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novanhistorian · 19 days ago

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I must say, thus far I have been quite a poor correspondent. The point of this blog is to slow the rate at which I pester my friends with elaborate—and winding, when verbal��rants about various facets of the Imperium Novel, as well as to have a convenient public point of reference for them when I offhandedly mention something like the “regional parliaments” or when I forget myself and accidentally talk about the gender binary as if it were the gender trinary. (It is partially also because I want a public forum to yell to my very small audience about this thing I’ve been working on for years.)

Needless to say, I have thus far done exactly none of that.

To jumpstart things and give my readership at least something, I have made this massive post.

You can also get this split into separate posts for a better, but less linkable, reading experience:

The Fundamentals

A Sketch of History (masterpost with sublinks)

The Fundamentals

1.3k words.

I am here to talk about the Imperium Novel, which I must immediately clarify is not a novel. What it actually is is a rather massive and intricate worldbuilding project. Now, I could tell you that its name is a relic of the earliest days of its development, when it was really to be one novel with an increasingly cartoonish amount of backstory, and that would be true enough; but the heart of the matter is that I am a painfully pretentious artiste in this specific way. I could have changed the name; I didn’t.

(As for why it is no longer a single novel: As I write this, the [pseudo]historical period I concern myself with covers almost fifteen centuries, most of them quite complicated. Any attempt to cover the whole in one novel would wind up a gargantuan, winding, likely quite boring mess possessing more pages than a medical textbook and less plot than a wet blanket.)

Anyhow, hard segue.

The other basics you need to know are the following:

We are not in our solar system. References to the sun are to the star Scientia (to us, Era Cassiopeiae A), and references to Forsuno or the Far Sun refer to, well, Forsuno (Eta Cassiopeiae B).

The main planet, Terranovo,* has twenty-six-hour days and slightly stronger gravity than Earth. Its days are the standard in most other regions; we are ignoring Ilajn for now because I haven’t formally named their planet. (It has 21.5-ish-hour days and markedly weaker gravity. Let’s hear it for large, fast-rotating terrestrial planets.)

All the planets we care about after 2300 orbit Scientia, and—at the risk of misrepresenting the gravitational dance—the orange dwarf Forsuno basically does too. Scientia’s stellar classification is G0 V, which is to say that it is more or less like our sun, though slightly brighter. Forsuno’s is K7 V, which makes it either an orange or a red dwarf, depending on which classification system one follows. Basically, it’s small, it’s dim (only 6% of the Sun’s luminosity, still far brighter than a full moon), and it will live a very long time after Scientia is dead. Although their orbit is very eccentric (that is to say very elliptical rather than circular), the closest approach between the stars is 36 AU, or just this side of the Kuiper Belt; this allows for stable, although compact, planetary systems around both stars safe from the worst of the gravitational interference of the other star.

Novanity (non-collective singular novan and plural novans) is the sapient species the Novel follows for most of its history. They are, as many of them will bitterly tell you, the products of genetic engineering and a whole lot of moral stupidity on the parts of various humans—but we shall get to that in the history.

* At other points in its history, Terranovo was also known as Terra Nova, Terranova, Tero Nova, and Nova Tero. By the current working date, 745, variation is only historical.

The gender trinary is probably the most relevant thing in here besides the location, but thanks to narrative flow I have to put it down here. The three novan genders occupy roughly the same position as the human two, which is to say that the majority of the population falls into one or another, but there are a large number of outliers besides.

Two of the dominant genders are descendants of our concepts of male and female, and they remain mostly similar and are called by their names. The third is called sendua (an adjective), and people who have it are called senduoj. Its name derives from a shortening of senduuma, a rather nonstandard way of saying “nonbinary;”* it somewhat evolved from the use of the word as an overcategory for a variety of genders,

* It literally means “without a binary;” the human standard, neduuma, is a calque from English.

If you encounter something like Ĉlr or Nŝx/n, that’s reference shorthand, a standardized system used in the Imperium (with War-Era predecessors); it tells you a person’s gender and pronouns, and sometimes their preferred grammatical gender and physical sex.

The capital letters stand for gender and are derived from the gendering suffixes in the Imperium’s dominant language: Ĉ stands for male, N for female, S for sendua, and X (from crossing out the category on a form) for anything else. The lowercase letters, of which there are often more than one, stands for pronouns: l for li, the equivalent of “he;” ŝ for ŝi, “she;” r for ri, “re;” and x for anything else (which is quite rare, but in practice means “ask”).

The lowercase letter after the slash, if it exists, describes grammatical gender—and boy do I wish English had a shorter way to say that. The Imperium’s dominant language is largely non-gendered, and for words which could be gendered—titles, professions, and so on—the default is to use the genderless base word rather than add on one of the gendered suffixes. But some titles are routinely declined by gender, and several minor languages gender their adjectives at a minimum and their verbs at a maximum. As a result, some portion of the population has a preference about which gender is used, and that’s usually denoted like this. (The letters themselves follow the same rule as the actual gender indicator, and good lord have I said “gender” a lot of times in this paragraph.)

