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Old 04-30-2018, 04:51 PM   #1
DataPacRat
 
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Default Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

Aka, "How can I genetically engineer a Care Bear?"

I'm working with a hard-SF universe, in which a wheel-shaped space station has low gravity and high air pressure, letting ridiculously oversized critters fly. For various reasons, I want to include as many versions as I can of the various cartoon characters found in cute cartoons and storybooks. I want a bunch of rich, lush subsettings, full of strange forms of life, reminiscent of Dark Crystal or Avatar.

Some examples:

* Fraggles and other generic talking critters. I'll have to come up with some handwaviness about how smart a brain of a given size can be, but this includes smurfs, talking animals (bipedal or otherwise), centaurs (of various sorts - chakats, bariaur, etc), winged folk (small pegasi, fairies, etc), My Singing Monsters, and so on.

* Fairies act something like pollinators, but actively managing various other parts of the station's biomes.

* Care Bears. Use some handwaving about bioluminescence, Hox genes, epigenetics, and immune-system-like shuffling, and that should be enough to explain rainbow-coloured glowing patterns on their tummies. Specific recognizable patterns may need some conscious interventions, such as tattooing or surgically moving pieces of skin around. I can't think of a way to get the "Care Bear Stare", but I can probably include positive-emotion-inducing pheromones, and a home near the station's hub.

* My Little Pony unicorns. I'm thinking of crossing Piers Anthony's unicorns with hollow-ish musical horns, that blue guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who could control a thing with a whistle, and Charles Stross's Equoid parasite. Resulting in a horn-shaped, barnacle-like symbiote which can glue itself to various critters' heads (eventually integrating into their nervous sytems), and which itself contains its own tiny, flying bioluminescent symbiotes that respond to audible cues. (I can even throw in Care Bear style flank-marks on most equines.)

* Frosty the Snowman, the Scarecrow and Tin Man, Pinnochio, and animated toys. I'm thinking of adapting the 'death snakes' from John Varley's "Demon", which in the original work formed small hive-mind collectives that could move a dead body around zombie-style; and letting them collaborate to animate less gruesome host-forms.

* Ghosts. I am still feeling my way around, but I'm hesitantly considering something based around every sapient inhabitant's mind being digitally uploaded to the hub, and generally given amnesia and inserted into new fetuses. I want "death" to still generally involve the loss of most things most humans would consider important about that person, but with enough demonstrable continuity for the locals to have various philosophies based around being close enough to immortal for death to be less worrisome.


Has reading this given you any ideas along similar lines?
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Old 04-30-2018, 04:58 PM   #2
warellis
 
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Default Re: Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

What is the world beyond the space station like in your setting and idea? Is it hard except for FTL or what?

Oh also since most of these beings display magical powers, how would you represent that in your hard,SF setting?

Last edited by warellis; 04-30-2018 at 05:07 PM.
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Old 04-30-2018, 05:08 PM   #3
DataPacRat
 
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Default Re: Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

Quote:
Originally Posted by warellis View Post
What is the world beyond the space station like in your setting and idea? Is it hard except for FTL or what?
I'm either going with straight hard SF (not even FTL), or almost-as-hard SF plus a particular model of reactionless thruster I'm fond of (based on McCulloch's theories on gravity and inertia) also without FTL.

I'm intending that finding out what's going on outside the station is a Significant Campaign Goal.


Quote:
Oh also since most of these beings display magical powers, how would you represent that in your hard,SF setting?
"Well, that's the real trick now, isn't it?" :)

I'm aiming for the closest approximations to such magical abilities that I can come up with non-magical, hard-SF versions of. Eg, unicorn horns that emit 'glowy auras', rebuilt as a biological symbiote barnacle thing.
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Last edited by DataPacRat; 04-30-2018 at 05:44 PM.
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Old 04-30-2018, 05:12 PM   #4
Culture20
 
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Default Re: Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

