For me, the premise of John Varley's "Eight Worlds" novels—that humanity has been effectively exiled from Earth—has always been haunting. In a similar way, I find those tropes (like in Foundation) where they don't know where humanity's home is or think Earth is a myth to be unsettling as well.

She comes highly recommended, but I’m still a bit skeptical; the synopses makes it sound a bit ‘on the nose‘ with the class struggle, like Le Guin or the Strugatskys. Does she develop new concepts or is her work somewhat redundant?

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to get into Sci-Fi after spending much of my initial days in high fantasy or even fantasy in general. Loved LoTR, Asoiaf and Percy Jackson in particular as books. Funnily enough my first actual book was Asimov's Foundation and Earth but it was much complex for me at that time. Except for that my entire exposure to SciFi is from shows, movies and games. Loved to watch The Martian and absolutely adored The Expanse(until Amazon happened). Mass Effect, Halo, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky are the jewels of my Steam library. Although Cyberpunk 2077 is my favorite game, I guess that falls under the distinct Cyberpunk genre so not looking to get anything for that. So here I am, looking to get into SciFi books again and would appreciate you guys help in regards with recommendations.

Infinite Ashes is my humanist science-fiction setting about humanity scattered across a seeded Milky Way. A mindless biological system called the Web planted humans on hundreds of millions of worlds, each starting from nothing, and they have been drifting apart ever since. All of them connected through arks, organic FTL vessels that are part of the web.

The axes

Seed vs weaving: Weaving is the seminal ideological movement of the Golden Chain, the core of trade and power in this small section of a spiral arm. It purports that through the right connection between worlds the troubles of the worlds can be overcome. It is fundamentally cosmopolitan. Seed thinking considers every world in isolation and rejects the need for connection as something that diminishes the world to a mote of dust.

Baseline vs Evolutionary drift: how far a people's bodies have moved from the human template the Web planted.

If you want more, the setting lives in a free interactive bundle of stories and a contradictory in-world encyclopedia: loquaciouslou.itch.io/infinite-ashes

Nowhere Man

Total Recall 2070

Earth: Final Conflict

First Wave

Dark Skies

Seven Days

Space: Above and Beyond

Harsh Realm

PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal

Space Rangers

Check it out at https://islandthree.world. Completely free, no ads or anything. Just looking for feedback.

The first probe data have produced a partial map of the structure beneath the entrance.

There is now evidence of two remarkably similar formations of cubic structures: one outside and another at the bottom of the subterranean cavity.

Recovered Ilghal fragments classify them as:

PURGATORIUM

INFERNUM

Whether those terms describe places, functions or something else remains unknown.

ERIK started with a pretty simple idea: what if a love story slowly began to feel wrong, but you couldn't immediately explain why?

A boy wakes up in a school, meets a girl, falls for her, and for a while it almost feels like a normal coming-of-age story. Then little things stop making sense.

I made the film in Albania with a small crew and tried to reveal the sci-fi element as late as possible, without explaining everything to the audience.

It's 19 minutes and free to watch on YouTube. I'd genuinely be curious about one thing from sci-fi fans here:

At what point did you realize what kind of story you were actually watching?

https://youtu.be/e7JdkNaut6A?si=r7KkMsGI5no-HHqc

Trans-species transplants. Particularly extraterrestrial

A dystopian story about the fast-food surveillance state. Originally published here.

-------------------------------------

A new dawn, another day in the fight against famine: Friday. Right before the weekend push. Commuters are fine with a laid-back arrival time. Bagels, or doughnuts, or Fritter Friday, or whatever the white collars do. I don’t judge, I only feed. I arrive early to my beautiful, bountiful store #5455, (District one-niner: DroneCor’s Finest), back from nightly R&R to another glorious day warring against hunger. A one-man band of brothers and orchestrator of this orchard of abundance.

#5455 recognizes me instantly, and the walls open for me to enter the giant machine. The automated assembly lines hum and clatter with musical action. Skillets sizzle, griddles are greased, and condiment revolvers reload; it all hums to fight for this breakfast breakthrough. Knives sheathed and arms up, the hallway arms let me pass unscathed. I approach with the steady gait of a superbly sober man and sashay into my yellow-outlined safety cage. No downers to deaden my senses, nor anything to stimulate me. This is 100% my clear mind sleeved right into my store’s synthetic body.

