Hello good people of Lainchan
It has been a long time since I've been here. There used to be some long-burried now, back then, unfinished sci-fi project posted here almost 2 years ago? Anyways, if anyone remembers that, this was the first ever feedback I had ever gotten on anything written. Fast forward a bit, I ended up finishing a 150k soft-scifi artificially theocratic cyberpunk book not so long ago and I'd like to open a thread for it. It is a completed project and well... I value a lot of the tastes and opinions people have here. I would be honored if anyone goes through it, even a quarter or just a small part of it.
Anyways here's Immaterial Contest.
Genre: soft sci-fi, horror, action
Description: Immaterial Contest is a story about futuristic gladiators fighting in the arenas of future humanity. It is a story of death overcoming immortality, a deeply flawed reiteration of the Iron Age among the stars, a narrative of divine origins and the always pre-existing cultures that give texture to life.
Somewhere in this fine line, brutal exhibitions call our protagonists to obliterate both fantastical and real, to prove their strength and to win the Contest.
Setting: The setting of the story is an expanded universe that still has no name. This is the second story written about this universe. However, neither story is interconnected, or heavily referenced, as either story focuses on different time periods and themes.
There is rarely a greater, defining, universally-true opinion to define certain plot points or reasons as to why things happen. Those are left for the reader's understanding and of course (fingers-crossed) future projects that can explore the setting in a more traditional, historic layout. The project ties into the setting by the limited viewpoint, a slice of reality that the main characters experience and understand.
In general, just like city-states in the Mediterranean sea of the Iron Age, humanity occupies many different planets in a broad collection of celestial bodies and vast, empty space. Corporations also exist as an alternative of city-state uniformity, an anachronistic collection of mercantile power.
The stakes of the Contest are tied to the very real superstitious way that the universe works in. Magical realism, signs, narratives and divine inspirations all reveal what is to happen in the future. The Contest works as a proxy of future events, the very results of each match tie directly into decisions and future narratives. Impossible concepts of language appear to bleed into reality and it is in this impossible manifestation of fantasies that the Contest draws wishes to reality, hopes and dreams into tangible events.
In the world of the Immaterial Contest, there is logic given magical form, hidden history, contradicting truths, different castes of people and even godlike rulers of planets. There is advanced technology whose form and function copies myth, mysteries of technological advancements that tiptoe on divinity. To those the Commoners that gloss over the finer details, this technology appears magical, with no reality-grounding logic behind it. The friction created within technology, culture, human differences and the many truths becomes the driving force that moves desires and motivates the various individuals or factions within the story.
Part A covers the journey up to the finals and the planet of Sicela. Part B covers the final bracket and the arena matches that happen on a planet kneeling under civil war.
Aesthetics: Kenophobic, Maximalist, New Iron Age, Industrial, Techno, Black metal, Unreal Tournament 99, Theocratic Cyberpunk
Main Mythological themes are Greco-Mediterranean with traces of Semetic, Mesoamerican, Nordic and Igbo cultural references as passed through modern cultural influences.
Different cultures blend and carve out small, defined pockets of their own traditions and texture of life in this universe. This results in dense, description-heavy text that falls on top of the quick, fleeting, one-way pace of going from one match to the next, just like any performing troupe, or theater, or an athlete who is called to perform somewhere new with each day. Places, cities and planets constantly swap (with some more grounded aesthetic on part B) as our team continues their journey through the Contest. Some places take the shape of industrial cities with deep forests, whereas others are planets of oceans and barely any human intervention on nature.
One cultural example is Ulm. Germanic cultural influence of Germani peoples blended with the similarly-named faction of Ulm from the fantasy war-game Dominions 6. As in the game, cultures are shaped not only by their Iron Age, real world counterparts but also by later cultural additions that build on them such as the sword and sorcery books of Conan by Robert E. Howard. At the same time, some cultural additions come straight out of modern times, such as the techno culture of the late 20th and 21st century. Specifically, club culture, the source of electronic music born out of the sounds of heavy industry, close tie-ins with the esoteric concepts of iron forging and the balance between European city planning, forest-to-building ratios and brutalist architecture.
Greatest aesthetic influence was mainly Dominions 6 and Unreal Tournament 99, the latter, being almost the backbone of all arena matches. To be honest, you could just imagine the entire thing as an Unreal Tournament off-brand book.
Magic: There is a magic system in place that measures the abilities of Claimants in the story and allows them to control machines. This happens mainly in the Inverse Dream when the machines can support such battles of magic, with rare influences of this system in reality. Regarding this "magical" abstraction of controlling the logic of machines and measuring whose will is stronger then the other's, there is a deliberate lack of definition. Instead, for the magic system I've tried to define it only via who the characters are. For example, the two sea witches use water magic in the Inverse Dream. This makes sense only aesthetically, without clear definition in text, carried mainly by magical realism and stylistic prose instead of outright definition.
In other words, the complete extent of this magic system is not defined, but it instead hinted at by the heavy, or strange prose that only makes sense when the Claimants dive deeper into their fantasies.
Magic takes eight forms, mixed and matched depending on the Claimant's abilities, training and character. Four basic elemental paths of magic. Fire, water, air, earth and four sorceries. Death, life, astral, blood.
Glossary:
Commoners. The everyman.
Claimants. A group of humans characterized by their ability to enter Inverse Dream.
Inverse Dream. Cybernetic space that controls machines, gives shape to fantasies so that they may become real and measures the superiority of one Claimant versus another.
Pantokrator. Ruler of a planet, source of that specific culture and power. A Pantokrator is to a Claimant what a Claimant is to a Commoner.
The Contest. Violent, public exhibitions of arena violence. Comprised by many different types of games and events.
Announcement of Colours. Ladder announcement for the final brackets. Each team is assigned colours respective to their racial/ cultural/ corporate/ circumstantial characteristics.
Attached is the epub version of the book and a low definition version of the book cover I painted.