Yes, I am talking about Lemmy posts.

Rather than continuously adding to the OP, I’m going to post replies. Feel free to comment either on the root of the thread or as a reply to a specific comment.

Here’s a geopolitical map of Focus, the yinrih’s home star system. As is conventional in a lot of sci-fi, the name of the star can serve as the name of the whole system. Humanity’s home system is referred to as Sol.

Random Facts about Each Body:

Focus

The Bright Way refers to a star hosting sapient life, especially their own, as a hearth star (not to be confused with a star hearth). All yinrih languages have a simple word for sun, but since humans can’t utter vulpithecine speech sounds we decided to give their star a nice classical name. The Latin word focus means hearth, and a star serves as one of the foci of an elliptical orbit, so the word seemed fitting all things considered.

Hearthside

The closest planet to Focus, Hearthside is tidally locked. The region around the substellar point is called The Nightless Desert. The capital city, located directly on the substellar point, is known as the City of Eternal Noon. There is a green belt running along the terminator. The City of Eternal Noon is the center of religious government of the Bright Way. Politically the planet is an ecclesiocratic republic, economically it is destributist (respecting private property while being aggressively anti-corporate). Companies must either be privately owned or cooperatives. There is no public stock market, and citizens are forbidden from holding a stake in a foreign company. Hearthside retains a unique language, but most citizens are proficient Commonthroat speakers as well.

Sweetwater

An ocean planet, Sweetwater is the innermost member of the Allied Worlds. It’s famous for its class disparity. There is a wealthy upper class living in underwater cities, and an underclass of surface-dwellers in roving ships and submarines. Some make a living fishing or mining, while others are pirates. There are a few small fixed islands, but there are also free-floating rafts of vegetation large and dense enough to support entire forests. These mobile islands have no fixed topography, and undulate along with the waves. As such it is nearly impossible to build fixed structures on them, and they are very popular with Atavists and others who seek to live a primitive lifestyle.

Yih

The cradle of the yinrih species, and one of only two planets in the galaxy to naturally give rise to life. The planet is the center of political power of the Allied Worlds. It is also the urheimat of the Commonthroat language. After the formation of the Allied Worlds, regional languages were slowly supplanted by Commonthroat across the AW, but substrate vocabulary remains.

Newhome

The first planet to be terraformed. The first wave of colonists started a machine-worshiping cult.

Welkinstead

The first of the two gas giants (or if you want to be pedantic, the only gas giant with Moonlitter being an ice giant). There are floating cities in the upper atmosphere that mine and refine economically exploitable gasses. There are also a few moons, and their inhabitants, called moonies, are seen as rustic and uncultured. The moony accent of Commonthroat carries many of the same stereotypes as the Southern American accent.

The Inner Belt

The first of the two asteroid belts, and home of the Spacer Confederacy. The SC is a less a unified polity and more a very loose collection of independent city states that group together solely to defend their sovereignty against bigger players. These city-states take the form of orbital colonies that go from asteroid to asteroid mining and selling the minerals in order to keep the lights on. One of these city-states is Wayfarers’ Haven, which started out as a refugee camp of Moonlitter citizens fleeing a Partisan border expansion. The Dewfall departs from Wayfarers’ Haven, making the tiny colony the first nonhuman polity to have diplomatic relations with Earth.

Moonlitter

An ice giant with many moons. Moonlitter is caught in the middle of the cold war between the AW and the Partisans. Its government is notoriously unstable, as both the AW and the Partisans fight for the hearts and minds of its citizens. Border skirmishes between Moonlitter and the Partisans are common. When Moonlitter allowed Welkinstead to establish a military outpost near their border, the Partisans retaliated by glassing the dwarf planet Pilgrims’ Rest. Fortunately the AW peacekeepers evacuated the residents to the inner belt before their home was destroyed, which is how Wayfarers’ Haven was founded.

