extrapenguin

I'm

ExtraPenguin and this is my

worldbuildingex letter.

Navigation:
Likes
DNWs
Children of Time
Dragon's Egg
Uplift

Likes

Same-sex relationships, especially F/F.
Narratives of reconstruction: fixing something, whether that be a country, a piece of equipment, a relationship, or a person. (Examples: Nirvana in Fire, Zuko's arc in Avatar: the Last Airbender)
Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic.
Comedy of Errors -type things.
Crack taken seriously.
Untitled Goose Game crossovers of the type where the goose comes to visit the canon.
Alien settings: Dyson spheres, ringworlds, planets tidally locked to their red dwarf stars, artificial habitats on otherwise inhospitable planets, planets with large axial tilts, planets that are actually moons of gas giants, etc.
Engineering, especially of the sort that keeps civilization running – sewage, maintenance, transport etc – plus fault analysis and infrastructure design stuff.
Characters expressing caring for each other by feeding each other/giving each other tea.
Established relationships.
Good mentor figures/teachers who have their students' best interests at heart and succeed.
Class issues and other tensions between origins and current presentation (eg. alien whose species is considered monsters in disguise as a human).
Worldbuilding!
Weird physics.
Tea.
Competence porn.
Enthusiasm in general.
Xenobiology, aliens, very alien aliens.
Loyalty, loyalty kink, people loyal way past the point of reasonableness.
Loving descriptions of small details/of how systems run; insertion of Shown Their Work details.
Happy endings.

I like both shipfic and gen. If you're choosing between something you think the characters would do in a situation and something on my likes list, please err on the side of what you feel is right for the characters and story in general.

DNW

Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU) (exception: In Space AUs of canons not already In Space are fine)
Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
Humiliation, especially public.
Unrequested incest, including foster/adopted relationships.
Stories about motherhood.
Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, cheelas are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine.)
Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
Stories about mourning a dead person.
Requested characters dying.
Stories where the characters have never loved or could never love anyone but each other, incl. soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.

(to top)

Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Original Character(s)
Listen: I am a sucker for uplift narratives. I love the spiders, but I also love the sheer potential of the universe exposed to the Rus-Califi virus. Spider society as born from pre-sentience spider behavior was great, and I'd love to see how other species form societies, as well as the steady rise to sentience.

WB: Stomatopod History & Culture (Children of Time)
Tell me anything! How did the stomatopods make first contact with the spiders? What do they think of their spider neighbors? What to they think about space and the humans that came from there? What ocean-things weigh on their minds and occupy their collective cultural consciousness?

WB: Other abandoned terraforming projects (Children of Time)
We see one unintended success state and one failure state – how else could the terraforming projects fail? Something like Solaris, or a multi-sentient species-kill-species world, or something where the virus did not quite work as intended and there were even more unforeseen consequences? Something where the virus ends up making everything look more like Ediacaran biota due to interaction with alien virus-equivalents? Go nuts!

WB: Corvid-alien hybrids (Children of Time)
The collision of corvid genome with alien molecular catalyst was mentioned in the epilogue of Children of Ruin and not elaborated upon at all, but it sounded super cool. How much did the alien molecular catalyst influence the corvid society? Can they survive in environments other Earthlings cannot? Do they have different amino acid needs? What was first contact with the spider society like?

(to top)

Dragon's Egg - Robert L. Forward

Swift-Killer, Original Character(s)
The setting here was really cool, and the premise of aliens that lived their lives at a different rate to ours spectacular. I liked their society, too, with its prophets and hunters, and their biology, crystallization thing Swift-Killer accidentally discovered included.

WB: Humans in cheela culture (Dragon's Egg)
After the cheelas' development, how do they see humans? What stories do they tell about the slow ones, what monuments do they make, what do they teach their children? Do they keep watch on Earth? Do cheelas later make second contact with humans/try to communicate again?

WB: Cheela exploration of space (Dragon's Egg)
I would love to see anything about the cheela space programme, both from the start and also from the "traveling places" stage. We know they've reached a number of nearby places. What was it like for them to traverse those worlds so utterly unlike their own?

(to top)

Uplift Series - David Brin

Creideiki, Chissis
I greatly enjoy our wily philosopher and the fierce determined fin clawing her way back to sentience! I enjoy Creideiki/Hikahi, and Chissis &/ Tkett. Feel free to include any other dolphins and aliens, though I'm not one for the humans or chimpanzees.
Format opt-in: if you want to write a fic entirely in Trinary, or with significant Trinary elements, I'm game!

WB: Trinary (Uplift Series)
What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What sort of poetic imagery is most popular? What sorts of things count as undertones of Primal that e.g. Makanee is worried about Brookida displaying? How did Trinary form exactly? (Dolphins finding haikus cool and just unilaterally to only communicate using them?) How does thinking in Trinary affect dolphin views of art? What are the images that are considered most poetic, and why? How often do they use Trinary to subtly or not-so-subtly troll humans? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What're dolphins' favorite wordplays?

WB: The Whale Dream (Uplift Series)
I'd love to see some sort of opening up of what it is and what it means, and how it's reflected in modern Trinary! Do our spacegoing fins miss the song of the humpbacks of Earth's oceans?

WB: Progenitors (Uplift Series)
What were the Progenitors like? Why did they make the choices they did? Did they unifiedly disappear one day, or was there fractiousness? Why did they leave? How did First Contact between the Progenitors go? What sorts of traps did they leave behind?

WB: Buyur plan for Jijo (Uplift Series)
Is the Buyur plan simply what they said it would be in Temptation, or is there yet another layer hidden there? Do they have things hidden on Jijo beyond the things mentioned in Temptation? What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind?

* Hands and fire?
      Hands and fire!
* Use them, use them
      To leap higher!
* Dreams and song?
      Dreams and song!
* Use them, use them
      To leap-long! *

(to top)