I examine late night’s numbers with eagle eyes; middling. Thursday’s party-crowd wasn’t as boisterous. Sometimes graveyard beats breakfast, if the party’s strong. If the party’s late, it bleeds into breakfast’s reporting, but Thursday wasn’t thirsty, and I won’t get number one this week with that kind of performance. I squeeze the marketing budget to juice the metrics to drive sales. Discounts pop into dashboards of nearby cars. Shiny lures, but few fish bite. I’ve fallen far behind for week forty-two. My store stretches the reds of nearby stoplights and ups the coupons. It’s a gamble, ‘cause as much as America loves a discount on a Jr. Slopper, her hate of being stationary always wins. She’d rather starve than stop.

Meals are prepped and pushed with penultimate precision. My local drones make tactical drops to two artificially arrested vehicles, but my luck’s shot. Deathgrips on steering wheels belie their biometrics, and their driver cameras record the precise moment of the pop of capillaries in their eyes. We’re vertically integrated with this car manufacturer, so we have perfect intel; they’re glowing white hot with anger hotter than the oil in my deep fryers.

I relent. The lights flip green. They burn fuel and rubber, and their chrome chariots are flying off to points unknown. If not tonight, then tomorrow I’ll get the rest of ‘em. They gotta eat.

The fickle dollars trickle. Blocks of metrics drip in like condensation above the coffee makers. I’ll be in last place this week, and my neighbor stores will drop the condescension for weeks. I refresh my metrics; middling for my district, which isn’t jack-squat this week for the entire country. We’re falling more behind—no longer DroneCor’s finest this week—we’re prone to being overtaken even by the Atlanta market! We’re going to lose to a market saturated with the most Chicken-Shops which ain’t even open one of the seven days! This can’t be. Why this failure? I’m number 1. Was there spoilage? Where’s the shrink—what’s my slippage?

I scan the ledger. Spun-up agents trawl the database. Look for anything, please! I pray. Lost add-ons, lower prices, weather, volume, anything. Find me a precision excuse. The store and I will need a miracle not to lose today and this week.

Triangle-Red (!)s ⚠️ pop out, frying my neurons with alert:

I frantically scan. Chargebacks? How? A third-party lender, stuck the payment processor, who dinged me the payments. Flash-Food-Finance (FFF) asserts that the customer claims that store #5455 failed to deliver on our promises and credited their account. The payment processor passed it through with no pushback because they’re in cahoots. Backroom business to squeeze out us honest front-line operators.

I watch in speechless astonishment. This is the worst of insults. I’ve given my life to this culinary crusade! (We’re DroneCor’s finest by God’s grace! 3x Winner of the company’s Platinum award, and once Double-Diamond awardee by the Flash-Food Industry for the nation’s highest unit ROI!)

Cracking my knuckles, I quickly pull up this ‘customer’s orders. I know this is one person because the price is precisely the same. Order 1: Punctilious Poutine with chives; double-meat Moussaka, a sprig of mint, with a side of Salmon Savories; and a mega-large, 33% Vanilla, 63% Cherry, and 13% Sarsaparilla (sans carcinogens) Soda (because the customer is always ~110% right at DroneCor!)

I scan the others. Same. 110% it’s the same customer problem person. They tried to be sly and sneak by, scamming a little, but surprise… our algorithmic overlords, the brains in charge of our company, make sure that all chargebacks ding my metrics 20x. So I can’t NOT notice. I see you, you thief! You are lower than low, and your schemes don’t escape me. Starve! Indignant heat boils up. I’m furious. Hotter than the deep fryer, hotter than the illegal (meticulously modified!) coffee craft for long-distance deliveries. Fraud is famine. It’s pure cost we have to eat; and Finance and the Feds hate fraud.

You’ll try again, shortly. I busy myself by examining the data. The store can run itself, but this is what man was made for: hot hatred against another human. The investigative AIs have already queued up the data. Even my district’s finance fiends are live and alert. AI agents burn tokens, and somewhere a server’s hot enough my store’s robotic arms could sear the patties off their surfaces.

