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dragonlady7So 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.
“You’re right,” he said, instead of anything else. He shook out his scarf; he’d considered rinsing it out in the bathing room, but they were going to stay here a couple of days and there were probably actual laundry facilities. He could at least wash it with soap, he figured, along with the shirts and underwear he’d been rinsing out. Usually they had to wait until they got to a city to do that kind of maintenance but this place was certainly nice enough that they’d be able to.
“Don’t wear that gross scarf,” Lupa said. “Not indoors. Don’t you have a nicer shirt?”
“I didn’t bring anything to dress up, really,” Akash grumbled, but he put back the shirt he’d been intending to put on, which had gotten grubbier around the cuffs than he’d realized, and fished out a cleaner one. He did have a decent sleeveless jacket, with nice embroidery up the back.
“That’s better,” Lupa said, as he pulled the shirt on. He gave her a long-suffering look for her meddling, and she reached over and patted his cheek. “My good boy, you clean up so handsome.”
He laughed, but let her tousle his hair, which was too short to disarrange anyway. She’d cut it, at the last nice place they’d stayed, and it was the way he liked it, nice and even, only a tiny bit longer on top. He wasn’t vain, exactly, but he tried to look decent, anyway, for what good that might do. Decent people would be suspicious of him for his profession no matter what, but being well-groomed at least staved off the sting of the “dirty mercenary” comments.
He turned away to put his waistcoat on, and when he turned back, Lupa was still staring at him, but her expression had gone distant. “Oh no,” he said, and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Lupa, sit down. Come, sit down.” He steered her to the nearer bed, and gently pressed her down. This happened, sometimes.
Lupa blinked, and looked at him, collecting herself, but he could see her eyes were still slightly unfocused. “Baz,” she said, with a faint laugh, “don’t look so worried, I’ll be fine.”
Baz was, Akash had learned, the man his mother had been intending to marry, before everything had been destroyed. Baz had died in the attack. Baz had not been his father, and he did not particularly resemble Baz, but sometimes Lupa had these spells, and she would get confused. Akash’s mother had presumed Lupa’s spells were in some way sent by the ancestors, but most of the rest of their group assumed they were a health issue. Lupa herself was cagey about what she thought they meant, afterward, but in the moment she was completely absorbed in them as they happened.
“I’m not worried,” Akash said gently. He had learned not to get upset, not to try to snap her back to reality. He kept his hand on her shoulder, preventing her from rising. Tiu knew about these spells, and had helped him deal with one before, but Oru didn’t; Lupa wasn’t that close with him. Akash’s mother had been best at dealing with them, of course.
“We should stay here,” Lupa said, staring vaguely past him at nothing. “We should-- stay here.”
“All right,” Akash said.
“No, I mean-- in this place,” Lupa insisted. “We should stay here.”
“Of course, Lupa,” Akash said.
“You’re just agreeing with me to shut me up,” Lupa said, and she was testy enough to really sound like herself. “Don’t patronize me, Baz.”
“I don’t mean to,” Akash said. “I’m just-- you don’t look well, Lupa, and I want you to just take a deep breath and relax for a moment.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Lupa said. “Listen to me, Baz-- this place is a good place.”
“I am listening, Lupa,” Akash said. “I’m agreeing with you because I agree with you. I like it here.”
“I liked that girl you were talking to,” Lupa said. That was new; usually when she thought he was Baz she talked to him about his mother. “She had a good heart, I could see it.”
“I liked her too,” Akash said. “I can’t judge hearts like that but I thought her wit was keen, at least.”
“You would like that best,” Lupa said fondly, patting his cheek again. “You’re a sweet boy. So much like your father.”
Akash gave up on trying to keep up. He’d never heard any mention of Baz’s father before. Sometimes, though, Lupa seemed to believe that Baz was Akash’s father, and he’d given up trying to figure out what to feel about that. “Thank you,” he said, instead of anything else at all.
Of course, at that moment, Gaura the merchant’s niece Kila rapped at the door and then burst in. “Oh, shucks,” she said, “you’re decent.”