The Outer Belt

A resource-rich region politically divided between Moonlitter and Partisan Territory. Both polities share a common language, Outlander, but the Partisan dialect is much more conservative thanks to government efforts to stave of encroachment of Allied Worlds media and with it the spread of Commonthroat.

Texan here. We learned Mexican Spanish (seseo, yeismo, ustedes for everyone, etc) It’s been years since I had to use it for my job but IIRC there’s a difference in the subjunctive verbs as well.

There are also distinct varieties of Spanish spoken in the US that differ from Mexican Spanish. As a general rule, if a common word has a similar-sounding English cognate (often false cognate) the cognate will be used. truck = troca instead of camión, concrete (as in cement) = concreto instead of hormigón, carpet = carpeta instead of alfombra, to park (a car) = parquear instead of estacionar, and so on. This is from my years working as a bilingual call center agent.

Much appreciated! Been thinking of looking for a writing community to have my work critiqued. I know I said on the Neocities page I’m not an aspiring author, but it would be nice knowing whether and how much I’ve improved over time.

Can I ask what’s your goal with this work

This is a playground to get lost in while daydreaming.

It feels like a great setting for a really dense wide scope novel

I have some stories set in this world, but the narrative and characters serve the worldbuilding and not the other way around.

How are you organising all your work?

I use Obsidian.

At first I was imagining Firefly as a sort of mystery box character, but they’re more of a one-man panopticon state.

While he does have a degree of direct control over the capital complex, in the vein of a genius loci, the low data rate of the ansible network means he can’t directly observe everything that’s going on in Partisan Territory, though the government would very much like to tell everyone that the Great Leader is always watching. He’s a deliberately ambiguous character. Did he initiate the genocide of Wayfarers, only relenting at the plea of his advisors? Or did the genocide start with the disorganized secularist warlord states that Firefly united under the Partisan banner, and Firefly put a stop to the atrocity after returning to Focus from his failed missionary journey? How did the the other two missionaries die during the time their womb ship was incommunicado? Did Firefly kill them in a nihilistic rage? Or did he make a final prayer to the Uncreated Light to save them as their amnions failed, only turning his back on his faith after the prayer went unanswered? Did he also die along with the other two missionaries, with the Partisans propping up his corpse a la Weekend At Bernie’s in order to have a unifying symbol to rally behind? Did he die some time in the intervening millennia? Surely sheer entropy would get to him eventually, suspended metabolism or not? If he is alive, is he sane, or have the millennia worn away his mind? Is he still a wanderer (apostate) after First Contact, or has he reconsidered his beliefs in light of the existence of other sophonts among the stars, and now wishes to embrace the natural death he’s fled from for 33 millennia? You get the picture.

sounds like you think a lot on ideology and utopias.

The Partisans are just my sink for all my grimdark ideas. The Lonely Galaxy is actually meant to be much more upbeat. The Partisans are mostly in the background. As far as ideologies go, there’s also the hyperlibertarian Spacer Confederacy, the capitalist Allied Worlds (which currently enjoys a degree of cultural and economic hegemony in the system), the unstable middle man between the AW and Partisan Territory that is Moonlitter, and the politically ecclesiocratic and economically distributist planet Hearthside.

The main thrust of this setting is that the yinrih are all alone, just like humanity, crying out into the blind uncaring cosmos. Our First Contact is also their First Contact. Most sci-fi involves a galaxy-spanning meta-civilization of countless alien races. Some works have humans all alone, but none I’m aware of have just one other species, just as surprised to meet us as we are to meet them.

What kinds of stories are you interested in telling with this?

Low stakes slice of life stuff, believe it or not. A human has to negotiate a yinrih bathroom, a yinrih and the human she’s lodging with have to deal with a broken air conditioner, a yinrih tries Texas BBQ for the first time, etc.

This looks interesting. I started learning Blender specifically to depict my conworld. This is the first time I’ve heard of Flowscape. It looks neat.

