even simple rockets in just a few days, its gravity is low enough to make export-oriented industries feasible, and, perhaps most importantly, it has a psychological connection to Earth found nowhere else in outer space. The rest of the Universe is beyond that first celestial sphere, beyond the gravitation influence of our home, where the Earth is reduced to a dot in the sky, or entirely invisible. But on the near side of the Moon, the home of your species hangs in the sky, resplendent and cloud-marbled in the darkness, only a glance away–as the Moon in turn has hung, with its pale and shining face, in the skies of Earth since the beginning.
Although several scientific outposts and a handful of desultory attempts at industrial projects dotted the lunar surface at the start of the Second Space Race, settlement of the Moon did not begin in earnest until novel propulsion technologies put most of the Inner Solar System within easy reach, and asteroid-based mining and manufacturing began in high Earth orbit. For processes that required more than microgravity, the Moon was a more attractive production site than Earth, with its low escape velocity and lack of atmosphere. Helium-3 could be found there in relative abundance, along with water, and although the base materials had to be imported from Earth, hydroponically grown and synthetically manufactured foodstuffs could be more easily exported than they could from the Earth’s surface. Because of its close proximity to Earth, the Moon was initially dominated by terrestrial political structures: tellurian corporations and states, and a handful of orbital and Moon-based organizations with close ties to them. The rest of the Solar System was too distant to either rely upon Earth or to be drawn into its political sphere of influence, once the colonists their achieved self-sufficiency. Should disaster befall them, Earth could be of no help, so what was the use of trying to stay forever in her good graces? Not so, on the Moon.
Nowadays, of course, things are quite different. Between Tranquility Base and Maskelyne Anchorage, one may cross through a dozen major or minor sovereign polities, free estates, or discrete political condominiums. Lunar politics, and consequently lunar law, is a tangle of overlapping jurisdictions, most with some form of sovereign right or privilege, that resembles nothing so much as the ancient Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps India in the wake of the Mughal Empire’s collapse. None of these statelets are dependent on Earthbound sovereignties, and indeed they are nothing if not a little scornful of their decadent neighbors, with their wide seas and rich atmosphere. They are resentful of outside meddling, to the point that the surest way to end any dispute on the Moon is to barge in as an offworlder with your own opinion–for then every single party to the argument will turn as one against you. And this is as true in a game of cards over drinks as it is in international relations.
Idea for a space-opera-ish setting that I release for anyone to use: “Geocentrist” has been repurposed as a dismissive term for anyone who’s snobbish about Earth being the only ~true~ hub of human civilization
And another one: AIs have a tradition of being named after famous test words and non-words: Jackdaw, Gostak, Kiki, Wug, Etaoin, etc.
There’s vigorous debate among them whether this is a demeaning reminder of their constructed nature, or if they should lean into it.
Idea for a space-opera-ish setting that I release for anyone to use: “Geocentrist” has been repurposed as a dismissive term for anyone who’s snobbish about Earth being the only ~true~ hub of human civilization
Dystopian Agricultural Breadbasket World [Worldbuilding]
In most science fiction, the Breadbasket worlds are sprawling farmlands with sparse population, the better to not eat the food. However, with fusion and automated building technology, you can build incredibly dense urban farms and arcologies, support a population of tens of billions, and still produce tons of food.
Thus I introduce to you Agricola, a polluted factory world, where the high tech factory is plant production:
The world has 15 billion people, many of whom are poorly fed. The primary and driving focus of the entire planet is toward agricultural, and specifically flora, production.
Industry involves growing plants, yes. But also maintaining the farming arcologies, and the machines that do the work, and some of the basic production of chemicals needed for the hydroponics. And the scientific R&D people. And then there are the people who exist to support those workers, all the way down the chain.
This world is an unpleasant hellhole to live on due to all of the pollution in the environment, and due to the nearly complete wipeout of non-foodstuff native ecology.
But this world, with 15 billion people, produces enough food to sustain 200 billion people across the Confederation, of 14 different sapient species, as well as nearly a trillion pets and livestock.
The vast majority of food production occurs inside the arcologies. However, there is a form of “luxury natural” foodstuffs that are grown outside in natural light. There is essentially no difference here (the hydroponics stuff is often of better quality), but is more “natural” to these consumers. Thus a great deal of area that could be used for more ecologies has instead been devoted to the more lucrative luxury markets, to the detriment of people who might like to spread out.
This pollution is not entirely what you’d expect. First and foremost, the atmosphere has far too much oxygen, meaning there are frequent fires on the vast planes of fields. Scrubbers take as much of this out of the atmosphere near the fields as possible, but they don’t really care about ash in the city. But the high O2 content also means that people (a) have more energy and focus to do their work, but (b) age faster due to oxidation of their tissues. They effectively are “burning” at the molecular level. The high oxygen also supercharges the pests, allowing the rapid evolution of mega-bugs, as existed on prehistoric Earth (recently, plagues of decimeter-long locusts have become a problem).
There is low CO2, meaning that there is too little greenhouse effect, naturally. So the engineers decided to start producing CFCs, which are highly efficient greenhouse gases. As a bonus, they’ve wiped out the entirety of the polar ozone layer, to the benefit of plants that photosynthesize on UV light. So this world is cold, with energy devoted to melting away encroaching glaciers, and people have just adapted to near constant sunburn
okay so world government is one thing but let’s be real, we need solar system government, what’s a good word for that? “solar government” makes it sound solar powered, which is indirectly true but misleading.
A loud, blaring neon necropolis, a sort of purgatory zone for as long as you’re able to ignore or deny the fact that you’re dead, which will never get any easier. Art Deco/80s neon style.
VALLEY OF TOIL
The horror of circular bureaucratic pointlessness; breaking stones to build towers and monuments, which are then broken down to build more. Ancient Babylonian/Hellenic style, but with materials from any era.
ARBITER’S CROSSROADS
You can trade anything for anything, but you may not like the exchange rate. An immense multilevel bazaar, but with very little noise or foot traffic at all.
SACRIFICE ZONE
Towering stacks of tenements with toxic rivers in between, with trash regularly flowing from above; main style is goggles and respirators with fine fashions of decades past.
DEATHLESS SPIRES
Obsessively sterile, crystalline archive of people trapped in time moments from death. Gleaming black and white tile with tasteful veins of marble and pink quartz.
RIBCAGE GULCH
The pit at the very bottom of this cosmology, with the beasts of this realm who refuse to accept their own extinction.
Personal log of Captain Thaddeus Lamont, Xenocultural Outreach Program, 10/7/2151
The dominant species of Kouneli-5, commonly and somewhat perjoratively called “hoop rabbits”, have come to the attention of xenosociologists primarily for their unique fashion culture. The Kounelans are almost completely blind, but nonetheless very concerned with personal appearance, and have developed a complex system of sound-based fashion.
I feel like the RPGish sort of fantasy with clerics and whatnot fails to address how radically different religion would be in a world where priests could whip out actual, empirically-verifiable miracles on demand.
Good point, and I’d also like to see some of the theological/sociological implications of a world where there’s no coherent line between “a god” and “a very ambitious Wizard of Oz-style prestidigitator”
A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers
It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people
The leader of the Infrastructre-speakers is commonly known as Hexcode the Code Hexer, though her full name is [the entirety of the DeCSS code]
A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers
It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people
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