Akash scowled at her; she’d been a creep to him ever since Tiu had told her he was a prude, and it was getting extremely old, because he couldn’t tell her to fuck off. They needed this gig, or at least needed not to be fired from it so far away from anywhere else. “I’m always decent,” he said. “Excuse me, I was speaking with my aunt.”
“Aunt,” Lupa said vaguely. Shit. Shit.
“They said lunch is in a couple of minutes,” Kila said. “Kas, are you going to fuck that local girl? Because if you don’t, I might. She’s a sweet piece of ass.”
“That would be up to her, now, wouldn’t it,” Akash said.
“Come on,” Kila said with a laugh, “like you’d ever unbend that far! I don’t think your nephew is a human man at all, Lupa.”
Lupa stood up suddenly, fixing her glassy stare on Kila. “No,” Akash said, soft and intense, but she pushed his hand away from her shoulder.
“I’m not sure you’d know a human man if you met one,” Lupa said, tilting her head a little. “There’s a void you’re trying to fill but that’s not the way. That’s not the way, my dear. Focus on yourself, and bide your patience, and fulfillment will come to you.”
“Uh,” Kila said dubiously, frowning at Lupa.
“It’s not wise to startle my aunt at a time like this,” Akash said, taking Kila by the shoulder instead and gently steering her back toward the door. “We’ll be down in a few minutes, tell them we’re grateful for the hospitality. Thank you very much.”
Kila didn’t protest, and he stuffed her through the door and shut it politely but firmly behind her.
“I don’t like her,” Lupa said, matter-of-fact. “She’s not going to do the work on herself she needs to, and she’ll take it out on other people her whole life.”
Akash leaned against the door, letting out his breath in a nervous laugh. “I don’t either,” he said. “See, I do agree with you, Lupa, I’m not just saying it.” He didn’t know how much longer this fit would last. Sometimes Lupa would rapidly fall asleep, and would wake normal, if cranky. Sometimes she would fade in and out of normal, and pretend nothing had happened. Sometimes she’d deny she’d been strange at all. And sometimes she’d become so distraught she became incoherent. It was impossible to predict, and in this unfamiliar place surrounded by unsympathetic people, Akash didn’t know what to do.
He hated the thought of showing weakness in front of Gaura or her people. It was important that their clients took their warnings seriously, and if Lupa was stumbling around seeing the truth of people’s hearts in inconvenient clarity, that wasn’t really conducive to their future relationship being smooth and no-nonsense.
As he was running through his options, chewing nervously on his lip, Lupa swayed suddenly, and he darted forward to catch her. “I’m-- tired,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Akash said, helping her over to the bed she’d put her things next to. “I’ll bring you back something from lunch, why don’t you wait for me here, and rest?”
“Oh,” Lupa said, and let him help her lie down. “All right. That would be kind, if you would, Kas. My head just hurts, all of a sudden, and I have the strangest feeling.”
“Just rest,” Akash said, “it’s been a long few days.” She was using his name again. He arranged her skirt so it wouldn’t tangle her feet if she got up, and spread one of the blankets from her pack over her, put her water canteen near to hand, and took her hand in his so he could feel the pulse of blood in her wrist. One of these times it was going to be a heart attack or something, and he’d never forgive himself for assuming she’d be fine. But her pulse was beating strong enough, if a little fast.
Maybe there was a medic, here, who could-- no. They’d had her seen by doctors before, and she was always cranky about it. It wasn’t worth it.
“Akash,” Lupa said, as he sat on the other bed to pull his boots on.
“Yes, Auntie,” he said, coming over immediately to bend close.
She blinked sleepily up at him, and smiled softly. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “I’ll be all right. Go and flirt with that girl, she was nice, I meant it.”
Akash smoothed his hand across his little-mother’s glossy hair. “I will, auntie,” he said.
He absolutely would not.
***
Maliy had already sat down at the table when she saw Akash come in. He’d changed clothes and cleaned up, but what struck her most was that he looked angry, his face taut and dour, his jaw set, his shoulders rigid. Hanah, the woman who’d been in charge of preparing the meal, greeted him warmly regardless, and his expression eased to blank politeness. He didn’t quite manage a smile, but he did manage to look sincere and pleasant as she explained what the various dishes were and how he could serve himself.
