Originally posted by Loing
Yea I let my imagination run wild sometimes and imagine up fantasy worlds. I'll write about some of them in my notebook sometimes. Some of them are ongoing movies where I am the director, and I'll close my eyes and play them out.
I have a "mind movie" these days about a space war in a crescent shaped galaxy. In the void inside the crescent, there is a black hole, and this is a cosmic barrier to travelling "across" the croissant, and this serves multiple purposes.
Also, the cosmic scale allows me to imagine futuristic tech but also the political intrigue that is enabled by slow communications, as it used to be before the invention of telephony. Many classic political dramas are impossible because phones exist, old school military tactics are impossible because of telephony and satellite+aerial reconnaissance. But not so when you're dealing with cosmic distances.
In space, momentum from high speed travel is also difficult to reverse or brake due to physics. So ship dogfights play out like naval warfare in 3 dimensions. Everything is about time, trajectories, information and decision making. These battle sections are about teamwork, politics, how the ships work like an organism internally, they are clashes of commanders and their philosophies, their skills as leaders and their relationships to their crews, rather than a direct battle of arms.
There are also small skirmishing "fighter" crafts for more traditional dogfighting combat scenarios, which allows personal, individual storylines to develop.
I write down the least trite stories.
Originally posted by Loing
Oh I forgot to describe the actual world.
The crescent is split into two halves, roughly. Down the middle there is disputed territory, the warzone.
One half of the crescent is a confederation of nations of various sizes, from planetary to massive interstellar civilizations, lead by a senate that is directed by a high council of 12 equal, elected parties.
The other half is a pseudo-theocratic multinational empire, governed by the immortal philosopher king Yari, a mycelial brain that has engulfed a planetary system and is sustained by the radiation from a core of circling binary stars.
With virtual invulnerability and no need for sustenance, Yari has pondered for aeons, his primary interest being the black hole's gradual devouring of the galaxy.
By absorbing and processing the raw radiation it comes into contact with, Yari has gathered massive amounts of data from the galaxy and surrounding space, including on surrounding civilisations. Yari has gained dominion over half the galaxy purely through conversation and diplomacy.
Somewhere in the heart of the warzone is a hidden rogue planet that holds a secret that will decide the fate of the galaxy.
I really like the concept of how communication breaks down over long distances. It’s like a recapitulation of an old theme of mankind—that we struggle to maintain power over distance—which we thought had been eliminated through telephonic innovation but really wasn’t done with us. The mycelium-brained philosopher-king strikes me as a very original spin on an already potent narrative device, I have to wonder if it isn’t for the best that he rule the galaxy despite my objections to any kind of government endorsed by Plato.
Unless I’m mistaken, it sounds like we have something in common in our imaginings: that the primary, antagonizing regimes of our stories have acquired their hegemony through diplomatic violence, rather than by waging open wars. It probably works better in your setting than mine, given the modernity of such strategies.
I’m especially interested in the confederation. What is the background of your galactic Senate? From what do they derive their authority and what is its genealogy, and who are their constituents? Why is this arrangement, in their view, preferable to the kingship they oppose? Are they aware of the existential threat (the black hole consuming their galaxy), and if so, how do they prioritize it?
Originally posted by Loing
Could you tell us about one of your favourites?
The world I'm creating is still pretty fresh, I mean to develop it a lot more completely than I have so far and make aspects very concrete, maybe even a continuous narrative. Its core themes deal with how power constitutes culture, that domination is the law, and hubris is the inevitable product. Though I borrow elements from Greco-Roman history in constructing its society, and the races I use are from the D&D universe, much of the politics I incorporate are drawn from modern examples and contemporary philosophical theory. As I'm trying to fit it into a roleplaying system, the results will, unfortunately, be more derivative than I would like, but it's an experiment I've enjoyed nonetheless.
Its base concept begins with a small empire, built over the ruins of an ancient race against whom Men had committed genocide after a bloody and silent revolution, and it is situated across an archipelago of volcanically-formed islands with highly fertile soil rich with mineral deposits. Their emerging culture has been carefully authored by a unique ethnic group and philosophical cult which wields authority through a proxy emperor and channels their imperial resources in the manner of a surveillance state toward a series of political technologies including a compulsory medical system, a state-sponsored body of intellectuals which produces propagandist literature, eugenics programs meant to engineer a subservient labor/military apparatus, etc. Despite these nefarious tactics of power which span the whole epoch of their hegemony, by all conventional measures, their people enjoy spectacular prosperity and have benefited from a peace unbroken for centuries (as in
Pax Romana), except for the undertaking of covert 'peacekeeping missions' which purpose to bring surrounding city-states under their dominion, though these never qualify as ‘wars’ and are habitually rationalized by a naïve public mind.
Several chiefs among this hidden authority are literal vampires with an agenda of social control on a vast scale, and their matriarch (named for my evil sister) is obsessed with her sterility. She can only have ‘children’ by biting the throats of targets within the nobility and converting them, and they, in turn, regard her as their mother and submit to her command. Civilization lies in the shadow of her envy for humanity due to her longing to conceive, and her ultimate project is to prepare an artificial, immortal body, to imbue it with a stolen
anima originally from the body of the First King (that's me!), and to install it as a god-emperor loyal to her will (a homunculus, really) which replaces the current, human monarch. To accomplish this, she requires a mythological element which can only be extracted from a sacred well of spiritual energy at the
axis mundi of their world, and for this task alone she has been preparing her mind and body for centuries. She doesn’t know it, but actually doing this would probably result in disaster.
A splintered resistance has arisen to oppose this whole strategy on multiple fronts, though none of them understand fully the extent of the oppression they seek to undermine—if they were ever united, perhaps there would be hope that they’d comprehend the big picture—regardless, they also can’t see a tremendous existential threat on the horizon. There is an exiled population of a prisoner race in revolt who are increasing their raids on territories of the empire by sea. The Intelligentsia, though largely complicit with the vampiric agenda, has within some rogue elements who publish counterculture for underground circulation which has amassed a growing readership of budding revolutionaries. There is an order of priests who, possessed with supernatural foresight, sought refuge in a cave system a millennium prior to the events of the story; their order, while spiritually enhanced and very powerful, have become entirely blind as a result of their residence. Among them was recently born a deaf, mute child, this array of deformities occurring because he is the rightful conduit for the stolen
anima (he is a reincarnation of its original source), and if it is restored to him, he will be returned the memories and faculties of the First King and assert his claim to the emperorship. Whether the citizens would accept him (a profoundly disabled exponent of cave-dwelling inbreeders) is a narrative puzzle for me to solve.
Unless the vampire mother succeeds in tapping the mystical vein of the world, of course. Their islands actually sit atop the caldera of a long-inactive submarine supervolcano and if she does this, it will probably collapse with Atlantean consequences.