I didn’t even get into the fact that amnions are also abused for recreational purposes. Abusers are called gelheads (or gel-heads, gel heads, etc), since the suspended person is completely submerged in a substance called neurogel that acts as an interface between the nervous system and the amnion without any implants.

The Partisans also recruit addicted gel heads and plug their amnions into mini mechs, slowing their time perception so they can react with lightning speed to incoming attacks. Since their nervous system is seamlessly intigrated into the mech’s control suite they make for scary good pilots. These soldiers are called immortals, both because they don’t age while in suspension and because they’re legendarily hard to kill.

The reason why the Partisans use amnions so much is that the Bright Way regards them as sacred instruments of their holy work, and regard their misuse as sacrilege, most especially their use as oubliettes.

Firefly’s (the Partisan leader) similarity to the Emprah is actually a coincidence, but I’ve run with it after noticing it. The idea of an immortal leader was a reference to the Civilization games, and the the idea of an atheist regime ending up worshiping its leader is a reference to North Korea.

Firefly is in many ways a sci-fi lich, indeed, his detractors refer to him as the Lichlord. The Eternal Womb is his phylactery. His consciousness is still inside his physical body, but since the amnion can present whatever to his sensory system and since he can control connected electronics while in suspension, he can “project” himself into robotic avatars or plaster his likeness on vid screens. Ironically, he has forgotten the location of the Eternal Womb over the millennia, only knowing it’s squirrelled away somewhere in the capital complex, which takes up the entire surface and a good chunk of the interior of a dwarf planet.

Regarding yinrih psychology, they’re surprisingly relatable for humans with a few outlying exceptions mostly stemming from their reproductive strategy. The caudal ganglion isn’t actively involved in higher brain functions, but some neurological disorders or physical trauma that cause the partial or total severing of the connection between the two brains may cause the tail to move involuntarily. Amputation is usually the only resort in this case. The Dewfall’s mission controller, Lightray Lacktail, lacks a tail for precisely this reason.

The Partisans (space tree doggo Commies) in particular play with this time perception thing in a few ways. The leader of the Partisans is an apostate missionary who has permanently sealed himself in a suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb. Because his metabolic processes are halted while in suspension, he’s been alive for over 33 millennia, since the War of Dissolution. This is already an unfathomable age even for a species that lives for over 700 Earth years on average, but he has also slowed his subjective time perception so that from his perspective he’s been alive for millions of years, and may no longer be sane by the time of First Contact.

The Partisans also use this slowed time perception combined with the amnion’s ability to present arbitrary sensory input to the suspended person as a form of torture, drastically slowing the victim’s time perception while withholding any sensory input, including proprioception, so the victim experiences a thousand years of utter isolation while a mere six minutes pass outside. The amnions used for this purpose are called Oubliettes.

As for the inability to loose consciousness, Yinrih have two brains, the main brain located in the head, and a caudal ganglion whose original purpose was to control their prehensile tail, but has gained a secondary use as a hot-spare for the main brain should it be damaged or inactive. Yinrih do not sleep, but experience a 24 hour period of torpor every 12 days that serves the same purpose. Torpor is much like the unihemispherical slow wave sleep experienced by birds and marine mammals. A torpid yinrih is still conscious, but experiences dulled sensation and a feeling of detachment. If you’ve ever had cataract surgery, it’s like that.

The fact that yinrih can’t loose consciousness has forced them to get really creative when it comes to invasive surgery. Many surgeries can be performed by a tiny remotely operated micro mech that enters the patient’s body Fantastic Voyage style to operate without invasive incisions. But some procedures, such as amputations, have to resort to hallucinogens to send the patient on a wild drug trip so they don’t experience the trauma. These medical hallucinogens frequently find themselves on the streets as drugs of abuse under the street name mind candy, and it is common for medical professionals to go from healer to dealer.

The simulacrum generated by the amnion is necessary to keep the suspended person from going insane from a lack of sensory input. However, the sim itself can also be addictive, and potential missionaries must be rigorously screened and undertake a regimen of prayer and meditation while in sim to keep their minds anchored in reality.