Istaso had just stood up to refill the water pitcher, and she stepped close to him on her way past and said something, tilting her head toward Maliy. Akash glanced over and saw her, and nodded. Once he’d filled his plate, he came and sat next to her at the long table. “Your friend said there was space here,” he said, a little awkwardly.
“There is,” Maliy said, smiling at him.
He thanked her and sat down, and the tense line of his shoulders was back. She also realized that he was alone; she’d expected the older woman to be with him, at least. She looked back the way he’d come, but no one had followed him. He noticed her look, and quirked an eyebrow quizzically.
“I was just wondering where all your friends had gone,” she said, trying to make it less awkward with a smile.
“Tiu’s staying with the cart,” he said. “Please don’t take it as a gesture of mistrust, it’s just what we’re hired to do. It’s our job. We can’t ever leave that stuff unattended, not until the contract’s up.”
“Oh, we’d figured as much,” Maliy said. “We do get merchants through here a fair bit, though we must seem pretty out of the way to you.”
He blushed, which was so charming Maliy almost forgot what she’d been wondering about. “Not at all,” he said earnestly. “It’s really nice here.”
“Your other friend was already down here,” Maliy said, “but I didn’t see the woman, what was her name?”
“Lupa,” Akash said. “She’s my auntie.” He looked briefly angry, or-- no, this time Maliy could see his face better and could make out that he was worried, or upset. “She’s-- resting.”
“Is she all right?” Maliy asked, dismayed. The woman had seemed fine-- a sturdy woman of middling age, perhaps her forties, with an unmistakable air of competence.
“Just tired,” Akash said, with a tight closed-mouthed smile that could not have more clearly conveyed that he was upset and frightened. She realized, in that moment, that he was possibly even younger than she herself was-- despite his height and his broad shoulders, there was a rawboned quality to his wrists, and a roundness to his face, that revealed that he wasn’t very far into his twenties at all.
And he was a mercenary, was the thing-- the guards who protected convoys on contracts weren’t municipal workers, they were private, and as such only had the kinds of protections they could negotiate for themselves. People were afraid of them, and suspicious of them. He was here with only his three companions, and if one of them had been taken ill, he might not feel he could trust anyone to help. And if she was too sick to complete their contract, all of them could be in serious trouble.
She leaned in a little. “You were kind to me on the road,” she said. “I would return the favor. If she needs a medic I can get one discreetly.”
Akash looked startled. “Oh,” he said. But he was quick-witted, she’d observed that before, and his expression quickly settled back into polite attention, though with a warmer cast than before. “No, I think she’ll be all right. But thank you, I sincerely appreciate the offer.”
Istaso returned and tucked herself back into the chair on Maliy’s opposite side. “What offer, now? Have we moved on to that portion of the conversation yet?”
Maliy laughed. “Don’t be a goof. Istaso, this is Akash. Akash, this is my best friend Istaso.”
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.
“You’re right,” he said, instead of anything else. He shook out his scarf; he’d considered rinsing it out in the bathing room, but they were going to stay here a couple of days and there were probably actual laundry facilities. He could at least wash it with soap, he figured, along with the shirts and underwear he’d been rinsing out. Usually they had to wait until they got to a city to do that kind of maintenance but this place was certainly nice enough that they’d be able to.
“Don’t wear that gross scarf,” Lupa said. “Not indoors. Don’t you have a nicer shirt?”
“I didn’t bring anything to dress up, really,” Akash grumbled, but he put back the shirt he’d been intending to put on, which had gotten grubbier around the cuffs than he’d realized, and fished out a cleaner one. He did have a decent sleeveless jacket, with nice embroidery up the back.
“That’s better,” Lupa said, as he pulled the shirt on. He gave her a long-suffering look for her meddling, and she reached over and patted his cheek. “My good boy, you clean up so handsome.”