Occasionally, an italicized x or y or a centered asterisk, placed after the pronouns, indicates physical sex. The x and y, mean roughly what one would expect—XX or XY chromosomes respectively, without any sort of intersex condition. The asterisk, which in some state governments has subcategories, indicates that the person is intersex. Sex is mostly irrelevant in social life, so its denotation is circumscribed to medical and governmental records.

As you may have guessed by now, the dominant language is Esperanto—or, well, a version of Esperanto that’s evolved like a (fairly regulated) natural language for a millennium and a half. Some people speak one or more of the so-called “minor languages,” usually regional dialects descended from natlangs.

There are two different calendars in use over the course of the Novel, one that continues roughly directly from the Gregorian calendar and is dated relative to the traditional year of birth of Jesus Christ and another dated relative to the Year of Fortifying the Peace (the official end of the War Era, covered in the last two sections of the Sketch of History).

The first or human calendar can be identified because it will almost always have a four-digit year, and in cases where it doesn’t it gets labeled (B.)C.E. The second or novan calendar can usually be identified by having a three-digit year, or else because it uses a minus sign to indicate its negatives. It may also be distinguished by the ᴊ (from jaro, “year”) that precedes single- and double-digit years, as well as any three-digit years that require disambiguation. The novan calendar has a year zero; this is, as can probably be predicted, the Year of Fortifying the Peace.

Technically there are four major dating systems (standard, human, Terranovan orbital, and Ilajnaplaneta orbital). The orbital calendars exist because neither of the inhabited planets have years particularly close to 365 days, so their seasons are wildly out of sync with the administrative calendars. I should probably also note that neither planet has 24-hour days, and that the administrative calendars are standardized on the 26-hour Terranovan day.

I think that’s about it. I’ll write up instructions on how to pronounce all the random Esperanto words soon; for now, the vowels are like Spanish and the J makes a Y sound.

A Sketch of History

Human Future History, 21st to 23rd Centuries

I will cop to it up front that this period is the least interesting to me and has had the least work put into it; I hope to settle most questions about it here and keep the blog to a mostly novan focus. You are welcome to inquire further, but since humanity’s time on Earth is mostly just background to the background it will likely not receive much coverage organically beyond this. If you, like me, are mostly here for in the genetically-engineered cat people and their post-human politicking, you can probably jump ahead to the next section. 2.1k words.

For all my fine talk, we start with humanity as the sole species, and we start with them on Earth. Everything that led up to our time happened. After 2024, humanity narrowly survived climate change with their civilization battered, but in one piece. The sciences progressed; the most relevant for our current purposes are astronomy and space travel, and the most important later on are the advancements in batteries and synthetic biology.

Public interest in space grew, at least partially fostered by escapist thinking, and the World Space Agency (a terrible name, but so is “the World Health Organization” and they get on alright) was formed. At the outset it was more a collaboration of national agencies than an agency unto itself, but over the years it slowly gained authority and independence and evolved from a coordinator into a major player in its own right. It had quite extensive scholarship programs, which probably contributed.

The Moon was not so much settled as populated by sparse construction and mining towns with few steady inhabitants. I will spare you most of the details, but in short the main business of the Moon was construction for spaceflight and asteroid-mining. Its lower gravity (a) made construction rather easier and more importantly (b) made it much easier to reach escape velocity—that is, to launch something off it and into space. Almost no one stayed for more than five years.

Several things built on the Moon were space telescopes, eventual heirs to the long-defunct Webb, with one being roughly comparable to the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory. During the climate crises (plural intended) a dedicated minority of the public attention had turned toward exoplanets. Whether or not humanity could reach them now, they said, we should try to develop the option.

Most of the advocates, being laymen, did not understand how mind-bogglingly far such exoplanets were, nor how mind-bogglingly difficult it would be to get there. Most reasonable astrophysicists, and those in related fields, cautiously encouraged the public fascination because it had caused a funding boom, but rightly downplayed the possibility of finding and settling anything.

Then Eta Cassiopeiae Ae fell into humanity’s collective lap. A terrestrial planet, slightly smaller than Earth; in the habitable zone of a very sunlike star; in possession of an atmosphere, but not too much of one; wet, but not too wet; showing evidence of volcanic activity that likely indicated tectonic action—all this, and only (“only”) 19.42 light-years away! Careful observation even indicated it had a moon comparable in size to Earth’s!

Humanity took the hint. In the middle twenty-second century, relatively shortly after its discovery, η Cas Ae (at the time known as η Cas Ad, as it was discovered after the two outer super-Earths) was confirmed to have the right amount of water to potentially support life. No life yet existed, at least that humanity could detect; but that didn’t mean they couldn’t go over and put some there.

