Dear Sufficiently Advanced Creator

[extrapenguin]

This is my letter for sufficiently_advanced_ex.

Navigation:
Likes
DNWs
Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Uplift series - David Brin
Dragon's Egg - Robert L. Forward
Revelation Space series - Alastair Reynolds
Memory of Water - Emmi Itäranta

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.
• Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
• Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
• Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic. Action/adventure.
• Comedy of Errors -type things.
• [record scratch SFX] So You're Probably Wondering How I Got Into This Situation: the fic
• Madcap adventure
• 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 infrastructure design stuff.
• Failure analysis/unraveling the causes of catastrophe, e.g. "why did the plane crash?" (yes, I like Mayday and Admiral Cloudberg)
• 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.
• 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)
• Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
• Humiliation, especially public.
• Unrequested incest, including foster/adopted and master/padawan relationships.
• Motherhood (childcare etc) as a woman's sole or main motivation or purpose.
• Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, cheela are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine. Bit part OCs in het relationships are also fine.)
• PIV sex.
• 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.

Getting up to speed on the canons

Children of Time: Trilogy consisting of the books Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory. You should be able to write about the stomatopods and other terraforming projects just based on the first one.
Uplift series: Series of 6 books and a sequel novella. For Creideiki, you can probably just read book #2, Startide Rising. For the worldbuilding prompts, you probably also want to read books #5 (Infinity's Shore) and #6 (Heaven's Reach) plus the novella Temptation, where Chississ and Tkett are introduced.
Dragon's Egg: A single book about a human expedition to a neutron star, where they meet a species that exists on a vastly different timescale to them.
Revelation Space: Trilogy consisting of the books Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap. You should be able to write Khouri/Volyova based on just the first one and Skade based on the second. The universe also has a collection of short stories, Galactic North, and a novella duo, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, if you really want to go into it.
Memory of Water: A standalone novel set post-climate collapse. If you're not reading in English, the title might be based on the Finnish one, Teamaster's Book.

Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

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.

Stomatopod History & Culture

• 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?
• Do they get included in the space project at some point? Perhaps after the octopodes have been integrated?

Other abandoned terraforming projects

• We see one unintended success state and one failure state – how else could the terraforming projects fail? Go nuts!
• 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?

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Uplift series - David Brin

My very favorite dolphins! I love the setting with its "and even the kitchen sink" attitude towards space opera worldbuilding eg the five different means of FTL travel, and the fact that the universe is vast and wondrous and has umpteen billion alien species in it. Pragmatic Hikahi and Creideiki the wily philosopher were the standout stars of Startide Rising, and Chissis and Tkett, both mad in their own ways, were of Temptation. I'm grouping the Chissis and Tkett prompts and the Creideiki and Hikahi prompts together, since they're sort of different cast herds, but the pre-canon prompts in the Creideiki+Hikahi set should work just as well for any subgroup – feel free to mix and match. WRT hetships, Creideiki/Hikahi and Chissis/Tkett are both OK, as are the & variants of both.

I've opted in to haiku series and in-universe poetry. I would love some trinary haiku, either as part of a fic or as a standalone piece!

Creideiki
Note: Please don't dwell on Creideiki's head injury. It's okay if he has it, but I don't want a fic that's All About him having a head injury and how he copes with it – I'd prefer fic about his adventures instead.

• I'd love to see more of Creideiki & co's galactic escape adventure! How do they reach Earth?
• Does their escape adventure/some training cruise of Creideiki's go through E-Space, and perhaps yield them with some new knowledge of how E-Space works? Or do they actually encounter a mad sentient who prefers it to other modes of hyperspace travel?
• Are there still Progenitor relics to be found? Did the Progenitors all unifiedly disappear one day, or did they gradually fade out? Does their find in the Shallow Cluster lead them to another set of clues, or did Creideiki's hunch to investigate the Shallow Cluster come from some prior experience with Progenitor relics?
• How did Creideiki and Hikahi first meet? (I do ship it!)
• Do they stumble across some (illegal) Uplift process? Or a failure/"failure" of an Uplift process?
• What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What are Creideiki et al's favorite wordplays?
• Do they have some additional encounters with Galactic bureaucracy, either before or after the whole "everyone wants to murder Earthclan" thing?

