Disco Elysium was a huge inspiration to me, and I really want to capture the same “hope despite hopelessness” feel, though from a different perspective, as I’m not from a post-soviet country. I’ve also always had this idea in the back of my head of a sort of “invisible apocalypse”, the idea that the world is ending and nobody notices. Ultimately I just want to make good, communist art. If I can make something even 1/10th as great as DE I would consider it a huge success.

I am not at all getting to grips with it because I have bitten far more off than I can chew, but I envision a science-fiction world with a progression across different blanets (with a “B”, since they surround a black hole instead of a star) where time passes at different rates and which hence are stuck in different stages of economic development. According to general relativity, the closer you are to the centre, the slower time passes on your clock, such that the innermost blanet has feudal and slaveholder societies, and there’s a capitalist and a socialist blanet further out who are having themselves a space race. But because of the distance of the accretion disk, they will have to rely on finite resources to sustain themselves, a constraint by which the inner blanets aren’t limited. Because of its slow development, the feudal blanet has yet to comprehend spacecraft technology, but it is the ideal base camp for either of the outer blanets to perform human space travel and scientific experiments near the black hole, and to extract energy from it. So while this whole space race is going on outside, the capitalists and socialists both seek to convince feudal empires to cooperate with them, but down there they are disconnected from their respective motherworlds, many generations behind the tech created at home in the meantime, and forced to abide by feudal rules. Also, they are both disgusted by feudal society and try to establish a bourgeoisie, but each one inherits capitalist/socialist values. Of course, I plan to eventually let the socialists achieve a more-or-less complete victory, perhaps with some aftertastes.

Rather than focussing on the complicated intrigues and schemes of space politics - which, although interesting in its own right, I consider to be liberal masturbation from which little of value can be learnt - I want my world to be grounded in both actual science and hard science-fiction, and look at the implications these physical effects and social differences have on the development of society at large, as well as the ways in which work, science, technology, trade, and art are accomplished. For that reason, I want to try to rely on working-class protagonists and supporting figures, narrate big events through a landscape of social and mass media with its respective bias and unreliability, and imply what is actually going on through descriptions of the real state of the world and the natural collision points of the cast. This necessitates all of the main characters to touch a lot of grass and get around, which is why I am going to use a lot of military, mercantile, academic, and touristic environments as well as public spaces.

As for the vibes, I am relatively good at describing and analysing but absolute dogshit at tragedy and action, so most of the time I will try to have a relaxed atmosphere and use comedy and absurdity to prompt the reader to ask questions about the in-universe narratives and learn theory. There will be some amounts of crime, death, and violence given the proxy schemes on the feudal blanet, but no total warfare and I don’t want to impact it the basic tone of the story too much.

I’m basically kind of writing a pulpy resident evil-style thing set in a spacefaring socialist society, so I guess whats most important for me to get, vibes wise, is the vibe that things really were okay before this. I loved the resident evil books as a kid, but it’s impossible to read them the same way as any kind of leftist. Most of the main characters are cops but it’s never examined, it’s always just treated an an in-universe reason to make your cast of characters a squad of armed martial artists. But this refusal to engage with any part of what they actually do day to day creates a kind of anesthetic blind spot in the worldbuilding, where early on it’s just sort of assumed that everything was totally fine on every level until this one dang bad apple company got too greedy and went too far and did evil stuff, and then the later the reveal that there was also government complicity is hinted at as something shocking and weighty.

I’m rambling, but I want to create a sense of true peace and prosperity on this world to contextuaɔize the horror to come, not a sense of uneasy peace-by-omission conveyed through the perspective of a capitalist enforcer.

For my worlds, I think what I’m shooting for, not even really intentionally, is that feeling of arriving somewhere new for the first time with the intention of living there, and/or the feeling of a child in a big city exploring where they live. Both feelings may or may not have been present in my childhood. Everything is still a bit of a haze, you don’t typically remember everything about a place the first time you go there because there’s so many new things and it kind of overloads your senses, and totally mundane things can seem to have a sense of mystery and allure because you still don’t fully understand them or how they work yet. Fairly common technology also feel way more advanced and high-tech when you’re a kid because you don’t know how they work, and that what makes them so good to explore (I used to be super fascinated by public urban infrastructure as a kid, still am). It’s not exactly like that because I generally like to frame my worlds through the perspectives of adult characters, I just find it easier to write and advance the plot when my characters are all mature enough to know what they’re doing and have a general idea of what they should be doing, but it’s not like adults can’t experience those exact same feelings.

The other side I want to capture is the nostalgia and bittersweet familiarity of returning to your old home, somewhere you used to be really familiar with. But even though most things are still as you remember it, enough has changed to once against warrant exploration and experiencing the place again. Again, that enjoyable haze of exploring somewhere like a city comes to mind.

All this combined with the feeling that things will continue looking up and it’ll stay cozy and nice forever, which is definitely also a childhood thing but what if the world actually worked well enough for adults to feel that way too?

Not sure how well I described this but I hope you get the idea!

I have a socialist science-fantasy world with intelligent animals trying to live in harmony with each other. Though none of my main characters are kids in this story, I definitely frame my main character to experience a “vibe” similar to what I described.

I’m trying to go for a dune-ish, lonely feel. Lonely, in that the Padishah Kaiserin’s plot is understood only by her majordomo Monika. It’s also got a lot of war, so there’s the excitement there, I guess. And finally, Pavel’s life in the killing game for him feels like fighting upstream.

For the sequel, the ghola Haika is again lonely, with only her caregiver Leto for support in yet another killing game that threatens to destroy them. I guess she also has Miu, sort of, but she doesn’t really count.

On a brighter note I’m working on another world that’s much brighter and takes place in an AU socialist world. I won’t spoil too much, but it’s entitled “Shokaku and Misha’s Socialist Tankist Life” or something along those lines.