Hi. I'm new to Orion's Arm

[Joseph Siriani]

Welcome!

Thank you, Everything4404.

It's good to meet you!

[Joseph Siriani]

Hello! Still Random Ambles.

I've written a rough, incomplete draft of a novella I'm writing called Truth in Medicine set in OA and was wondering how I might go about posting a short summary and link to a commentable google document.

Three or four fairly decent young xeno spheres are introduced which I think would make for compelling inclusions to OA in one form or another. I'm curious to know what you folks think.

Here's what I would like to post in its own thread:

Hello, fellow sapients of Orion's Arm,

Hopefully you're all having a pleasant [undifferentiated block of time on the sleepless internet's perpetual eve].

I would like to share, for the first time, a long story set in Orion's Arm which I've been working on for the past few months.

Truth in Medicine is a novella partially from the perspective of an unusual, partially-transapient hider vec studying a complex, self-hiding memetic blight on the edge of terragen space, as part of an exploratory wave towards the Triple Point, the common point of border between the terragen sphere and 3 relatively young xeno civilizations, who've arranged a kind of meeting. The story follows this unnamed vec through their personal past and in their collaborations with strange entities and peers, as they try to discover enough about the blight to develop a comprehensive vaccine, often going to extreme measures for what they perceive as the greater good, even as they attempt to remain in hiding. Tagging along with the wave is one of the higher transapients within it, Pache, The Universal Friend of the NoCo Zone, who's recently taken an interest in determining where some of their friends are disappearing off to, and why.


The novella explores themes of cooperation, parasitism, utilitarianism, deception, trust, and identity.

I've imagined 3 new xeno races: The Retes, The Shelled Ones, and The Sterile. A plucky, drolly sardonic, relentlessly curious civilization of octopoid water-world weavers who love to imitate, quite possibly too much for their own good; an industrious, transapient civilization of xeno-vec molluskoids whose bodies are industry, sport, and recreation all at once; and the mysterious, frenetically and meticulously omnicidal, parasite-obsessed Sterile, whose conceptions of Good and Clean are one and the same, and who suddenly -inexplicably- want peace.

Will our strange, intrepid vec get to the bottom of this blight? Will they be uncovered? Destroyed? Worse? Will Pache be able to manage relationships with 4 extremely different civilizations at once? What are the values of the Sterile?

And what's to be done about a disease that seems to emerge from the very freedom and diversity of sentient life, thought, and being in Orion's Arm itself?

I don't know.

I haven't finished writing it.

What do you think?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kzVv...sp=sharing

Feel free to leave comments to let me know on the draft itself. Constructive criticism both scientific and literary most welcome.

ps.) I also go by Random Ambles

[Worldtree]

neat! I'll look at the story when I get a chance!