He laughed, but let her tousle his hair, which was too short to disarrange anyway. She’d cut it, at the last nice place they’d stayed, and it was the way he liked it, nice and even, only a tiny bit longer on top. He wasn’t vain, exactly, but he tried to look decent, anyway, for what good that might do. Decent people would be suspicious of him for his profession no matter what, but being well-groomed at least staved off the sting of the “dirty mercenary” comments.
He turned away to put his waistcoat on, and when he turned back, Lupa was still staring at him, but her expression had gone distant. “Oh no,” he said, and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Lupa, sit down. Come, sit down.” He steered her to the nearer bed, and gently pressed her down. This happened, sometimes.
Lupa blinked, and looked at him, collecting herself, but he could see her eyes were still slightly unfocused. “Baz,” she said, with a faint laugh, “don’t look so worried, I’ll be fine.”
Baz was, Akash had learned, the man his mother had been intending to marry, before everything had been destroyed. Baz had died in the attack. Baz had not been his father, and he did not particularly resemble Baz, but sometimes Lupa had these spells, and she would get confused. Akash’s mother had presumed Lupa’s spells were in some way sent by the ancestors, but most of the rest of their group assumed they were a health issue. Lupa herself was cagey about what she thought they meant, afterward, but in the moment she was completely absorbed in them as they happened.
“I’m not worried,” Akash said gently. He had learned not to get upset, not to try to snap her back to reality. He kept his hand on her shoulder, preventing her from rising. Tiu knew about these spells, and had helped him deal with one before, but Oru didn’t; Lupa wasn’t that close with him. Akash’s mother had been best at dealing with them, of course.
“We should stay here,” Lupa said, staring vaguely past him at nothing. “We should-- stay here.”
“All right,” Akash said.
“No, I mean-- in this place,” Lupa insisted. “We should stay here.”
“Of course, Lupa,” Akash said.
“You’re just agreeing with me to shut me up,” Lupa said, and she was testy enough to really sound like herself. “Don’t patronize me, Baz.”
“I don’t mean to,” Akash said. “I’m just-- you don’t look well, Lupa, and I want you to just take a deep breath and relax for a moment.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Lupa said. “Listen to me, Baz-- this place is a good place.”
“I am listening, Lupa,” Akash said. “I’m agreeing with you because I agree with you. I like it here.”
“I liked that girl you were talking to,” Lupa said. That was new; usually when she thought he was Baz she talked to him about his mother. “She had a good heart, I could see it.”
“I liked her too,” Akash said. “I can’t judge hearts like that but I thought her wit was keen, at least.”
“You would like that best,” Lupa said fondly, patting his cheek again. “You’re a sweet boy. So much like your father.”
Akash gave up on trying to keep up. He’d never heard any mention of Baz’s father before. Sometimes, though, Lupa seemed to believe that Baz was Akash’s father, and he’d given up trying to figure out what to feel about that. “Thank you,” he said, instead of anything else at all.
Of course, at that moment, Gaura the merchant’s niece Kila rapped at the door and then burst in. “Oh, shucks,” she said, “you’re decent.”
Akash scowled at her; she’d been a creep to him ever since Tiu had told her he was a prude, and it was getting extremely old, because he couldn’t tell her to fuck off. They needed this gig, or at least needed not to be fired from it so far away from anywhere else. “I’m always decent,” he said. “Excuse me, I was speaking with my aunt.”
“Aunt,” Lupa said vaguely. Shit. Shit.
“They said lunch is in a couple of minutes,” Kila said. “Kas, are you going to fuck that local girl? Because if you don’t, I might. She’s a sweet piece of ass.”
“That would be up to her, now, wouldn’t it,” Akash said.
“Come on,” Kila said with a laugh, “like you’d ever unbend that far! I don’t think your nephew is a human man at all, Lupa.”
Lupa stood up suddenly, fixing her glassy stare on Kila. “No,” Akash said, soft and intense, but she pushed his hand away from her shoulder.