A certain august international body, in company with the World Space Organization, put out a call for anyone of skill interested in the prospect of settling η Cas Ae. The public response was immediate and enthusiastic, and demands were made to give this new Earth an official name rather than its sterile initial designation. In their exuberance, they unwittingly named it after Newfoundland; this was only noticed several months after the fact.

Thus was the Convention for the Terraforming and Settlement of Terra Nova called. The Convention gave way to the Committee for the Terraforming [and so on]; no one wanted to say all that, so most languages shortened it to “the Terra Nova Committee.” In English it was often called the rather snappy “New Eden Project.”

The official language of the project was declared to be Esperanto. This left most of the world very confused and astonished the handful of people who knew what had been going on behind the scenes—they had never expected it to actually work.

(Esperanto, as I hope you know, is an international auxiliary language created by L. L. Zamenhof and first published in 1887. It is designed to be simple and easy to learn, but still capable of a full range of expression. It is the most popular I.A.L., though that does not mean it has ever been exactly societally prevalent. Most everyone I mention it to has never heard of it, or else has only run into its name in passing. I have never, to my knowledge, met an Esperantist—unfortunately including myself, as I am grammatically sound but not yet fluent.)

Most of the work of the Committee was one of five things:

How do we get there?

How do we build that?

What do we do once we get there?

What do we need to accomplish the above?

Whom do we send?

They solved the first question by commissioning various independent teams of experts for potential starship designs, choosing the best three or so, and bringing their creators onto the subcommittee responsible for the actual final design. That committee was given ten years to come up with a first design and was intended to run for thirty overall, then handing things off to another committee that would be responsible for bringing that plan to fruition. It wound up taking forty, but that more or less happened.

The second question was solved incidentally by the first committee from question one, and their answer was “in space.” Given humanity’s off-planet expansion, it seemed the natural choice. By the time of the conclusion of the design phase they were also mining the asteroid belt, very carefully and mostly via robots, which provided the Terra Nova Committee another much easier fount of resources for their project.

The solution to the third question was rather more complicated than it might initially appear. Clearly they had to terraform the new world—that atmosphere, in its current state, was poisonous—and that would require a timescale measured in centuries at the minimum; but whence were they to do it? Where do you send potentially tens of thousands of your children and their children’s children to live and work in pursuit of a goal they themselves will never see?

The best choice was obviously the moon around the planet—it was well-positioned for a base and it should have enough gravity to beat off the worst of the developmental effects. Life on the moon had been proven possible long before, although few who took up residence there stayed very long; so had life in the asteroid belt, whose recently-sighted Terra-Nova-system counterpart they planned to mine. There would have to be improvements—these hypothetical “canned generations” would have to spend their whole lives on the moon, so their situation was not really comparable to that of the human-contemporary lunars.

It fed into the fourth and fifth questions, which were uncomfortably close to one and the same. Once the starship arrived at Terra Nova, its occupants would be alone. Earth would be unable to send help in anything resembling a timely manner, and supply runs were an outright impossibility. The lunar settlement, and later the planetary ones, needed to be self-sufficient and capable of performing the terraforming work laid out before them. But they also had to be able to build the ship in the first place, within reasonable materials constraints. Mass is a major consideration in air- and spacecraft design for many reasons (the most relevant here being its effect on the amount of energy needed to alter a craft’s course, be that for maneuvering reasons or simply to get the blasted thing moving in the first place), so cargo had to be minimized too. As a result, they tried to maximize the amount they could derive from materials in the new system or renewably produce aboard ship—food, water, clothing, plus metals and more water after Advent.

I’ll omit the math and any more of my rambling here, as I have already gone on far too long about the fourth question. Just understand that the fifth question was decided under the same material constraints as the fourth. They decided to send a few hundred carefully-chosen scientists, other “people of expertise,” schoolteachers, and their immediate families, all given training on how to handle the isolation they would face and on how to deal with the vastly different cultures their new roommates would come from. The number of people—around eight or nine hundred—was high enough and their sources global enough that they ran very little risk of problems with genetic diversity or in maintaining their population. Only three of the twelve highest-ranked officials in the Committee (which by this point was more of a Division) opted to go.

Probably in the early twenty-third century, the project was finally ready. The great starship was built, the people were chosen, every single possibly necessary thing had been loaded aboard in triplicate. (That last is an exaggeration—the things allowed on board were very strictly controlled and pared down, and while they were given a margin of error, it was far from triple the expected need.)

They set out—and novan knowledge goes entirely dark.

I write from a post-Departure novan perspective, and although I have my guiding theories and research on how humanity got to Terra Nova and what they did on their way, at the end of the day I like to keep it a black box. With that said, feel free to speculate wildly in my inbox. God knows the novan scientific community has been doing the same for centuries.