I like this a lot. My own conworld also involves quadrupedal sophonts (aliens rather than animals), and I’ve thought about writing RFCs for some of their communication protocols.

YAP (yinrih ansible protocol) is a link layer protocol that manages messaging on an ansible link. Communication via ansible is very low bandwidth, meaning interplanetary networks look like 80s BBS’s or very very early (we’re talking still at CERN) websites. Ansibles use a kind of subspace called the Underlay. In order for two ansibles to communicate, they must contain wafers of tailstone shaved from the same monocrystal. Raw tailstone (or tailstone precursors) are mined and manufactured into monocrystals in a similar process to how silicon ingots are grown. At a certain point in this growth process, the crystal “locks”, and any wafers shaved from that monocrystal will only communicate with other wafers from the same monocrystal.

The Underlay link is shared between all such wafers, similar to a shared wifi channel, so individual ansibles have to take turns sending frames. You can achieve full duplex communication by growing two seperate monocrystals, shaving two wafers from each, and placing one wafer from each crystal into two ansibles, with one serving as an RX interface and its partner on the other ansible serving as TX, and vice versa. In practice, this is only done on high capacity trunk lines, as more underlay links require more power.

State actors can perform a supply chain attack by ordering a tailstone fab to grow monocrystals twice as large, break them in half, send half downstream to their customers and give the other half to the government, which can spy on communications made via those ansibles undetected or perform MITM attacks.

YIP (yinrih internetworking protocol) is a network layer protocol that can serve either in a reliable or best effort configuration. While the address space of the original YIP was exhausted millennia ago and a new, but incompatible, YIP version developed with a much larger address space, there are still single-stack networks using the older protocol at the time of First Contact.

Because yinrih evolved writing rather than inventing it, their digital age stretches back to the mid-Pleistocene despite only gaining sapience around the same time as humanity, and because yinrih live over 700 Earth years on average, their networks are built to be apocalypse-proof. With such robust networks with enough uptime to be measured in geologic terms, some networks are left to run forgotten for millennia. This gives rise to the discipline of cyberarcheology, which specializes in ferreting out these archeonets and uncovering their secrets. Cyberarcheologists are experts in defunct communication protocols, obsolete storage formats, and long outmoded hardware architectures.

non-anthro animals trying to live in harmony

Off topic, I am very intrigued how their ergonomics works. How do tools and architecture in this world account for vastly different body plans, sizes, and sensory systems? Xenoergonomics is one of my favorite aspects of worldbuilding.

As for terrible takes in the Lonely Galaxy, probably the Partisans. Most other residents of Focus are indifferent toward religion, but the Partisans are militantly atheistic. While their dislike for the Bright Way (Focus’s historically dominant religion) is somewhat understandable given the Partisans are descendants of former ecclesiastical slaves, there’s no excuse for genocide, especially when the majority of the believers you’re killing are trying to dissolve the Bright Way’s economic monopolies that permitted debt slavery in the first place.

Even after the War of Dissolution reverted the Bright Way from system-spanning megacorp to a purely religious institution, the Partisans wanted control of the whole system, austencibly so that the clergy could never rise to power again. This caused a rift between the Partisans and the other factions of dissolutionists, the Pious Dissolutionists (internal renewal movement) and the moderate secular dissolutionists (remnants of the secular governments of the inner planets who were puppets of the clergy during the Age of Decadence.)

The Pious Dissolutionists would very much like it if the Partisans didn’t kill them, and the secular governments of the inner planets weren’t keen to be anyone’s puppet so soon after throwing off the clergy’s yoke. Most of the newly freed planetary governments sacrificed their hard-won independence in order to form an economic and political union to counter the Partisan threat.

The partisans are so anti-theist that they’ll even happily slaughter misotheists. To despise the Uncreated Light is to acknowledge its existence, and the Partisans will brook no compromise in that regard.

Are there misotheists who try and kill the gods JRPG style?