“I’m not sure you’d know a human man if you met one,” Lupa said, tilting her head a little. “There’s a void you’re trying to fill but that’s not the way. That’s not the way, my dear. Focus on yourself, and bide your patience, and fulfillment will come to you.”
“Uh,” Kila said dubiously, frowning at Lupa.
“It’s not wise to startle my aunt at a time like this,” Akash said, taking Kila by the shoulder instead and gently steering her back toward the door. “We’ll be down in a few minutes, tell them we’re grateful for the hospitality. Thank you very much.”
Kila didn’t protest, and he stuffed her through the door and shut it politely but firmly behind her.
“I don’t like her,” Lupa said, matter-of-fact. “She’s not going to do the work on herself she needs to, and she’ll take it out on other people her whole life.”
Akash leaned against the door, letting out his breath in a nervous laugh. “I don’t either,” he said. “See, I do agree with you, Lupa, I’m not just saying it.” He didn’t know how much longer this fit would last. Sometimes Lupa would rapidly fall asleep, and would wake normal, if cranky. Sometimes she would fade in and out of normal, and pretend nothing had happened. Sometimes she’d deny she’d been strange at all. And sometimes she’d become so distraught she became incoherent. It was impossible to predict, and in this unfamiliar place surrounded by unsympathetic people, Akash didn’t know what to do.
He hated the thought of showing weakness in front of Gaura or her people. It was important that their clients took their warnings seriously, and if Lupa was stumbling around seeing the truth of people’s hearts in inconvenient clarity, that wasn’t really conducive to their future relationship being smooth and no-nonsense.
As he was running through his options, chewing nervously on his lip, Lupa swayed suddenly, and he darted forward to catch her. “I’m-- tired,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Akash said, helping her over to the bed she’d put her things next to. “I’ll bring you back something from lunch, why don’t you wait for me here, and rest?”
“Oh,” Lupa said, and let him help her lie down. “All right. That would be kind, if you would, Kas. My head just hurts, all of a sudden, and I have the strangest feeling.”
“Just rest,” Akash said, “it’s been a long few days.” She was using his name again. He arranged her skirt so it wouldn’t tangle her feet if she got up, and spread one of the blankets from her pack over her, put her water canteen near to hand, and took her hand in his so he could feel the pulse of blood in her wrist. One of these times it was going to be a heart attack or something, and he’d never forgive himself for assuming she’d be fine. But her pulse was beating strong enough, if a little fast.
Maybe there was a medic, here, who could-- no. They’d had her seen by doctors before, and she was always cranky about it. It wasn’t worth it.
“Akash,” Lupa said, as he sat on the other bed to pull his boots on.
“Yes, Auntie,” he said, coming over immediately to bend close.
She blinked sleepily up at him, and smiled softly. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “I’ll be all right. Go and flirt with that girl, she was nice, I meant it.”
Akash smoothed his hand across his little-mother’s glossy hair. “I will, auntie,” he said.
He absolutely would not.
***
Maliy had already sat down at the table when she saw Akash come in. He’d changed clothes and cleaned up, but what struck her most was that he looked angry, his face taut and dour, his jaw set, his shoulders rigid. Hanah, the woman who’d been in charge of preparing the meal, greeted him warmly regardless, and his expression eased to blank politeness. He didn’t quite manage a smile, but he did manage to look sincere and pleasant as she explained what the various dishes were and how he could serve himself.
Istaso had just stood up to refill the water pitcher, and she stepped close to him on her way past and said something, tilting her head toward Maliy. Akash glanced over and saw her, and nodded. Once he’d filled his plate, he came and sat next to her at the long table. “Your friend said there was space here,” he said, a little awkwardly.
“There is,” Maliy said, smiling at him.
He thanked her and sat down, and the tense line of his shoulders was back. She also realized that he was alone; she’d expected the older woman to be with him, at least. She looked back the way he’d come, but no one had followed him. He noticed her look, and quirked an eyebrow quizzically.
“I was just wondering where all your friends had gone,” she said, trying to make it less awkward with a smile.
“Tiu’s staying with the cart,” he said. “Please don’t take it as a gesture of mistrust, it’s just what we’re hired to do. It’s our job. We can’t ever leave that stuff unattended, not until the contract’s up.”