We will get to why this disappointing blank exists, and why the dates on the Committee period are so fuzzy, when we arrive at the Departure and then the Devastation. We think the voyage lasted two to three generations, if that helps in your guessing.

We pick up their trail again somewhere between five years (short chronology) and two decades (long chronology) before their arrival at the new solar system, and we do this mostly by reconstruction. The early Lunar period, beginning about two years post-Advent (that being the general term for arrival at the Scientia system), was not targeted for destruction, and thus its records have a much better survival rate. By this point the miracle starship had apparently been disassembled and re-formed into Prime Dome. As Prime Dome is known to have been nearing completion two years after Advent, that allows us to use its culture and current events to reconstruct those of the late Shipboard period.

Shipboard politics were generally quite a restrained affair. Government was handled mostly by an elected committee of respected scientists, professors (these from the shipboard university), and career public servants. It was called simply the Leadership Council and held wide-ranging authority. Social norms, like politics, were fairly rigid, and there was a strong emphasis on the social contract. Cohesion was to be prized and praised, and the good of the collective came first in all cases. The ship required its human components to be in as perfect of working order as its mechanical ones, and any societal crisis would potentially damn everyone aboard to death in the void. In this unstable environment, the Terra Nova Committee had determined, a strong hand was needed at the tiller and social cohesion had to be prized above other goals. (Every member of the project who had embarked from Earth had agreed to their peculiar form of government, which was to be replaced with a less-overbearing republic once they were safely settled on the Moon and could afford such things.)

Scientists from, or whose recent ancestors had been from, certain countries often had minor rivalries or feuds with scientists from certain other countries; but this was kept to a background tension, heated competition over sports and that sort of thing. The ship had a population of perhaps eight hundred at the outset and it seems a similar number arrived at Terra Nova, so there may have been some amount of regulation on reproduction.

Independent organizations of more than a handful of people required official permission, and until they got it were given very little leeway. Political parties were unofficially banned as engines of disunion; one was to vote based on an assessment of the relative merit of the candidates. Most political discussion took place in private discussion clubs, which usually met in a member’s apartment or a restaurant. These clubs, which I will for ease’s sake be calling by their later name, “salons,” generally numbered ten to forty people, the average being twenty-six. Since the population was so small, at their peak there were only nine such salons worthy of the name; by the arrival at Terra Nova four had dwindled out and only two newcomers had risen to take their place, yielding the Seven Salons so notable in later history.

The Pre-Novan Lunar Period, 2300 to 2450

This part of history is predominantly based on the actions of a few key people. I swear to God this is very condensed compared to the amount of canon that actually exists. The next section should be more trends-based, as we and history are no longer working with a population of less than a thousand people wherein everyone knows everyone and individual actions have outsize impact. Please be aware that this section of the summary contains descriptions of what I can only describe as a mishandled crush leading to nonconsensual use of genetic material. I really don’t know if that needs a warning, but what Sikora does is creepy as hell. 4.5k words. Part of “A Sketch of History;” preceded by Human Future History; followed by the Remainder of the Lunar Period.

The Advent, in this instance, has nothing to do with Christ—it refers instead to humanity’s arrival at the new solar system. The shipboard government decided it was such a momentous occasion that they should jump the calendar forward to the suitably impressive year 2300, so they did. (This is important later.) The aim of those aboard then shifted from the holding pattern of life in transit to frantic preparation for their final landing on Terra Nova’s moon.

The early Lunar period is largely dominated by two figures: Alexei Ilyasov and Darya Staravya. I’ll discuss them as briefly as I possibly can here, given that I’ve already had to cut two drafts that spent eight paragraphs on them and them alone. Expect a cleaned-up version of one of those to be posted at some point as an extra.

Alexei Kirilloviĉ Ilyasov was, at Advent, forty-one and supposedly a climatologist. In practice he was a politician of the rather subdued shipboard breed; he ran with no party and gave his rousing speeches on paper. His major focus was preparing for Advent, an event which, while yet unnamed, had loomed large on the horizon for most of his life. He had been an Illustrian—that is, part of a large salon known for meeting in the poshest restaurant on the ship—for about ten years. Like most of his fellow members, he was a reformist and an amateur linguist absolutely convinced he and he alone knew how to perfect Esperanto; also like most of his fellow members, it never came up unless he was asked about it point-blank.

It surprised even him when he was elected Council Chair* shortly before Advent; he was serving a Council term at the time, but had made no bids for the Chair and had planned to guide the Council toward a successful Advent from within rather than above. Regardless, he acquitted himself wonderfully in the office, and his administration—twenty-two years long, with a two-year gap after his eighteenth, when he was voted out of the Chair—did likewise. It was under his authority that the starship was broken down and re-formed into Prime Dome, the first and largest of the lunar dome-habitats; he inaugurated the First University. When he finally retired, construction and terraforming were both proceeding ahead of schedule and the first mining expeditions into the asteroid belt since the construction of Prime Dome were underway.