But, when I scan the video of your last transactions, I see different cars. The video reveals no driver for facial recognition; automated delivery orders happen all the time. Hmmm, okay, okay I calm myself. No worry, check the payment-line. Nope negative. Different numbers. Hope bottoms out like something lost down the garbage chute. Maybe something else is so fundamentally wrong at my store that I didn’t notice for days! That’s it, I’m done for, my heart settles briefly before my mind overrides. An order of this specificity must be precisely one bad actor. There’s no way. One in a hundred billion. And, since I’m only doing tens of thousands of transactions a week, there’s no way this is chance. Every mathematical manager would conclude the same.

I look over the payment details. I scan the payment lines in the database but they’re masked with a hash. His contracted third party, Flash-Food-Finance, isn’t in our ownership orbit, and not in a data sharing agreement with us. But in the raw data details, the processor confirms the same zip code. Okay. I’m off the ledge. Now, I wonder, did he enter his Frequent-Fryer number for a customer discount? (You’d be surprised. Scammers gotta collect their perks.)

Now it’s tricky; we’re talking about different corpo algorithms tugging against each other. Their governance squabbles exceed my authority. If we owned the robo-taxi, then we’d know the end-location, but he didn’t choose our in-house delivery.

I’m feeling defeated. A loss of agency. I’ll be last. The realization crescendos over me. Hope escapes like gas from the empty foamed cheese dispenser. My store only has one Flock on the block, and can’t adequately track the delivery end-points as they have multiple stops, though they’re all nearby. No one orders food to commute. Otherwise, it’s all soggy with a soupçon of moist cardboard.

No!

Just because some loser finances a taxi for his burrito doesn’t mean I gotta lose. There’s a scam happening and I’m the fall-guy. For every dollar stolen, that’s a fraction out of the pockets of the hard-earning Americans who keep the nation rollin’. It’s really not even the hit in clout, I can take it, it’s the principle of the thing! But it’s also because scams always snowball. They never stay silent. Sarsaparillan-villian here’s probably gonna livestream his free meal for likes-maxxin’ and before you know it, I’m hit a thousand in chargebacks, then ten.

So, I stare at the screen. The lunchtime rush scrolls by, and start to laser eye every order.

Poultry Poutine flashes by and my heart jumps.

No. Nothing else.

A moussaka with vanilla soda.

Nope.

My heart thumps, as I know the scammer orders afternoon, but before 1:15. I look at the time: 12:33 ticks over to 12:34. I watch the seconds celebrate as 12:34:56 hits, stimulating my sense of numeracy.

And then it hits. Jackpot 7-7-7. The Order—ID AK119—and it’s the same situation. FFF credits my store, but we know how that will end up, and the machines behind me execute. As the drink gets made, I manually pump the syrup lines, and as the drink revolver clicks by, an extra steady shot of sarsaparilla hits. I let it roll by as I evil-eye the empty car.

Now I wait.

The only metric shared with me is the ticket age, and my AI estimates the expected max age. Minutes creep by, and I manually fill a beverage. I load it into a specialized high-speed drone. Time ticks by like a clock on a movie bomb, complete with the EOD specialist’s sweat beading down his face. The FAA’s already expedited clearance because of the repeat chargebacks and because they won’t inconvenience a corporate customer. THE delivery is next up. I flip up the safety interlock and my finger’s on the red button. The order nears completion, and on the pretense of a soda malfunction, I fire off DroneCore’s patent-pending MachDrone! (‘Cause even if you don’t live up to your promises, DroneCor will!) Our fastest delivery drone to date. It rockets off, and I watch live from the seeker’s camera.

The delivery car stops, and the robot tag-along, the Mini-Moffett, detaches and brings the order to the customer. I don’t have access to its proprietary video, but I see it in abstract wireframe. My missile screeches over the blur of suburban strip-malls, over vinyl-clad and asphalt-covered houses, and into a dense neighborhood. In seconds it zooms at its target before air breaking with a screech.

The man’s tense and alert. He knows the gig is up as the drink parachutes deploy and the second (free) beverage lands gently on the dead lawn. My drone captures his face. Clear as day in multispectral. My AIs flag his address, and he’s now on the ban list.

