☕️ your Arateph universe?
I've been waiting to answer this until I had both the time for this post and the attention-span for thinking about this universe, because I have a lot of thoughts to unload. I apologize in advance (the 99.9% of you who have no frame of reference for this are encouraged to ignore this post).
This universe is so easy and so hard to write in.
It's easy because:
The vaguely futuristic setting allows me to write with a voice and viewpoint that's more-or-less 21st-century
I can throw in a weird piece of technology whenever I need to facilitate a desired plot point
It's firmly focused on one particular planet, so I get to know that spaceships exist without ever having to describe these spaceships or have the slightest understanding of how they work
I just get to mash up all the things that I like--cultural worldbuilding, historical romance, science fiction, fairy tales, political intrigue, grounded stories of daily life--and it all fits together.
I like this setting and the conflicts I get to explore.
But it's very hard because:
This universe was designed for one purpose: to allow me to retell "Sleeping Beauty" on another planet. I threw in only the worldbuilding details that facilitated this and allowed everything else to remain vague background material. Trying to set other stories in this universe highlights just how paper-thin this worldbuilding is.
Anything set after Auren wakes up has to explain Auren's stasis experiences, and thus bombard the reader with a crash-course in tephan history.
(And anything set in this universe that avoids tackling the Auren issue feels extremely peripheral).
Anything set before the revolution risks feeling like a historical romance rather than science fiction. It's very hard to get across "these people are aliens" when they have only minor differences from humans and don't even know that humans exist.
Any story that more thoroughly explores tephan culture highlights the fact that these aren't really aliens. They're humans that I call aliens so they can make funny comments about how weird humans are, but whose societal structures and cultural conflicts are basically the same as those faced in 19th and 20th century Europe, and I feel like a fraud with no imagination.
I've established that human technology is overall vastly superior to tephan technology. Yet some of the most prominent pieces of sci-fi technology are tephan in origin. It's hard for me (especially in stories set pre-human-contact) to decide just how advanced each type of technology should be for a given race in a given era. (And how to make pre-contact stories feel like sci-fi when I need to limit most technology to mid-20th-century levels).
The Problem of Auren. I love this boy. But his usual function in this world makes him more of a symbol than a character. I can't give him too many doubts or have him make too many mistakes without risking his status as Virtue Prince. He's not so much a character as an idea for other characters to react to. Any story I make has to revolve around him, and such stories usually have a similar structure: someone has a mistaken idea about themselves and/or Auren, they meet Auren, and he sparks some kind of character arc. Which can work if the character arcs he sparks are different, but I fear that several of the ones I've considered have largely the same beats and themes.
The Auren problem is compounded by the fact that he was designed for the "Sleeping Beauty" story, so his traits were developed in opposition to Tanza's. Put him with different characters, in a different situation, and it's more difficult to understand who he is. What does he like to do in his spare time? Does he ever react to a situation with anything more interesting than bland good-humor? What are his interests, desires, hopes and dreams, beyond the Savior of Arateph role that's been cast on him since birth? Can he be anything other than an Ethics Lecturer or a Humorous Fish-Out-of-Water? Within the confines of his life and the story structures that work in this universe, it's difficult to say.
It's so hard to write post-reform Tanza and make her still feel like Tanza. One of her key character traits is her cynicism and self-serving nature. Take that away, and it's easy to reduce her to a self-conscious and self-doubting introvert, the bland college student of a thousand half-baked literary novels. Especially since I can't quite decide where life takes her, or how she can continue to fit into Auren's life when they take very different paths.
I prefer to keep to smaller scale stories. But with so many Very Big Things happening in the background, it's easy to feel like we're missing out on the true stories and just getting these little flakes of detail instead. (This is more of a problem with post-human stories than pre-human ones).
tl;dr: Don't design a universe for one fairy tale and then try to set other fairy tales in the same universe. It's a bad idea.