“Oh, we’d figured as much,” Maliy said. “We do get merchants through here a fair bit, though we must seem pretty out of the way to you.”
He blushed, which was so charming Maliy almost forgot what she’d been wondering about. “Not at all,” he said earnestly. “It’s really nice here.”
“Your other friend was already down here,” Maliy said, “but I didn’t see the woman, what was her name?”
“Lupa,” Akash said. “She’s my auntie.” He looked briefly angry, or-- no, this time Maliy could see his face better and could make out that he was worried, or upset. “She’s-- resting.”
“Is she all right?” Maliy asked, dismayed. The woman had seemed fine-- a sturdy woman of middling age, perhaps her forties, with an unmistakable air of competence.
“Just tired,” Akash said, with a tight closed-mouthed smile that could not have more clearly conveyed that he was upset and frightened. She realized, in that moment, that he was possibly even younger than she herself was-- despite his height and his broad shoulders, there was a rawboned quality to his wrists, and a roundness to his face, that revealed that he wasn’t very far into his twenties at all.
And he was a mercenary, was the thing-- the guards who protected convoys on contracts weren’t municipal workers, they were private, and as such only had the kinds of protections they could negotiate for themselves. People were afraid of them, and suspicious of them. He was here with only his three companions, and if one of them had been taken ill, he might not feel he could trust anyone to help. And if she was too sick to complete their contract, all of them could be in serious trouble.
She leaned in a little. “You were kind to me on the road,” she said. “I would return the favor. If she needs a medic I can get one discreetly.”
Akash looked startled. “Oh,” he said. But he was quick-witted, she’d observed that before, and his expression quickly settled back into polite attention, though with a warmer cast than before. “No, I think she’ll be all right. But thank you, I sincerely appreciate the offer.”
Istaso returned and tucked herself back into the chair on Maliy’s opposite side. “What offer, now? Have we moved on to that portion of the conversation yet?”
Maliy laughed. “Don’t be a goof. Istaso, this is Akash. Akash, this is my best friend Istaso.”
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Date: 2018-12-20 07:21 pm (UTC)I also wonder about your mix of names, which is very cool for a post-apocalyptic society.
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Date: 2018-12-20 08:35 pm (UTC)I usually go to somewhere dumb like babynames dot com or whatever, and then load up all the names they have of a particular ethnicity (or like, go to Google and type in "irish Baby names" or whatever). Sometimes in my mind I'll have a set of characters assigned to different ones-- like, the very first drafts of the Solarpunk Mammoths thing, when I just wrote lists of names, I had all the herders be Basque, all the mammoths Swahili, all the farmers Russian, and all the city folk... I don't remember now actually, I might have just gone to Generic Fantasy Conglomerations of Syllables by then, I do a fair bit of that. It's nice because at that stage you can give people meaningful names, to an extent, though hopefully more subtly than, like, Wolfy McWolf...
Then, once I had a list of names I aesthetically enjoyed, I could kind of narrow it down to the names I like to use the most and won't spork my eyes out typing a hundred thousand times each.
And then you kind of scramble them around, change up spellings, pick alternate versions that are less common, or super common, sometimes it's great to have your character have a real-world name people are going to recognize.
But I do find it helpful to kind of keep an aesthetic in mind for different groups. I try to be a little more worldbuildy than just saying "Ok the crypto-Arabs with Arabic names live in a desert" because that's kind of gross, but, like, that's the foundation of it. (Like... these are two related ethnic groups so I'm going to research related language-families of names, like Russian and Ukranian names, and muddy the distinctions, or the like.)
I definitely try to steer clear of "all the villains have Super Ethnic names and the heroes are easy to pronounce in English", as well. But I admit that I really do try quite hard to have names be easy to pronounce, and be distinct from one another.
The last thing in choosing names is to Google your preferred mis/spelling of major character names to make sure that it's not, say, a common word in a foreign language, or the name of a really famous celebrity. it's not a perfect system but I feel like that last check is kind of important.