* His election was the result of a compromise on the Leadership Council between deadlocked Illustrians and Blue-Roomers, who both saw him as inoffensive and unlikely to make any terrible decisions.

Toward the end of Ilyasov’s career, Darya Staravya, the other major figure of this period, comes to prominence. She was born three days after Advent, the first baby of the new solar system, and she would have been notable for that alone. Her parentage—Brits Clarence and Marina Staravia, who had, in accordance with a contemporary fad, made up a “new name for the new world” upon their marriage—is necessary to mention to explain her surname, but they’re most notable as her later collaborators. I should also mention that she was Ilyasov’s goddaughter; he was about a decade older than her parents, but they aligned politically and intellectually and had met in their mutual salon.

Staravya was a prolific inventor and engineer, and in her forties she was the primary mind and force behind the Starry engine (officially the “New Standard Engine, Mk. IV”), which would be the basis for most all interplanetary flight for centuries to come. That was arguably her most distinctive invention, but her most pervasive came about by accident when she was in college. She, like all Scientian children, was in some form of school from age four until eighteen; during the latter half of that time she and a friend* progressively refined a private phonetic script or cipher, which they mostly used for the extremely teenage purpose of snarking at their teachers without them knowing. While students in the First University, they taught their other friends the cipher, and, generations being small when the total population is 1,021 people, it quickly spread through all of theirs.

* Yoshikawa Namiko, about a year older than Staravya, later a biochemist and historian. (Her parents, by contrast to the Staravias, and the Myleras a generation later, were not caught up in the new-name-for-a-new-world craze, seeing as they were Red Hats and didn’t bother with that sort of thing the way the Illustrians and Spider’s Nest did.)

Now I have to step back and give a bit of context. The problem of naming had been under debate since shortly after Advent, when Ilyasov had tried unsuccessfully to force everyone to fully Esperantize their names. (“Aleksejo Ilyasofo,” who did not by any means like writing that version of his name in every blasted language, was almost glad when the motion was shot down by seven elevenths of the rest of the Council.) Debate, among the perhaps sixty percent of the population who cared one way or the other, was split between those who favored the invention of some new writing system and those who instead favored regularization of sounds in names to match the phonology and writing system of some language. The former were called Sonskribists and the latter Regularists (though I anglicize their names here).

Staravya was in the forty percent. She thought it all kind of silly, having heard every possible argument at her dinner table growing up. She had been an unofficial test subject for too many of the new scripts (her parents being ardent Sonskribists, to Ilyasov’s alternating consternation and amusement) to actually take them seriously as a solution; she dismissed the Regularist position out of hand. While she did use her phonetic system to note down names’ pronunciations, it had always functioned as more of a code for her. She and her friend, Yoshikawa Namiko, actually had a minor falling-out over whether or not to encourage the growth of the script, which Yoshikawa believed they should and Staravya dismissed as irrelevant.

Yoshikawa won.

Now we come to a more trend-based as opposed to person-based period, which I can—finally—cover pretty quickly. Staravya went on to be a prolific inventor, as described in the second paragraph of her description, but she never crossed over into a major public figure the way so many others did. The Yoshikawa-Staravya phonetic script became the standard way to note down pronunciations, though it would take a century and a half more until it started replacing Latin and Cyrillic outright for the writing of names. (It never entered some scripts at all, including Arabic, which even well into the novan period adapted all names to its own orthography.)

The Leadership Council does not so much give way to as become the Academy, a name initially belonging to the board of directors of the First University set up by the moon-dwellers. Akademio, translated here as “Academy,” is also the term used for Esperanto’s regulatory body in our world and theirs. The University’s Academy had absorbed the Akademio de Esperanto, to the great consternation of the salon called the Spider’s Nest, back in the early days of the project. The Leadership Council in turn absorbed this unified Academy, at first thanks to near-complete overlap in membership and later by official decree; having so done, it declared itself the Terra-Novan Legislative Academy. (Later historians know it as the First Terra-Novan Legislative Academy.)

Staravya died in 2358, just under two decades after Ilyasov; Yoshikawa lived into the early 2370s, meaning her lifespan just barely overlaps with the next people we need to talk about. They, as they are ultimately more historically important, will take proportionally longer.

Florentine Sikora was born in 2370, or shortly after the official merger of the Leadership Council and the Academy. She grew up in an era of immense (compared to the mostly-static shipboard culture) change, but we’re not going to talk about any of that. We’re going to talk about this thing called the Catgirl Principle, and then we’re going have some bad lesbian representation. (Quite likely it also qualifies as bad allosexual representation, seeing as your author is ace.)

The Catgirl Principle is an oft-cited novan aphorism, most common in the first few centuries of the Imperium and believed to have reached its permanent form sometime in the middle War Era. The sentiment it describes is far older, and we will get to it in due time. The Principle is this: “A statistically significant proportion of the human population would want to fuck a catgirl were the opportunity to present itself. A statistically significant proportion of them would be willing to take active work toward that goal.”

