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gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:
“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…
[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]
SINCE YOU ASKED
I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though.
I have SETTING:
so it’s presumably postapocalyptic but I don’t want to get into the brass tacks of that. Some society presumably was preserved. Genetic engineering had gotten as far as restoring a bunch of Ice Age megafauna as the climate changed, though I don’t get into it; it’s been long enough that nobody really remembers the details except some urban egghead types.
The Earth’s magnetic poles sometimes shift, or have done so in the past, meaning all electronics go on the fritz. (It could also be sunspots. Again, some of the eggheads know for sure, but the majority of people don’t know or care.) This happens enough that people are used to it. Radios exist, but everyone keeps pigeons because sometimes the radios don’t work.
There are settlements where agriculture is practiced, and the cities are where most of the manufacturing happens. Far out in the countryside are populations of hunter-gatherers, some of whom farm seasonally, some of whom don’t; many of them are pastoralists, and herd animals. Others follow megafauna herds and more or less manage them.
Our Heroine, the protagonist, is a hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherers in her area are loosely organized into clans, and are matriarchal, organized by bloodlines. If they want to breed, they have to breed with someone from outside their bloodline, which means either finding a visitor from another clan, or traveling to a larger settlement, or in some way making arrangments. Children belong to the clan, though, so even if a woman travels to find a mate, she would come back to her clan to give birth and raise the child. (Sometimes sons are given to their father’s family. It’s complicated.)
It doesn’t work that way in the cities, but our heroine doesn’t really know that; she’s well-traveled, but only within her herding ranges.
But the radios stop working, right as they’re trying to track the mammoth migration: the herds are radio-tagged, so they can be more effectively managed. They can’t get the collar signals, and they can’t raise any of the other settlements or the city. Their pigeons go unanswered, until they’ve depleted them. (The way a pigeon works is that they’re one way, so you have to go to the city to get a pigeon that’ll communicate with the city.)
So, with no further ways to reach the city or the intermediate settlements, a couple of the clans have come together and determined that they’ve got no choice but to send an emissary, even though it’s prime herding season and normally they wouldn’t send anyone to the city until after the harvests and all.
So our Heroine gets chosen to go to the city. She doesn’t want to go, she’s already got a daughter, but for some reason she’s the one who’s got to make the trip, so she figures, well, she’ll try to find someone to get another baby from while she’s there, and maybe she can trade some of her cool knicknacks and get some fun stuff, and she’s never been to the city so maybe it’ll be rad. She goes along with, like, a cast of characters, I haven’t decided who. It’s a big deal to get to go to the city.
But there’s the adventure journey bit, that’ll be fine.
But I haven’t figured out yet a) why the radios don’t work and b) why the city hasn’t been responding.
Also I was toying with letting her ride a mammoth to get there, if some of them are semi-tame, but that might be too much. I figure they’re about as tameable as elephants but tame elephants get handled every day. She probably rides a horse instead. Maybe a mammoth tags along for fun, though; they’re probably curious. That might be fun. (They know better than to give it any of their luggage, if it’s only coming for kicks. It could run off at any time.)
I was sort of considering that maybe it’s that usually the radios break because of sunspots and this time it’s a magnetic pole instability that’s causing it, which means they can’t just wait it out. Or just that it’s much more severe solar flares than usual, or somesuch. There could be some angst over whether there’s been an explosion or something somewhere on the planet– there may be some remnant of knowledge preserved about EMPs among the remnant egghead community in the university– and so the academics in the city are very worried, and that’s why nobody was responding to the pigeons. (It could also be, mundanely, that they were out of pigeons. Or, in the case of magnetic pole anomaly, that the pigeons were getting lost too, and so not useful as messengers!)
Anyhow I hadn’t worked much out beyond that she goes to the city, causes a minor stir with her mammoth (who maybe wanders off into the countryside and wreaks some havoc that she then has to deal with while she’s enjoying the city), and she meets a very interesting nerd-boy who she decides to court, only it turns out sexual mores are very different in the city, and he’s not sure what to make of her and also her arms are as big around as his thighs and he’s really not sure what to make of that. Anyway maybe Our Heroine and Skinny Nerd-Boy maybe go on an adventure to Fix All The Radios or somesuch.
Only they wouldn’t be able to fix the radios, and the adventure would probably be doing research, and I suppose she can read but she wouldn’t be all that interested in libraries, but maybe she’d find out she was.
And mostly I want to poke at the gender roles and play in the fun semi-utopian setting.
But I need a Plot because I can only really fix my characters by Doing Something.
So, that’s where I’m sort of stuck, and also I haven’t let myself think about it very much, so.
HEY you ASKED ok. LOL.
