Alright, today I want to take a dive into the world building for my first Sci-Fi novel, Free As Dust, which will come out… eventually.
Honestly, we're still in the world building phase because I, in my infinite grace and wisdom, decided to start building alien cultures and then I started thinking about how human being got to be the way we are and then I started trying to see if I could avoid 'the planet of the hats'. And now we're here, and I'm going to talk about the first alien species I've gotten a handle on.
But first, what is Free As Dust?
Free As Dust centers around a solar system divided. In my deep love for Babylon 5 and Mass Effect and basically every other science fiction story where mankind has gone to the stars, I have seen that Earth is united. Having grown up in the 21st century, however, I find this improbable. So instead different countries have gobbled up different parts of our solar system. Most relevant for our purposes is the Irish Republic (unified, I know who I am) has a large presence on Mars and there is a small colony on Venus of Quakers, from which our main character hails.
I thought the idea of Venetian Quakers was fun and it gives me a good excuse to talk about Quakers with my grandfather, who is one.
Initially this was supposed to be a story about a war on Earth spreading to its colonies as some of those colonies are pulling away, but it's morphed into something much more Stranger In A Strange Land as eventually our intrepid ex-Quaker protagonist finds herself in a first contact situation with various forms of alien life and those have been what I've been neck deep in trying to work out.
This happened for a couple of reasons.
1) I have uneducated but broadly positive feelings about the IRA that would need to be heavily examined.
2) If I'm going to research the IRA that heavily, I'd probably write the historical drama I keep threatening Ink with where King Arthur and Fionn Mac Cumhail duke it out in a 90's parking lot.
So instead today, let's talk about The Siphonophores.
Nothing has a real sci-fi-y name yet.
I wanted an alien species that wasn't a tetrapod and so I went looking into the invertebrates and found siphonophores. Siphonophores are colonies, creatures made up of many smaller creatures (called zooids) all working as one.
Okay, great, so we've got a colony of creatures being a creature. Using the bioluminescence inherit in most siphonophores on earth and the ability to move their bodies to different configurations, our siphonophore alien friends can mask themselves as variants of the other races, always with something uniquely off about them (probably coloration, it's in the works).
Two personal pronouns which mean either we (the nominal individual) or we (the larger group).
Now that we've got that. What are they like? How has being the way they are shaped their morals and world view.
With the siphonophores I picture a sort of hard-line utilitarianism. They know that they are part of a greater whole, intrinsically. When one zooid dies, the whole continues on, and so it is for the universe. They life for a very long time, but the live as a persistent Ship Of Thesus, bit after bit being replaced. What is best for the group is always best. Ethically, it is always correct to favor the whole and when the siphonophores joined greater galactic society, the "whole" just got larger.
So with this comes some of what we would consider being unethical science zooids. For example, in the 1930s there were a whole lot of DEEPLY unethical experiments in psychology, like the Young Albert experiments, a lot of stuff with chimps. We look back today and go "Well, we learned a lot, but the damage to real people was way too severe".
The siphonophores wouldn't. Didn't. Sure, Albert is traumatized, but look at what we learned with regards to the way conditioning and trauma develop. That was a net gain for the whole, so it's fine. Morally correct, even.
I haven't designed much with regards to a dominant religion for them yet, it's what I'm working on now, but I have pilfered the basic and heavily bastardized idea of "timeless decision making" from the rationalist community.
For information on the rationalists I highly recommend the Behind The Bastards episodes on The Zizians, but for our purposes here, the idea is that you make decisions in the present based on what those decisions will represent about you in the future.
The classic rationalist example is that if you're going to be in a fight you should always fight with intent to kill because that will put into the universe that you'll kill people and make people less inclined to fight you. The mechanism for how they know you made this timeless decision is unknown, but that's the theory.
Rather, with the siphonophores, good cultural practice is making the timeless decision to always put the good of the group, the greatest group, ahead of yourself. Therefore, if you feel someone else might be a greater gain to society and they try to kill you? You die. Better to die than to rob the whole of something that benefits it.
those btb episodes are wildddddd