Katamariguy

When your asshole mentor knows your Dark Secret but literally could not care less... happened to my good friend Dinios Kol

I know Jay Eaton in meatspace so I've seen and admired their art for a long time, well before I finally read through their hard sci fi webcomic Runaway to the Stars. I love watching them work: they come from a science background and have this great meticulousness to depicting flora and fauna. Runaway's sort of a perfect fit for that kind of approach, with its spacefaring technologies and alien creatures. There's this palpable love for carefully developed speculative science that pairs perfectly with a careful approach to art.

Actually, reading through the archive reminded me just how much I enjoy really setting-forward speculative fiction. Lemme give you an example. I thought I had a pretty good idea, from seeing sketches and random pages here and there, of what was going on with the main character Talita and her species of alien--known by humans as "centaurs", for pretty obvious reasons. I took a look at her and thought, ok, sure, I know what a "centaur" body plan would look like. I've stared at more than a few land vertebrate skeletons in my time, and Talita's got limbs, a head, a mouth and trunk... this all seems pretty reasonable!

Centaur image from their species page.

Then just a few pages into the story Talita takes a pair of glasses with an elastic band and just sorta, does this:

Thwap

And I thought: Huh. Ok. So what I thought was a solid neck and cranium was actually a big mane that sorta sticks up and is thick enough to appear like a continuous mass. Talita's head is a lot narrower than I thought. That's... weird, it doesn't seem like there should be enough room for a brain.

From page 23

So it transpires that the head is this sort of mobile multi purpose appendage, with the brain down in the torso! What's more, the whole top of the skull turns out to be a big air bladder used for smell and vocalization. It's a pretty minor realization, but it just felt sooo satisfying to make this observation and intuit that a character's biology might be radically different from our own, and a few pages later get confirmation! The gradual rolling out of details on Talita's whole deal (both biological and personal) is one of the most captivating parts of the story. There's a number of quiet sequences of her working out, for example, where we get to see her doing this incredible six legged run on an industrial sized treadmill, and it's both this really intriguing look into her alien locomotion and the unique challenges and needs she has as the only centaur on a human- and avian-dominated outpost.

I've got only a hazy sense of where the debates in SFF fandom are these days; the debate on the necessity or acceptability of "worldbuilding" always seems to be swinging dramatically in one direction or the other. I do think hard sci fi in particular has gotten arguably deserved flack over the years for thin characterization and plots that act as vehicles for... well, vehicles, and their like, cool speculative space ships and such. "Runaway" itself is a spaceship, with its own careful detailing and some very cool designs for orbiting slingshot liftoff technologies... but it's also a ship that houses a renegade AI whose entire crew is dead, a grounding and sympathetic character trait. That kind of balance really makes the story shine. In moment to moment beats, this story resembles a slice of life drama more than it resembles Star Wars. It's deeply concerned with ideas of communication and belonging. But, I equally think that the interpersonal drama of the story works so well because it's grounded in the material, the biological, the constraints of history... worldbuilding. It turns out a lot of drama can come out of questions like "how does an obligate carnivore like Talita navigate living among grain-eating humans and avians, in space where you can't raise large livestock?"

Plus, you know, it's just intellectually pleasurable to think about these aspects of the setting. It's fun! The example I'm using is probably pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but these moments can really add up to shape the experience of a work. Reading in part involves acting deductively, anticipating what the story might or might not do next, and adding in speculative biology like this introduces a new space for that deduction to play out. Like, I'm pretty sure there's offhand remarks made about various aspects of life on Dirtball, like the skyhook that lifts craft into space, before we get full explainers on what those things are, so the way those elements weave into naturalistic conversation become these interesting little hooks inviting the reader forward. And on a recent page, which I won't spoil, Jay dropped a very cool and visually unsettling payoff to centaur biology that I'm sure is going to go in some really compelling directions. (It's a good time to get familiar with the comic, by the way--a kickstarter for the print book's going live in April.)

I love highlighting flashy weird formal nonsense in these reviews, but honestly sometimes what makes a story tick is just careful, subtle choices about what info about your world you want to give the reader, and when you give it.

The Thing

The Stuff

The Substance

The Entity

It

@territorialoak​ I hope you don’t mind me adding your tags here, that story is just too good and I’m Obsessed

“THE SUN, THE SUN THE SUN, THE-”

Why is it that the only Fallen London content I create is, you know, Like This?

Well, I don’t know either. Enjoy!