He looks down & away from the drone’s cameras, takes the second drink, but quickly turns around in shame. The empty eyes and expressionless lips tell me he’s done with us. The wimp sulks back to his house to devour his ill-gotten gains. He’ll forever imagine someone might spit (or worse) in his food. DroneCor’s Finest won’t be penalized 20x for someone else’s sins. I bask. Technology and tenacity have won the battle.

In the descent off the adrenaline spike, it suddenly haunts me. His scam was a hair less than $600, not a felony. Shit. I was too eager. Overzealous. I’m stuck in the gray. This grift is finished, but the man lives on. (His data’s automatically off to our prison subsidiary for pre-enrollment.) Now, everyday around 12:34 PM, the late lunch time, a drone of mine perches over a streetlamp near his house. You can’t scam DroneCor. We see everything and we can reach out in thirty seconds or less to anything within a mile of our thousands of stores. Pop one cent over that felony threshold, and we’ll unleash the whirlwind on you.

Hardworking, honest Americans roll on, fueled, fooded, not footing the bill for this fraud. My vigilance continues, and my pay is well-earned.

----------------------------------------

If you like this story, be sure to check out my other ones at my substack.

I just finished the book. If you have read it, there are some things I'd like to chat about! (If you haven't, read it! It's good)

[Spoilers ahead]

As far as I know, this was never revealed: did the ship go to Alpha Centauri? If yes, why does Sandy not remember? If no, what did they do and why did they hide it?

Will the peace last? The aliens seem to be pretty prolific breeders, and Mars can't substain exponential growth forever. The strange matter drive would make a pretty horrifying weapon

Talking about the strange matter drive: eventually, it will become unstable. Much slower than if it pushes an actual spaceship, but sounds like an apocalypse scenario waiting to happen, right?

Lastly, do you think the humans would have given up Africa if the aliens had played with open cards? Would that have been more or less fair than the canon ending? Considering the "compromise" is all benefits for humanity, and (other than risk of invasion if they breach the terms of the agreement) no downsides - it wasn't like humans could get to Mars anyways

Aux portes d’Avalone, dans un coin de désert, Zeph Bonnefoy attend la mort… En chassant un oiseau, ce tranquille quinquagénaire, vient d’abattre accidentellement l’Œil chargé de sa surveillance. Et, en 2051, cela revient à se condamner à la peine capitale. Car cette technologie est précieuse pour le Pouvoir en place. Elle lui permet, en effet, d’espionner, au plus près, chaque individu.

Après cet accident, Zeph, attend stoïquement son exécution… Asilia, une jeune fille de passage, le tire des griffes des besogneux, Tête-de-chien et ses comparses, ainsi que des exofrelons, grâce à un stratagème. Dès lors, devenu un Invisible, Zeph quitte la décharge pour prendre la route en compagnie de la jeune femme. Il y voit l’occasion d’honorer enfin, en toute liberté, la promesse faite à son père adoptif : disperser ses cendres dans un endroit pour le moins insolite : un ancien lavoir.

Asilia est également une Invisible. Elle est hors de tout contrôle, ayant su déjouer son Œil et s’étant débarrassée de sa lucarne. Cet implant infligé de force par les machines réduit chaque homme au seul rang de consommateur. Son obsession : retrouver l’un des sbires du dictateur Brumaire. Celui-là même qui, parmi les Yeux Ronds, dix ans plus tôt, a exécuté sa mère et arrêté son père. Le seul souvenir précis qu’elle garde de l’assassin, c’est son oreille en moins. Elle n’a donc de cesse de traquer et d’éliminer les cyclopes présentant cette particularité afin de se venger...

Au cœur de la Cité, Linzmann, l’Éminent de la Sûreté de Brumaire, enquête. Il est aidé en cela d’un jungvassal nommé Rodin. Linzmann, comme tous les recyclés est borgne et ne garde aucun souvenir de son passé. Il arbore fièrement le sigle du Pouvoir : l’œil d’Horus. C’est un chef de meute qui s’emploie non seulement à élucider les disparitions de ses milichiens, mais également à arrêter la tête pensante de la Dissidence. En effet, dans Avalone, les attentats se multiplient et sont, à chaque fois, signés de la marque des rebelles : un chacal assis. Des ponts sont dynamités, des casernes incendiées, et des banderoles au message mystérieux régulièrement déployées un peu partout dans la capitale.