(Your picture was not posted)
gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:
“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…
[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]
SINCE YOU ASKED
I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though.
I have SETTING:
so it’s presumably postapocalyptic but I don’t want to get into the brass tacks of that. Some society presumably was preserved. Genetic engineering had gotten as far as restoring a bunch of Ice Age megafauna as the climate changed, though I don’t get into it; it’s been long enough that nobody really remembers the details except some urban egghead types.
The Earth’s magnetic poles sometimes shift, or have done so in the past, meaning all electronics go on the fritz. (It could also be sunspots. Again, some of the eggheads know for sure, but the majority of people don’t know or care.) This happens enough that people are used to it. Radios exist, but everyone keeps pigeons because sometimes the radios don’t work.
There are settlements where agriculture is practiced, and the cities are where most of the manufacturing happens. Far out in the countryside are populations of hunter-gatherers, some of whom farm seasonally, some of whom don’t; many of them are pastoralists, and herd animals. Others follow megafauna herds and more or less manage them.
Our Heroine, the protagonist, is a hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherers in her area are loosely organized into clans, and are matriarchal, organized by bloodlines. If they want to breed, they have to breed with someone from outside their bloodline, which means either finding a visitor from another clan, or traveling to a larger settlement, or in some way making arrangments. Children belong to the clan, though, so even if a woman travels to find a mate, she would come back to her clan to give birth and raise the child. (Sometimes sons are given to their father’s family. It’s complicated.)
It doesn’t work that way in the cities, but our heroine doesn’t really know that; she’s well-traveled, but only within her herding ranges.
But the radios stop working, right as they’re trying to track the mammoth migration: the herds are radio-tagged, so they can be more effectively managed. They can’t get the collar signals, and they can’t raise any of the other settlements or the city. Their pigeons go unanswered, until they’ve depleted them. (The way a pigeon works is that they’re one way, so you have to go to the city to get a pigeon that’ll communicate with the city.)
So, with no further ways to reach the city or the intermediate settlements, a couple of the clans have come together and determined that they’ve got no choice but to send an emissary, even though it’s prime herding season and normally they wouldn’t send anyone to the city until after the harvests and all.
So our Heroine gets chosen to go to the city. She doesn’t want to go, she’s already got a daughter, but for some reason she’s the one who’s got to make the trip, so she figures, well, she’ll try to find someone to get another baby from while she’s there, and maybe she can trade some of her cool knicknacks and get some fun stuff, and she’s never been to the city so maybe it’ll be rad. She goes along with, like, a cast of characters, I haven’t decided who. It’s a big deal to get to go to the city.
But there’s the adventure journey bit, that’ll be fine.
But I haven’t figured out yet a) why the radios don’t work and b) why the city hasn’t been responding.
Also I was toying with letting her ride a mammoth to get there, if some of them are semi-tame, but that might be too much. I figure they’re about as tameable as elephants but tame elephants get handled every day. She probably rides a horse instead. Maybe a mammoth tags along for fun, though; they’re probably curious. That might be fun. (They know better than to give it any of their luggage, if it’s only coming for kicks. It could run off at any time.)
I was sort of considering that maybe it’s that usually the radios break because of sunspots and this time it’s a magnetic pole instability that’s causing it, which means they can’t just wait it out. Or just that it’s much more severe solar flares than usual, or somesuch. There could be some angst over whether there’s been an explosion or something somewhere on the planet– there may be some remnant of knowledge preserved about EMPs among the remnant egghead community in the university– and so the academics in the city are very worried, and that’s why nobody was responding to the pigeons. (It could also be, mundanely, that they were out of pigeons. Or, in the case of magnetic pole anomaly, that the pigeons were getting lost too, and so not useful as messengers!)
Anyhow I hadn’t worked much out beyond that she goes to the city, causes a minor stir with her mammoth (who maybe wanders off into the countryside and wreaks some havoc that she then has to deal with while she’s enjoying the city), and she meets a very interesting nerd-boy who she decides to court, only it turns out sexual mores are very different in the city, and he’s not sure what to make of her and also her arms are as big around as his thighs and he’s really not sure what to make of that. Anyway maybe Our Heroine and Skinny Nerd-Boy maybe go on an adventure to Fix All The Radios or somesuch.
Only they wouldn’t be able to fix the radios, and the adventure would probably be doing research, and I suppose she can read but she wouldn’t be all that interested in libraries, but maybe she’d find out she was.
And mostly I want to poke at the gender roles and play in the fun semi-utopian setting.
But I need a Plot because I can only really fix my characters by Doing Something.
So, that’s where I’m sort of stuck, and also I haven’t let myself think about it very much, so.
HEY you ASKED ok. LOL.
(Your picture was not posted)