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Date: 2018-12-21 02:37 am (UTC)The reason I asked in this case is Akash is an Indian name, and Lupa is... not, though I can think of a couple that it could be an iteration of now I think about it. So I got curious.
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Date: 2018-12-21 06:55 pm (UTC)I was trying to make Kes into something else, honestly.
His eventual son is named Alik, which is almost Alook, which I also know like, three guys with that name.
I'm just trying to make them not super obviously anything in particular, overall.
Lupa was me redoing Lita, though, probably via Guadalupe, and abandoning Norasol as too much a product of that particular OC-verse.
The next offshoot of this novel has characters literally named their role in square brackets, because I was wasting too much time on names. Featuring such hits as [MERCHANT], [CITY], [OTHERCITY] which hilariously wound up being the one that got discussed much more in the manuscript, [GUARD2], and [CHILD].
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Date: 2018-12-22 04:24 am (UTC)Sorry, I get excited about names.
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Date: 2018-12-27 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-27 04:05 pm (UTC)(I also still have not figured out how public entertainment goes in this world. I can see how broadcast media would be prohibitive but surely they can record stuff and distribute it on hard-copy, so like-- that could be a thing, like there are traders who just do exchanges of recorded media? like maybe a digital bard, kind of?? many possibilities, but as the story isn't about that, where do I work it in???)
Maybe you can help me figure it out!
My idea is that it's overall kind of a socialist society-- resources are pooled, so that everyone has what they need, and so anything beyond survival goes toward things like the Academies, and technological advances, medical care, and infrastructure improvements. But there's still going to be personal property, and people are still going to want to acquire things beyond the basics, so there'll absolutely be ways to earn surplus income. The idea being that no one settlement can be entirely self-sufficient, but within a region, they can largely meet their own needs-- the arable land goes to farming, the less-desirable land goes to herding, and then where there are large waterfalls or other natural resources that can support the power needs of manufacturing, that's where your large population centers are. So those would be semi-self-contained little municipalities, and they'd make sure nobody starved within those, and they'd have trade networks with other municipalities for the exchange of knowledge and entertainment, and to trade for occasional things that can't be obtained from within the municipalities, and such. But all of that guaranteed-survival stuff only extends to citizens. It'd have to; you couldn't just feed anyone who randomly happened by, you'd need to organize it in some fashion. And so in between the settlements there are going to be little pockets of people who for whatever reason have been excluded from citizenship, and some of them would turn to crime and other acts of desperation, and some of them would just live kind of feral subsistence lives, and some of them would organize themselves and try to participate in the wider world but without the advantage of citizenship they're going to have trouble getting by.
But I'm not sure how it would work, in a practical way. Like-- is food issued by the government? What about goods? Or are the providers of those goods issued with stipends from the government and they can just report what they dispensed?
I definitely feel like that's how it works for doctors, I developed that a little more in another story I don't think I've excerpted-- the POV character is a doctor in her final year of training, and she's with a convoy protected by mercenaries and one is sick and refuses treatment from her because doctors make non-citizens pay them. She's only ever treated citizens, and you just write up a report and the government applies it toward how much work you're meant to do in a year to receive your stipend-- but if it's not work done on a citizen, it doesn't count, and you don't get reimbursed for the medication. But there is a mechanism to put that into your reports; humanitarian concerns do apply, just-- most citizens are unsympathetic to non-citizens because there's a popular view that if you're not a citizen it's because you did something bad.
(Maybe I can pin that on recorded dramatic serials about it or something. *shakes fist* the media!)
Anyhow. I'm still working it out, really-- I'm not so good at logistics etc.
