After Tranquility

by The Orion's Arm Universe Project

The future isn't here yet. But don't worry. It will be.

Welcome to Orion's Arm, a scenario set thousands of years in the future when civilization spans the stars. Godlike ascended intelligences rule vast interstellar empires, and lesser factions seek to carve out their own dominions through intrigue and conquest. And out beyond the edge of civilized space and the human friendly worlds, adventure awaits those prepared to risk all.

Collected here for your consideration are twelve stories exploring the Orion's Arm universe, spanning years and light-years to examine a complex and diverse future from its beginnings in the colonized Solar System to its continuing advance toward an uncertain destiny.

About the Orion's Arm Universe Project

Orion's Arm is a work in progress, a space opera setting like no other. It spans the next ten thousand years of galactic history, from the near future interplanetary colonization to distant eras when humanity's descendants have split into millions of different species ruled by superhuman machines. It incorporates hard science, and the "soft" or social sciences to create a rich and complex vision of a world that might someday be.

The Orion's Arm Universe Project is continually growing and evolving as more contributions are added, and will therefore never be complete. We invite you to join us on this journey of imagination; after all it looks like we've barely gotten started, and there are still many worlds left to explore.

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 9, 2014

Reviews

[Bishop · Rating 2 out of 5]

Orion's Arm is hands down the best distant future science fiction setting I've ever found. They've incorporated all the critical modern far future posthuman sf memes. They've given them the best names. Archailects, modosophonts, turingrades, toposophy, clades, provolves, magmatter, the cybercosm. They've kept as close to real science as possible when it mattered and diverged at the right places to keep their future plausible. They've made it bigger, more detailed, and more diverse than anything else going. So it's puzzling and frustrating to me that I haven't found an actual decent story written in the setting. This collection doesn't change that.

Maybe the problem is that the exposition in their encyclopedia is so good, so evocative, and so detailed that it steals the thunder from any fiction they try to write on top of it. All the juicy reveals are already there for the taking if you just read the encyclopedia, so story writers are left with the unappealing choices of either focusing their tale on a rehashed reveal, like when we are apparently meant to feel the shock and horror of the protagonist's realization that the local superintelligences think of her people as pets in Chaos Under Heaven, but wait that's already a preconditional circumstance of this entire setting; doing a little vignette around one of the elements of the setting; or not focusing on any element of the setting at all and just letting it be background like in Ghostkill, in which case the setting isn't really necessary.

One of the most successful stories for me was New Home, which took the amusing/poignant vignette route, and worked in enough unusual sf layering to make it interesting and memorable. But others in that category (Posh Girls, The Fabulist, Homecoming) just end up feeling flat, flimsy, and pointless.

Still, I'd rather re-read Orion's Arm encyclopedia articles like the ones below than the short stories in this book.

toposophy http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b...
weylforge http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4...
the cybercosm http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4...
virtual labyrinths http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4...
ISOs http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4... (with Anders Sandberg's physics paper on them)

[Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of short stories set in the Orion's Arm Universe, a radical hard science fiction project. I used to read it when I was a teenager and spent a lot of time enjoying getting re-acquainted with it last year.

The difficult part about setting a stories thousands of years in the future (the last one being 10,000 years from hence) in the future where science has transcended levels above what we can possibly imagine is getting the balance right between being impossibly and unrelatably alien and being unrealistically familiar (you often getting cringy moments in Science Fiction where someone in the 23rd century remarks something like “this reminds me of a diesel age Earth singer who went by the name “Elvis Presley”...”). The task is akin to someone in the Mesolithic trying to tell a story about the present day, I think it was generally successful with it.

My favourite was “Midwinter” by Stephen Innis set in the Intersolar Dark Age set in 2709 AD (740 years after the moon landing, the eponymous “After Tranquility”.)

[Andrea Holberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories in a well thought-out universe

I enjoyed these short stories quite a bit. The biggest drawback is that this well fleshed out universe doesn't come with a career's worth of books in it!

[Sergio · Rating 3 out of 5]

De calidad variada.
En general los cuentos me parecieron demasiado cortos y/o carentes de conceptos suficientemente novedosos. Tampoco me quedan claros aspectos de la coherencia general del escenario, como ser la razón por la cual los modosofontes son tan prevalentes incluso en épocas avanzadas.