It’s @aggressivelyarospec‘s AggressivelyArospectacular event this week, and I don’t have anything new to post so instead here’s a small dump of old art of the protagonist (guess which one he is...) and three other main characters of my As-Yet Unnamed Sci-Fi Novel!
Alastair Hayashi (he/him), Nigel ‘Charlie’ Charleston (he/him), Flynn Turnbull (they/them) and Anwara Siddiq (she/her) live on Nimbus Station, an exploration outpost on the edge of a particularly interesting area of space known unofficially as the ‘Gnarly Cloud’ (after how it was described by the first humans to see it in person). Alastair and Anwara are both pilots for the Exploration Corps, there to map the Cloud and explore its mysterious interior, and Charlie and Flynn are pilot and engineer respectively on a cargo hauler that works the trade routes around the station.
The human race has spread quite far out into space by this point, but so far have yet to find any trace of other sapient races out there among the stars. Until, that is, Alastair and Anwara’s squad encounters an unknown spacecraft while deep inside the Cloud. Ignoring their best efforts at diplomacy, the ship fires on them, damaging and capturing Alastair’s ship, and Anwara is forced to retreat with the rest of their squad and leave her best friend in apparent alien hands.
The rest of the story follows Our Protagonists as they get caught up in the events of humanity’s first contact with aliens, and not just from one side - Alastair is now alone in mysterious alien hands, the sole ambassador for his species and stuck in a position not unlike the classic ‘alien imprisoned in Area 51′. Can he find common ground and convince his captors that they have nothing to fear from humanity and, as forces on both sides try to turn this situation to their advantage, is that really true?
Alastair and Charlie are married, Alastair and Anwara have been best friends since flight school, Charlie and Flynn are also best friends, Anwara and Charlie are Bros who spend a lot of time hanging out because the other two are big time introverts, Alastair and Flynn are Autistic Solidarity(TM), and Anwara and Flynn don’t quite know what they make of each other yet but they’re slowly figuring it out. Every single one of these relationships is Just As Important As Each Other, and all but one of them is platonic
Alastair is gay, demi and autistic, so he finds it kind of ironic and entertaining that he’s always going to be considered The Baseline Human(TM) by these aliens when really he’s always felt like anything but
(That said, I’ve put a lot of thought into how human society would evolve to be much more inclusive of all sorts of diversity so really he just sticks out from the perspective of our modern society, in the grand tradition of using sci-fi set in the future to point out things about our world)
Flynn is aroace, agender and autistic, because I never see people who share my identity in fiction and I’m making it a point to include someone who does in any original thing that I write
Alastair and Charlie are already married because I’m not remotely interested in writing a romance plotline. Instead, they’ve got a stable relationship that exists in the background and all the drama comes from the plot happening around them
The main themes that I’m going for are hope as a force for change, diversity as strength, The Power of Friendship, Capitalism and Imperialism Bad, and some meta stuff about the value of optimistic science fiction, all of which probably make it glaringly obvious that I’m a big time Star Trek fan ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Technically it’s not really a novel yet, it’s just a lot of notes and a skeleton plot that’s pretty robustly fleshed out in a few key areas, but one day it will be! In the meantime, I’m slowly adding to the worldbuilding and creating art of the characters as I go along. Check out the ‘gnarly space’ tag on my blog if you want to see more!