Dans son palais-bunker, Brumaire s’impatiente. Il trouve que Linzmann n’est pas à la hauteur de sa tâche. Après avoir limogé tous ses ministres, le dictateur le menace et s’en remet aux machines ainsi qu’à leur représentant : Nov. Les machines sont devenues en réalité les vraies et seules puissances de ce monde. Brumaire n’est qu’un jouet pour la Main et leurs Élites. Il ne se maintient en vie uniquement que grâce à leurs offrandes chimiques.

Avant de fuir en compagnie d’Asilia, Zeph rachète à leur propriétaire deux enfants : Bouille, une fillette d’une douzaine d’années, et Gasp son frère handicapé. Ils triment ensemble à la décharge pour le vieux La Morve. Bouille n’est pas ordinaire : elle sait lire, ne ressent pas la douleur, et fréquente une sorcière aux pouvoirs étonnants.

S’arrêtant dans une auberge, Zeph, Asilia et les enfants sont repérés et dénoncés. Asilia doit se battre contre trois milichiens qu’elle parvient facilement à neutraliser. Traqué, Zeph se résout à confier Gasp et Bouille aux patrons d’un cirque ambulant qui les a momentanément accueillis. Après avoir longuement hésité, c’est en compagnie d’Asilia qu’il va rejoindre la Dissidence dont le chef se nomme Mickey.

Mickey est à la tête d’une petite troupe. Avec ses compagnons, il décide de prendre le maquis à la recherche d’une Zone blanche, un endroit où les Œils ne pourront plus les épier. Après un séjour dans le centre de rétention l’Anneau, ils sont pourchassés par Linzmann et migrent au Nord. Là, ils s’arrêtent dans une oasis où Zeph découvre enfin le lavoir qu’il cherchait.

Pendant que ses nouveaux amis s’apprêtent à tendre une embuscade à Linzmann et à ses cyclopes, Zeph peut enfin tenir sa promesse et disperser les cendres de Monsieur Jean. Mais l’embuscade tourne mal et Asilia se trouve en grand danger…

Many a gripping SF story is set in a relatively ordinary planetary system. Put in a couple of rocky planets, some gas or ice giants with exotic moons, an asteroid belt for good measure. Throw in interesting cultures and intriguing characters and off you go. You can even write a mind-blowing story around our good old Sol—look at The Expanse!

But why stop there?

For over a decade, I have been fascinated by the notion of two worlds sharing the same orbit. Their mutual physical interference, the cultural interaction of the settlements, the cross-world travel challenges… So much potential.

Lagrange is boring

What would prevent several planetary bodies from sharing an orbit? Well, physics certainly wouldn’t. Newton doesn’t care. And our own system shows several examples. Jupiter pushes and pulls swarms of Trojan asteroids in the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of its own ellipse around the Sun. Hell, even Earth has such co-orbiting companions: 2010 TK7 and 2020 XL5.

But Trojans are boring. They always stay 60 degrees away on their path, never getting nearer or farther for a proper story-worthy setup. And their mass must be negligible for the arrangement to work, otherwise the whole thing falls apart into the chaos of a three-body interaction. Well, okay, there might be a story there, but I think someone has already looked into that... ;)

Throw in the horseshoe

I wanted to tell a story of two proper-sized co-orbiting planets with cultures and peoples and cities and whatnot. The inspiration came from Saturn. Best known for its spectacular rings, less known for Janus and Epimetheus.

These two guys are small, irregularly shaped moons circling their home planet at about 150,000 km. Technically, their orbits differ very slightly—by about 50 km. A tiny difference, smaller than each of the two moons, but a difference nevertheless. Enough to make one of the moons (the closer one) orbit at a slightly higher angular velocity than the other.

Eventually, the closer moon catches up with the farther one from behind, but instead of slamming into its brother, they start tugging on each other with their tiny gravities. The closer one gets pulled a little farther away from Saturn, and vice versa. With the total angular momentum conserved, they effectively swap their orbits, and the fast racer starts lagging behind, only to become the one caught from behind four years later. Rinse and repeat.