Sikora was in that second proportion, and unlike the vast majority of them she refused to handle it by any reasonable means. I will spare you the details of what I mean here, but in short, Sikora never considered just getting a girlfriend and discussing arrangements for role-play involving a cat-ear headband and a tail.

Sikora wanted a catgirl, and—given the advancements in synthetic biology since our time, which I almost completely glossed over back in “Human Future History”—she figured she could just go ahead and make one. This was an absurd proposition—doable, maybe, for a team of two dozen with good funding, a few decades, unfettered access to the supercomputers in the heart of the First University, and fairly loose ethics. Sikora was a schoolgirl with a dream. But she wouldn’t remain that way forever, and soon enough she was off to the First University, designated a student without work* and planning to major in genetic engineering.

* Most university students had, in addition to their classes, to perform some menial office for perhaps ten hours a week, or two hours per day of the core week. The “student without work” designation was given to those who showed remarkable aptitude in some useful field, as a way of softly forcing them in the direction they would most benefit society or the sciences. With Sikora it paid massive dividends in the most awkward way possible.

Because Sikora lived on the far side of Red Dome (the second erected and first constructed, by the classical reckoning), she was offered the chance to move into an apartment inside the University itself. She took it and was assigned Mieke Nagtegaal as a roommate. Nagtegaal was also a student without work for her promise as a genetic engineer, but—in contrast to Sikora’s animal focus—particularly interested in plants. She was outgoing, very attractive, and the kind of person to listen intently to what someone was telling her no matter how long the explanation lasted, and Sikora fell hard for her. Nagtegaal, for her part, saw Sikora as a surprisingly charming person beneath the quiet exterior, and they became fast, close friends.

As you can imagine, this went badly.

In university as in tertiary school, Sikora was driven; intelligent; especially talented at genetics; and very, very good at ingratiating herself with teachers. In her first year, one of her professors brought her onboard a project that had as one of its goals the development of a large research database of fully sequenced human genomes. Sikora saw this as an excellent opportunity to—instead of, say, confessing her feelings and maybe trying to start a relationship—convince Nagtegaal to contribute her DNA to a public University database, from which Sikora could later retrieve it and use it as the base for the catgirl. The samples were supposedly anonymized, but Sikora figured she would, like Caesar, build that bridge when she came to it.

Their second year brought Nagtegaal a girlfriend, later her wife, and Sikora greater technological access that did not quite make up for the loss. This greater access came in the form of a laptop, powerful even by that time’s impressive standards, running the University’s full suite of cutting-edge-five-years-ago gen-eng software. The project she joined to get access to it is unimportant; it did, however, give her a foot in the door that would prove vital later.

Then she used a professor’s administrative access to locate which anonymized human genome belonged to “Nagtegaal, Mieke,” waited a few days for appearances’ sake, and downloaded roughly seven gigabytes of her roommate’s DNA to her new computer. Creep.

That brings us to what would later be marked as the beginning of (drumroll please) the Novan Development period. Some reckonings have it starting earlier, with Sikora’s initial decision to make a catgirl in her early adolescence or else with her entry into the University; but while she clearly worked on the catgirl project on and off, mostly by research, before acquiring the suite, the actual development begins only now.

It ran ten more years. Sikora was in the University the entire time, pursuing first a master’s and then a doctorate after her baccalaureate failed to give her enough time and access, and often sidelining that doctorate to hop aboard professors’ projects and even headline one of her own. In that time Nagtegaal, who got an excellent offer right after she finished her master’s, moved out and started work, leaving Sikora alone in their apartment.

Sikora’s magnum opus progressed in secret, extensively annotated and tested almost every night (as running it still took four to six hours). Back in her second year, she had quickly and euphemistically named the project file containing Nagtegaal’s DNA “nówka,” roughly “new thing.” The name wormed its way into her head over the years, and in time she came to think of the catgirl as the nówka instead. (It doesn’t hurt that “nówka” happens to decline in the feminine.)

As for the development of the nówka, her ears expanded and shifted down her head to match the too-complicated-to-move human ear canal while keeping a tall-eared silhouette; her tail came along nicely; working claws into her human fingers required completely redesigning her distal phalanges; Sikora quickly abandoned all pretensions at whiskers. (I bold “ears, tail, claws” here because they will come back with a vengeance when we get to the identity crisis of the second century, and that’s not to mention the Novan Nationalists.)*

* Nor “hearing, balance, defense.”

Eight years in, Sikora had done all she could with the simulation capabilities of any of her succession of laptops. The version of the software she had, the one that didn’t have to run on a supercomputer cooled by a lake, could do full simulations of the effects of short genetic sequences (i.e., the resultant biomolecules) and rough simulations of much longer material, but the human genome was more than twice the length of its ostensible input cap. Given a few hours it eventually managed, but her laptops suffered for it and the results it produced were necessarily inexact. Having now gotten the best draft possible with her current resources, she set her sights on better ones.