Chissis & Tkett

• Chissis and Tkett were the outstanding stars of Temptation for me! I'd gladly read more of their adventures exploring Jijo, maintaining things in the face of entropy, Tkett doing science (and founding a scientific journal just to get a place to publish it in?), and Chissis clawing her way back to sentience!
• 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?
• How does being stuck on Jijo affect Trinary? Do the alien shores mean their favorite imagery in Trinary changes? Their favorite wordplays? Their views on art
• What's it like to be mad in a completely unique way?
• What else is there that lurks in Jijo's depths?

Trinary

• 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?

The Whale Dream

• 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?
• How much of the Whale Dream is cultural and how much is ... not?
• Is the Whale Dream something found without, to be sought in the oceans, or something found within, carried with the fins to the ends of the galaxy?

Buyur plan for Jijo

• 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 are they?
• What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind? Was there one?

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Dragon's Egg - Robert L. Forward

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.

Swift-Killer

• I'd love to read more about her life, either the pre-expedition life of a Troop Leader who killed a swift, or her life as a Renaissance Cheela who figured out how to communicate with humans!
• What challenges did she have to surpass to get the communications going?

Humans in cheela culture

• 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?

Cheela exploration of space

• 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?
• Or what about worlds very similar to their own? Do they find another neutron star? Does that have life, too? Do they try to uplift the residents like the humans uplifted them?

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Revelation Space series - Alastair Reynolds

Skade

• What did Skade's prior missions look like?
• How does she participate in Council politics?
• When (and how) did the Madamoiselle infiltrate her? How would she react if she learned the truth about it?
• What was it like to be Conjoined and then go to the outside world to operate alone?

Ana Khouri/Ilia Volyova

• In general, I love their enemies to allies dynamic and the dark fraughtness of it all, and the way they don't tell each other everything at the start. I'd like to see something that maintains that tension and unease even during an Enemies to Lovers plotline.
• Them discovering the Hades Matrix people together. (If you want to keep the Aura plotline, surely the Hades Matrix folks can do a F/F pregnancy, but you can also deal with it all in a different fashion.)
• Could they reprogram the Inhibitors with or without Skade's assistance and cause an Inhibitor civil war?
• Sexual usage of the cache weapons

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Memory of Water - Emmi Itäranta

(Note: I read this in Finnish so some of my terminology may be off.) I love the setting and the writing style and the way it's a dystopia, yes, but there is still some semblance of order rather than idk raving zombie hordes, and civilization is still there.

Lian Kaitio

• She traveled from Kuusamo all the way to Xinjing by train – what was the train journey like? What did she see out the window? A Siberia without snow, the saltwater coast encroaching inland, desertification. What does she think, when she sees all of that?
• After Sanja brings her the CDs of evidence, what does she do with them? An expedition into the Lost Lands? Does she go to some friendly authority, like Mikoa had Bolin, and ask for assistance? (100% here for Lian/OFC femslash traversing the landscape and figuring out how to fix things!)
• What is the situation like, and how bad is it? What sorts of things are they currently working on to make stuff better? Are they aiming for some sort of solarpunk future, or something else?
• How much does the government snoop, and how does it affect how Lian communicates with her daughter and husband once she's gone back to Xinjing?
• Does the war being waged elsewhere connect to drinkable water, or is there a war going on at all?
• What drove Lian into her profession? How much does she know about the world, and how much does she get to discover about it?
• Did Lian move to faraway Kuusamo because she'd discovered too much, and had to get out of Xinjing to avoid further negative consequences? If so, what changed to make it safe for her to return?
• How could the situation be fixed? Either the police state or the climate catastrophe. Are they contemplating some large-scale eco-engineering projects to decrease the temperature of the planet? Feel free to be as grandiose as you please!

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