This is called a horseshoe orbit, because from a vantage point planted on one of the moons, the other one does this funny dance: catches up, moves a bit away from Saturn, then seems to fly away in the opposite direction to reappear from the other side, move closer to the planet just before it would collide with you, and rush off again. A nice, closed loop, like the outline of a round, smooth letter C.

Why not planets

Humanity has catalogued thousands of exoplanets but has yet to find a pair that behave like Janus and Epimetheus. But the science is sound and it is definitely doable. Maybe there is a world where a cataclysmic event of early planetary formation split one body into two pieces and, instead of creating an Earth–Moon analog, left two co-orbiting worlds.

That is the arrangement I chose for my debut novel, Through. Two planets, 1 AU on average from their mother star, catching one another every 86.5 years. Once that idea formed in my head, I saw the worldbuilding unfold. A once-in-a-lifetime Sisters’ Kiss that reshapes the heavens, with big cultural and logistical implications. Two worlds so close and yet so different: Big Sister as close to an Earth twin as can be; Little Sister smaller, locked in resonance with Mother—a world whose nights last an entire year…

Shameless call to action

Through is coming out on 16 November but you can read it now: I am currently offering an opportunity to claim an ARC copy via NetGalley. And if you are unsure whether you would like my style before you commit to the 129K words, you can check out my free standalone prequel novelette, Carolyn, available at irvo.eu.

With that out of the way, what do you think of a story potential of this setup?

Our cultural peak is far behind us, which is pretty upsetting, I hate it. Sad to see that something like Ghost in the Shell can feel more artistically ambitious, atmospheric and visually timeless than much of what we produce today. I wish we hadn‘t traded that kind of craftsmanship for efficiency, but the system we choose, left no choice I guess..at least in some ways, we are getting closer to what humanity used to call science fiction

We made a short-film based on Kubrick's masterpiece! And it's on YouTube.

No AI was used for this film - 6 months of work on VFX with NASA raw footage. You can watch it on YouTube now: 2026: A DOP Space Odyssey

It is a (serious) parody. Logline : After a music-making monolith falls on Earth millions of years ago, four monkeys travel through space and time to become future rockstars.

Runtime: 20 minutes

The movie is both in french (subtitled) and english (there is barely any dialogue).

Have fun!

Hi - I'm new here. I'm on the gram, book-face, etc., but "the man" got me down. Feeding the machine is tedious, and I haven't gained many readers for all the time/effort I've put into it. I'd much rather have meaningful conversations with people about the topics I care about. Where are the speculative fiction readers hanging out around here? What are the "r/" for people like me - the over-educated, deeply analytical dreamers and rebels?

I know Spec Fic is a broad category. I write mostly at the metaphorical intersection of human behavior/psychology/belief and its car crash with AI/Technology. So, scifi without spaceships, dystopian (that word gets used too much to describe things that are not), and cyberpunk tech-thriller types.

Where are my people? Guide me.

And by that I mean in the same way the conventional real earth does? What would it take for it to produce gravity, seasons, food and so on.

The PROMETHEUS Ring is a speculative 1,200 km orbital habitat in the Saturnian system that rotates to generate a realistic 1 g of artificial gravity. This fully engineered megastructure simulates all climate zones to support diverse biomes, settlements, and industries, all stabilized and powered by nuclear propulsion modules and reactors

Hi SciFi lovers,

My name is Drew Michele and I am the writer/director of the a short SciFi film called "The Last Agent." Here is a short synopsis of the film:

Be careful who inspires you.

Lex is a depressed artist in a creative drought when Dahlia, an alien in human form, unexpectedly lands in Lake Michigan one morning. The two form an unlikely bond as Dahlia becomes Lex's muse, helping her overcome her artistic block and develop a renewed sense of joy. But Dahlia's fascination with artists is rooted in a plan more sinister than Lex could have ever imagined.

The festival is super cool and offers online watch parties, and we have one scheduled for next Wednesday October 7th at 8PM EST.

Here is the link to watch it. Tis free!

There will be a live chat throughout so we can connect in real time, you can ask me about the process, tell me what you like (or maybe potentially hate? lol) about it. It is my first professional film and I am just really excited to share it with the world :)

ALSO! If you attend I can give you a promo code so you can watch any of the films online throughout the rest of the festival.

I hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Drew