In flight the supercomputers had been used to manage the ship; now the Academy and the Terraforming Bureau had right to them, and a subset were used for genetic simulations of great accuracy and almost unlimited size. You can see where this is going.

She had by this time been brought onto a project (ultimately ill-fated, but later to inspire the sand-wolves) with an Academian at its head, and although she was in one of the lower rungs she had caught the said Academian’s attention. She had over the years maintained public side projects, partially out of interest and partially to impress her professors, and now it paid off. The Academian—and a few of her colleagues, Sikora’s professors—tacitly suggested that it would not be such a bad thing were Sikora to run the occasional after-hours experiment using one of the supercomputers, if nothing too urgent was going on.

Sikora, given an inch, made like the Devil and the British and took a mile.

She spent the next few years patching the gaping flaws in the nówka’s design that this more precise testing revealed. Finally, in 2407, she had something good. It ran perfectly in the supercomputer; it had all the features she wanted. It would work, she was sure, if she grew it in the real world; so she finangled her way into a frankly absurd set of permissions, never quite letting anyone know just what she was using them for, and actually managed to slip it by the review board.

The first nówka experiment was an utter failure. The nówka fetus, difficult to create and so promising, died before three months were out. Sikora couldn’t understand why, and she couldn’t get together the materials and permissions to do it again. She gave up utterly on the project, wallowed in self-pity, and tried to re-focus on her much more boring normal life.

Here Nagtegaal re-enters our story. She had never left Sikora’s, even though they drifted apart over the years as Sikora failed to call or write. She knew, vaguely, about her former roommate’s attempts to “create a new species,” had gathered that this new species was supposed to be sapient, and had overall thought it was neat. Too ambitious and not in her—Nagtegaal’s—area of primary interest, but neat. She asked about it one day, having asked Sikora out to coffee and Sikora having taken her up on it delightedly. Sikora almost started crying and said she had given up on the project, refusing to give Nagtegaal any more information.

Nagtegaal spent three weeks trying to figure out what happened and to convince her clearly distraught friend to resume work, or at least talk to someone. Then, after the last of a string of near breakdowns on Sikora’s part, Nagtegaal’s concern reached a boiling point. She broke into Sikora’s apartment and tried to find her notes on this “nufka” project, to see who—Nagtegaal was sure it was a who—had so badly damaged her self-confidence.

What she found instead was complete, fastidious, impossible documentation of the genetic code for a new sapient species. At the top of the folder a pinned text file held data about a practical test, ending with a paragraph about the final failure of the experiment.

Nagtegaal was floored.

So was the Academy, when she showed them Sikora’s research (which she had quickly copied onto a flash drive).

With the Presentation to the Academy we come to the Public Phase of Novan Development. The Academy, with Nagtegaal’s advice, privately contacted Sikora, who—despite being a normally dignified doctor in her thirties—sent back a moody email saying simply that the nówka wouldn’t work and there was no point in trying. She refused all involvement, but wanted credit for the initial development of this impossible dream. Maybe there would be a novel about it someday.

She also requested they rename the project from “nówka” to the less Polish and more Esperanto “novo,” which preserved the pun in almost exactly the same form. (Nówka is the adjective meaning “new” plus an ending that turns it into a noun, and so is novo.) It did create some confusion regarding the adjective nova, which now could mean either “new” or “having to do with the project called novo,” which never really got solved. The way the novans later deal with it is to use novara (“having to do with the novan species”) as the adjective form of novo, which works well enough but breaks the stated purpose of Esperanto.

Without going into excessive detail, the Academy liked “novo” mostly because it was so similar in structure to to homo, “human” or (at that time) “person.” Copying that pattern let them quickly produce versions for other languages, including novan (English), and the species name novaro (off the pattern of homaro, “humanity”); it would later produce the Latin novō, which is a homograph of an existing verb and must often be distinguished by context.

The Academy then published Sikora’s research and announced it widely, but declined to form an official committee to continue it. The nówka was in no way relevant to their main focus, that being terraforming efforts,* but anyone to take up the project would be given liberal resources. Essentially, they left it to open-sourced community development. It fostered a surprising camaraderie among the different teams who formed to take up the challenge, and it actually soothed political tensions between diametrically-opposed salons.

Well, it did portions of all these things. Novans have a tendency to assume their creation must have been a society-wide effort, but really perhaps a hundred people ever had more than a surface-level involvement over the decade and a half of novan development. A twelfth of society, yes, but only a twelfth. (Nagtegaal was not one of them, even after someone realized it was her sample used as the basis for novanity. She was, as she put it, just and only a botanic engineer.)