Quote:
Originally Posted by DataPacRat View Post
* My Little Pony unicorns. I'm thinking of crossing Piers Anthony's unicorns with hollow-ish musical horns, that blue guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who could control a thing with a whistle, and Charles Stross's Equoid parasite. Resulting in a horn-shaped, barnacle-like symbiote which can glue itself to various critters' heads (eventually integrating into their nervous sytems), and which itself contains its own tiny, flying bioluminescent symbiotes that respond to audible cues. (I can even throw in Care Bear style flank-marks on most equines.)
So the ponies are just normal ponies infested with a cthuluoid symbiote (which acts cute and cuddly)?
Quote:
* Ghosts. I am still feeling my way around, but I'm hesitantly considering something based around every sapient inhabitant's mind being digitally uploaded to the hub, and generally given amnesia and inserted into new fetuses. I want "death" to still generally involve the loss of most things most humans would consider important about that person, but with enough demonstrable continuity for the locals to have various philosophies based around being close enough to immortal for death to be less worrisome.
You could have the brain backups only happen on a schedule dictated by the Great Cloud Keeper, so that if a cuddly dies, it loses recent memories (a year, month, week?). That would confirm the immortality, but still provide a sense of loss.
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Old 04-30-2018, 05:23 PM   #5
Culture20
 
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Default Re: Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

Cabbage Patch Kids: Pod People clones of the original station human crew. They don’t get the immortality backups of the other cuddlies, but they do have a hive mind which has adapted to the other species (which it can not clone in its pods). The clones die quickly in the low gravity, so they’re always babies or toddlers.

Strawberry Shortcake and friends: hominids spliced with fruit genes for some weird reason.

Betty Spaghetti. *shiver* Beware her noodley appendages!

Polly Pocket. Tiny, Completely human-shaped mice bred for drug testing. With mouse level intelligence.

Wuzzles: Standard chimeras.

Gummy Bears: Giant Ameboid colonies fused together in a semi-solid outer shell which they excrete for protection. Unintelligent, but delicious.
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Old 04-30-2018, 05:39 PM   #6
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Default Re: Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

Quote:
Originally Posted by Culture20 View Post
So the ponies are just normal ponies infested with a cthuluoid symbiote (which acts cute and cuddly)?
Exactly.

(I might throw in something about the symbiote being pseudo-inheritable, with its spores passing into a uterus-or-equivalent.)


Quote:
You could have the brain backups only happen on a schedule dictated by the Great Cloud Keeper, so that if a cuddly dies, it loses recent memories (a year, month, week?). That would confirm the immortality, but still provide a sense of loss.
I do like having more clarity about the backup timing - scheduled backups rather than continuous ones gives more interesting plot opportunities. Though I'd still like full-fledged revival to be uncommon, requiring some kind of significant effort to accomplish.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Culture20 View Post
Cabbage Patch Kids: Pod People clones of the original station human crew. They don’t get the immortality backups of the other cuddlies, but they do have a hive mind which has adapted to the other species (which it can not clone in its pods). The clones die quickly in the low gravity, so they’re always babies or toddlers.

Strawberry Shortcake and friends: hominids spliced with fruit genes for some weird reason.
That reminds me of various other interesting plant-animal hybrids, such as the lamb that grows from a bush. (And then eats all the surrounding plants, and dies of starvation; which would require some careful ecological tweaking to come up with a justification for to prevent near-immediate extinction.)


Quote:
Betty Spaghetti. *shiver* Beware her noodley appendages!
Not particularly familiar with that one.


Quote:
Polly Pocket. Tiny, Completely human-shaped mice bred for drug testing. With mouse level intelligence.
Pretty much exactly the level of superficially-cute-but-disturbing-deeper-down I'm looking for.

(With various related subspecies, such as the tailed Borrowers, to add variety.)


Quote:
Wuzzles: Standard chimeras.
Yep.

Quote:
Gummy Bears: Giant Ameboid colonies fused together in a semi-solid outer shell which they excrete for protection. Unintelligent, but delicious.
Now there's a lovely image. :)

I'd been trying to think about other forms of animate food, with little success, but had missed this one.
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