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So the Solarpunk Mammoths Project has sprawled and contracted, as it does. I wrote two big sidebars to it when the plot wasn't coming together, over this summer/autumn, and one of them was quite simply me conceding defeat and moving some fanfiction characters over into the Solarpunk 'verse to see what they did and see if it shook anything loose.
And, honestly, it did. It did a lot.
Before that, I just had a utopia. But I used Kes Dameron, young Kes Dameron from the Lost Kings series, and a big part of his character is that he's the child of refugees, a stateless and disenfranchised young man who's trying to make a space for himself and his family to survive in the world.
Transposed into the solarpunk 'verse, it brought up really important questions for what I had shallowly thought of as a utopia-- it's sort of vaguely socialist as a society, with no one going hungry, and work being done not for profit but to improve the interconnected society, and such. There's money, surely, but people are working for improvement, not subsistence, and a great deal of society's collective wealth is clearly invested in infrastructure.
But what if you're stateless?
What if you're not born a citizen?
What if you have to work to survive?
And it brought up good related questions, like what kind of protections are contingent upon citizenship, and what kind of rights are extended to sentients regardless, and what kind of attitude people have about that sort of thing.
So, even if the 15k words or so I wrote on this sidebar, which truncates abruptly and doesn't resolve, were themselves wasted, it did a lot of important groundwork that gave the main work a lot more resonance.
I am 1000000% sure that I posted a snippet from this work before, but I cannot find it. So, apologies for those who will find this redundant. I don't think I had gone on and incorporated it into the main work, so at least that context is new. I honestly don't remember which bit I had excerpted but as I was looking for an excerpt this morning I was overwhelmed with deja-vu.
So, I give you, Kes (Akash) and Norasol (Lupa) in Solarpunk Mammoths-verse.
“You never know, with settlements like this,” Akash said, “if they’re going to be dire little dusty backwaters or really pleasant little places, and sometimes you can’t even tell by looking.”
“Oh, but the stables,” Lupa said. “If the stables are that nice, the whole town’s probably all right.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if their town had been like this, before, but Akash stopped himself. As a younger child he’d loved stories of the town they’d lived in, before he was born, back when they’d been respectable people, but now that he was older he could recognize the pain it caused the older ones, to talk about it. And of course, since his mother had died, it was too hard to talk about at all. So he’d mostly stopped asking. But sometimes he forgot.
He’d never been there; it had been destroyed before he was born. He’d never been respectable.
But the others had, once.
( 2000 words, no warnings apply )
And, honestly, it did. It did a lot.
Before that, I just had a utopia. But I used Kes Dameron, young Kes Dameron from the Lost Kings series, and a big part of his character is that he's the child of refugees, a stateless and disenfranchised young man who's trying to make a space for himself and his family to survive in the world.
Transposed into the solarpunk 'verse, it brought up really important questions for what I had shallowly thought of as a utopia-- it's sort of vaguely socialist as a society, with no one going hungry, and work being done not for profit but to improve the interconnected society, and such. There's money, surely, but people are working for improvement, not subsistence, and a great deal of society's collective wealth is clearly invested in infrastructure.
But what if you're stateless?
What if you're not born a citizen?
What if you have to work to survive?
And it brought up good related questions, like what kind of protections are contingent upon citizenship, and what kind of rights are extended to sentients regardless, and what kind of attitude people have about that sort of thing.
So, even if the 15k words or so I wrote on this sidebar, which truncates abruptly and doesn't resolve, were themselves wasted, it did a lot of important groundwork that gave the main work a lot more resonance.
I am 1000000% sure that I posted a snippet from this work before, but I cannot find it. So, apologies for those who will find this redundant. I don't think I had gone on and incorporated it into the main work, so at least that context is new. I honestly don't remember which bit I had excerpted but as I was looking for an excerpt this morning I was overwhelmed with deja-vu.
So, I give you, Kes (Akash) and Norasol (Lupa) in Solarpunk Mammoths-verse.
“You never know, with settlements like this,” Akash said, “if they’re going to be dire little dusty backwaters or really pleasant little places, and sometimes you can’t even tell by looking.”
“Oh, but the stables,” Lupa said. “If the stables are that nice, the whole town’s probably all right.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if their town had been like this, before, but Akash stopped himself. As a younger child he’d loved stories of the town they’d lived in, before he was born, back when they’d been respectable people, but now that he was older he could recognize the pain it caused the older ones, to talk about it. And of course, since his mother had died, it was too hard to talk about at all. So he’d mostly stopped asking. But sometimes he forgot.
He’d never been there; it had been destroyed before he was born. He’d never been respectable.
But the others had, once.
( 2000 words, no warnings apply )