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Date: 2018-12-30 06:51 pm (UTC)so full disclosure all the stuff i know about money i learned by getting really stressed out about medieval european money, so honestly when i asked this question at least a third of it was me thinking about mints & mining. it seems to me that you wouldn't have coinage at all because that's a fairly inefficient use of metal, but would instead have something like ration books, which isn't exactly money but is kind of money, so producers receive vouchers (or whatever) for the stuff they don't make. on the side you'd have some kind of other currency for private transactions, possibly? that seems like the most efficient way to handle it, but you could absolutely just do a lot of stuff on barter. it's hard to imagine a super centralized government without fast long-distance communication, so in less closely-controlled areas other forms of exchange (or i guess a currency) would probably coexist with or exceed the use of the 'private transactions' currency. i do kind of wonder about the prominence of counterfeiting, because that seems harder to prevent for less-centralized governments. i guess it depends on what kind of anti-counterfeiting technology the government could muster & what the currency was actually made of.
so guess what i actually wonder about is resource availability and government structure, because money doesn't really work without some kind of authoritative structure. i don't know if this was helpful to think about! but i am having a lot of fun thinking about what solarpunk money might mean
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Date: 2019-01-02 05:11 pm (UTC)Like, there has to be money.
The government structure I came up with was more like, a loose federation of cities, and probably some bureaucrats. It would have to be enforced somehow, and I just don't know-- like, I don't want nobles or kings, so it's got to be democratic, but how realistic is that? I wrote in, like, city councils and the like. So there'd have to be like. Maybe a kind of representative democracy is possible on that kind of scale, and there's a bit of higher-level government but mostly it's these fairly local types keeping the thing running. in the absence of ongoing crises of resource scarcity or natural disasters or the dispossessed bandits in the hills reaching critical mass, it seems like the government should be able to stay afloat without sliding into authoritarianism etc.?
There is high-speed communication, most of the time, and a fair amount of travel is possible, so like... there could be pretty decent control of counterfeiting and the like.
I think there being ration books and then separate currency for non-essential transactions would work, or something along those lines-- maybe it's all one currency and mostly people barter, but like-- would the government pay directly for necessities, and then the producers of necessities apply for reimbursement, or would the government purchase the necessities and then hand them out? No, the first system seems better and less-effort-redundant.
Maybe a lot is done on credit? Like, instead of currency, there's a clearinghouse in each city where the government tracks debts, and every citizen has an account there they can withdraw money from to buy what they need, and every producer who makes things has an account they're given credit into for the things people buy, and everyone who does work gets credit in there for them to buy things they want, and such? I could make this more technological so nobody carries around cash except for little stuff?
I'd have to write that technology in, though. And on days when the solar flares take the communications network down, nobody would be able to conduct business except on paper, and you'd have to hope nobody was lying to you about how much credit they had in their account, and so on.
Hmmmm.
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Date: 2018-12-31 06:19 am (UTC)I'm fond of your names, too. For SFF I always try to strike a balance between not-quite-familiar-and-not-quite-foreign, relatively intuitive to pronounce, and that weird nebulous mental click where it feels right for the character - and then I’m always surprised by how much time I end up devoting to getting the balance right. Istaso is a particular favorite, here.
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Date: 2019-01-02 03:53 pm (UTC)I was explaining that I start by just making myself a whole pile of names I can pick from so that when I introduce a character I can slap a moniker on 'em and not have to stop mid-writing to come up with something. Sometimes I get ahead of myself, though.
But what I do is go Google a stupid baby-name site and then filter by a random ethnicity, and start with a different group of ethnicity-names for each different group within the story. I then do try to change the names so it's not so obviously "hurr durr all the characters from Desert Savages Tribe get Arabic names and all the characters from Noble Northerners get Nordic names nurr hurr so clever! *barf*" -- in this case, the herders were Basque and the farmers were Russian and then I don't know how a bunch of Indian names got pulled in and redistributed.
Then there's always the tried-and-true Take A Name You Know And Spell It Weird. Molly= Maliy, and Alex = Alik, but sometimes you wind up accidentally just naming them a super-common name in another language. So the final step is to Google search the name and see if there are four hundred thousand results on LinkedIn, and if so shrugging and figuring it's anonymous enough.
Names take forever, i'm glad you seem to like these. I have really been trying to just-- keep the name work separate from the writing so I don't get bogged down.
Anyway-- thanks!! I think this is a side shoot so discovering more about the world was expressly what I was trying to do.