* There were persistent rumors that the Academy fostered the development of early novanity in search of a servant species, and in later days it was commonly believed as fact. It is in reality bullshit. Not unreasonable, given the Academy’s persistent monopoly on and heavy-handed use of power, but bullshit. I have to mention the rumors here because of the influence it has on the Darwins and the various novan identity crises, but the Academy was genuinely focused only on the flagship scientific achievement that novanity represented.

Fifteen years after the Presentation to the Academy, Novan Test 42 was successful. On the seventh of November 2419, a successful novan infant was born to delighted and somewhat terrified foster/surrogate parents the Augereaus. When it looked like she would survive, she was given the name Evo Darwin—Evo being one of two Esperanto forms of Eve and Darwin, of course, being for Charles. (Esperanto lacks /w/ and has very regular emphasis, so her surname lost its original pronunciation. The end result was a name said /ˈe.vo darˈvin/, something like AY-vo dar-VEEN in English phonetic spelling, with “ay” standing for the sound of the name of the letter A. This concludes the awkwardly-shoehorned-in phonology section of this essay.)

Evo proved bright and excelled in school despite her very obvious differences; she had her entire growth charted and wanted to be a genetic engineer when she grew up, just like her mother. When she was twelve, the first male novan (who had been in development for a while) was born; he was given the name Adamo Chikaonda, partially at Evo’s suggestion.* Another female novan followed shortly thereafter, off Evo’s pattern, as that was proven to be stable. Her name was Espero Darwin, thus making the Darwin lineage or gento the first of many to have duplicate line-headers. They were each raised by different families, which may account for Evo’s and Espero’s startling later differences.

* “Chikaonda” is in reference to the late lead developer of the software Sikora had written the initial nówka genome in, who had in his later years had some involvement with the novan project.

Evo fell in love with and married a human after they met in university; they communicated well and were mostly happy together, even when the human started getting strange medical issues they seemed to have inherited from their father. They did not try to reproduce, but adopted a handful of children: a later Darwin, her spouse’s nephew, and a novan patterned off the said spouse’s genome. Adamo and Espero, on the other hand, saw nothing to do but get together and propagate the species, in exactly those terms. They did not love each other romantically, nor share particularly many interests, but they understood each other better than anyone else would. Their seven children, plus an eighth that they wheedled Evo into carrying after Espero suffered an injury and became infertile, split their surnames between them (the first child being a Chikaonda, the second a Darwin, and so on); this would be common early-generation novan practice for the rest of the novan creation period.

Having gotten the rest of their lives out of the way, we need to jump back to when Evo was fifteen, because it was in that year that Sikora asked Nagtegaal out to coffee to celebrate the three-days-past birth of Espero. This was a tradition of theirs, having been started after they had met and held Evo for the first time fifteen years before; but, fatefully, this time Sikora brought moonshine.

Sikora, once tipsy, confessed that—or more accurately joked about how—she had known full well whose genome she was using and that it had its roots in a longstanding crush on Nagtegaal. Then, well, the whole sorry story of novan development came tumbling out of her mouth; it became increasingly clear the nówka was ultimately the result of a sexual fantasy; and Nagtegaal, horrified, exploded. The resulting scene—Nagtegaal standing up and striking the coffee table, irate, while Sikora leans back in her chair and laughs—would later become a frequent subject of paintings and tableaux, especially during the first and second centuries. What would not become such a favorite of the artists was how hard Nagtegaal wept that night, or how she filled a notebook and a half in the next two weeks with everything she knew about Sikora. They sometimes depict her internal torment over what to do with this new horrible knowledge in light of its potential effect on fifteen-year-old Evo Darwin, but they tend to make it a lot prettier than it was.

Three months later, Sikora died of a stroke. Nagtegaal drafted a letter that night.

Mieke Nagtegaal’s memoirs of Dr. Sikora, created with the full approval of then-seventeen-year-old Evo and her parents, were published two years later. The scandal rocked the Moon and destroyed Sikora’s reputation—but not that of the novan project. That, by now, was far more associated with the community of developers and harried university students that had brought it to fruition. The third novan genome sitting in their mutual drafts was originally intended to bear Sikora’s name, and work ground to an internally-snarled halt. After a worrying two-month stall, a public appeal from Evo and Nagtegaal brought it back into motion under the name Moreau.

And that’s the condensed version.

There are three more major sections of history to get to, and hopefully I’ll get them out soon. I’ll both update this and put them up separately, so you don’t have to watch this post for edits.

#📌 major posts #📘 history #FINALLY #it's been three months since I started this. life got very chaotic very fast.#the plan was to post it all -- finished -- in one go but honestly I've just kind of said screw it to the timing lol #---------#and now the discovery tags:#worldbuilding #sci-fi worldbuilding #conworld #writing #(I did much better discovery-tagging on the Fundamentals post so I’m going to call that good for now)

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