#sci-fi-is-every-thing

[ryllen]

no, but pinecones is really beautiful isn't it ?

[wolfsbaneandthistle]

Enith first developed space travel around 500,000 years prior to the modern period. This early era of space travel, called the First Enlightenment period, is survived almost solely through it's planetary colonists.

The Corldaxians of Enlightenment period had one goal- to send as many people as possible to nearby habitable planets. Ostensibly, the purpose of this was to set up an extensive empire with infinite resources so that Enlightenment period civilization could exist, as it was, forever. The real motivation behind this was the fear of what they assumed to be an exponentially growing population, and of the internal collapse of the state.

Enlightenment Corldaxians sent out hundreds of colonial trolleys with thousands of people aboard, all to colonize planets their ships wouldn't reach for hundreds of thousands of years. The majority of ships used cryofreeze to keep their colonists alive for the journey, with a good bit of variation on the specifics. All of them, with the exception of the earliest ships, packed the materials needed to make a wormhole generator.

Enith had set up a wormole gate on the edge of it's system towards the end of the Enlightenment period, but it had the knowledge and ability to create them halfway through shipping the colonists. The plan was to have the colonists construct their own wormholes upon reaching the edge of their planet's solar system; then land, set up their colony, and contact Enith through a micro-wormhole com set. The ships that did not have the materials for this on their leaving had another ship sent following them.

Many of the ships did not make it to their destinations. But some did.

The surviving colonists woke up, set up their wormholes, and landed on their planets. Many encountered barely habitable planets that needed thorough terraforming to support a decent population. Some encountered planets that weren't habitable at all, or were habitable but didn't have any native life, and a rare few encountered planets with life already on it. A few of those were even met by sapient life.

The colonists were lucky that, when the first of them contacted Enith, it was once again going through a period of space exploration. The First Enlightenment had collapsed not long after the last colonists left, and Enith had been in and out of dark ages ever since. The wormhole generator, luckily, saw a fair amount of upkeep every couple of millennia and was able to be repaired. Then duplicated, then updated as Enith entered it's modern period.

When Enith was contacted by it's long-lost colonist, it quickly sent more colonists and supplies. The problem was... well... it had been 500,000 years.

The colonists were met by people who barely looked like them, who rarely spoke the same language as them, and who often chastised them for dressing or acting how they always have. They were similar, but that was all that could be said. Enith had changed and the colonists had not. Their way of life was dead and gone, and they were the only memory.

First contact had to have been funny though. I mean imagine you went to an exoplanet to colonize it and when Earth sent some more guys for you and opposite Homo Heidelbergensis pops out with a grey alien behind it.

Hilarious.

A colony ship contacts Enith every couple of decades now. Bitriem's colony was the first to encounter native sapients, and they contacted Enith around one and a half thousand years ago. Zornxia and Atiske were two other early contacts, and the most recent contact was with the Umblans.

The people who were sent to colonize Umblan are still alive in the setting of The Little Bird. Diaf is probably in contact with a few of them. But while they made contact with Enith, while they have access to the full network of planets Enith has made, they're still alone. Isolated, because everything they once knew is gone.

Humans had the same strategy.

Enith is on the Sagittarius branch, though the cluster of systems the Enithian and Teth Tias governments inhabit is just about the closet you can get to Orion.

Hán was on one of the first generations of ships to be sent towards Sagittarius. Cereza's two times great grandparents were shipped out later than her.

Earth didn't send them out with wormhole tech. No one has heard from Earth since waking up.

What would you do if everything you ever knew was just gone? Unreachable, unknowable for the rest of your life. Not just what was your life, but all of Earth. Of humanity.

What would you do if you were stranded, alone, quite possibly the last humans in the universe?

[oozeandgoo-art]

[swampthingking]

the thought of cracking the spine of a book makes kevin nauseous. he like opens it just enough to see the words and holds the book at such uncomfortable angles to read— anything to keep the book pristine and intact. he does not let people borrow his books because he is a control freak (as a term of endearment) and does not trust them to take care of them the way he does.

and andrew is the complete opposite, cracking the spine as soon as he opens it. he annotates in pen. he dog ears the pages because who the fuck has time to find a bookmark. he throws books out of anger. he throws them at aaron for fun. he lets them get smashed and torn in his bag. he always keeps them, he just prefers them to look like they’ve been read.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

"Unreality" Jesse what the fuck are you talking about. I'm a real person urban is a real person robb wells the actor is a real person this is a real post. where is the unreality.

[deanpinterester]

i was going to make a post telling yall to stop calling godzilla minus one a low-budget film (because it isn't) but then i remembered disney regularly drops 12 million for ONE EPISODE of their shows without nearly the same cultural impact so. yeah godzilla is low-budget as far as i'm concerned idc

[trans-elrond]

any other sff novelists have a big ol' world that they use for stories and just transplant otherwise orphaned ideas there because, hey, i've already done the worldbuilding for that place, might as well put 13 plots there too??

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Every teenage girl has:

a) a society telling her constantly that the only thing she should be interested in is love and BOYSSSS!

b) a frustrated lust for violence

And the societal role of YA fantasy/sci-fi fiction is to act like it's just conforming to the former, while in reality appealing pretty transparently to the latter.

[aemiron-main]

why is he posed like a dead oblivion npc

[stairset]

One thing about the Degenerate video is in spite of any concerns I have over the AI shit it's actually not my least favorite music video from them. That dubious honor still goes to the Bringing It Down 2.0 video.

[queenboimler]

i dont even care about how weird 73 yards was, it made me feel

[cultivating-wildflowers]

cracking open “Are Women Human?” as a palate cleanser after reading Robert A. Heinlein

[pixellangel]

guyyss the new story brainworms are invading.... i need tto worldbuild... guys....,

[theswampghost]

romance is so wild

[jackkal]

i keep having dreams where im caught in a time loop, the dream keeps repeating and ending differently and then it replays and the whole time i never consider it's a dream but i am aware that it's a time loop

[asurrogateblog]

one underrated curse that famous people are inflicted with is that if they've had enough influence on history/pop culture, you automatically have to assume that they exist in every fictional universe set in a version of the real world. that is, there is no clear evidence that you, an average person, still exist off-screen in [insert media], but as soon as you've had a marked butterfly effect on the timeline, your life story is automatically baked into the narrative and is inescapable even in fiction