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[extrapenguin]

I am ExtraPenguin and this is my space_swap letter.

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Likes
DNWs
Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Expanse series - James S. A. Corey
Uplift series - David Brin

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.
• Experimental things. Weird stuff.
• 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. (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. (Exception: soulmate-bestowing geese/geese bullying characters into getting together with someone is okay.)
• Alternate character origin story AUs.
• Kinking on bodily fluids
• Under-15s having sex. People under 18 having sex with people older than 18.

Getting up to speed on the canons

Children of Time: Trilogy consisting of tho 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.
Expanse series: A nine-book series. My requests focus more on the stuff found/explained in the later books.
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.

Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Fanfiction, Interactive Fiction
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?
• Or colonists from Earth on a ship like the Gilgamesh or Enkidu turning up on a world that may or may not have life?

Imir engine builders

• Who are they? Are they still around?
• First contact with the Portiid-Human-etc culture?
• What is the purpose of all those engines? Is the one on Imir performing its intended purpose, or is it malfunctioning somehow?
• Honestly just give me all the archaeology of ancient aliens, I will eat it up with a spoon

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The Expanse series - James S. A. Corey

Fanfiction, Interactive Fiction
I loved the sweeping sense of space adventure and the sense of mystery wrt the Builders and their toys and why they died, as well as the existential horror of the attacks on reality that use of their toys caused. I loved the puzzles and the solutions presented.

Sol System Post-Ring Gate Collapse

• How does humanity readjust? Does the Mars terraforming project pick up again?
• Does humanity settle again into an Earth-Mars-Belters arrangement, or something completely different?
• Tech developments?

Ring Worlds

• We see a few worlds and hear about a few more, and they range from Earth-like save for weird details to the truly alien/constructed artefacts. I'd love to hear more about either type!
• Settlers turning up on something that looked Earth-like but turns out to be extremely weird instead/in addition?
• Scientists (Elvi Okoye or others) going on a trip to a ring world that looks to be really exotic and then investigating it?
• Archaeological expedition to some odd Builder artefacts?

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Uplift series - David Brin

Fanfiction
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!

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?

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! Creideiki/Hikahi is 100% welcome.)
• 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's (and Hikahi's and Chissis's and Tkett's) favorite wordplays?
• Do they have some additional encounters with Galactic bureaucracy, either before or after the whole "everyone wants to murder Earthclan" thing?

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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