Are there people in your world that just don’t get it, and keep spouting opinions that make no sense given the context of your world or would be disastrous if actually implemented? What are some of the most common bad takes in your world and what makes them so bad?
Admittedly, I kind of handwave that away as “their paws have evolved to be more dexterious in the millions of years between when humans existed on Earth and their current societies developed”. I mostly visualize this world in a cartoon style so they basically have “magic paws” that things just stick to on command.
However, due to them being four-legged, they can’t really hold things with their paws while walking. So they mostly carry things in their mouths while they walk, either directly or by putting it in a basket and carrying the basket in their mouth. Birds carry stuff in their talons while flying. Some animals are good at balncing things on their heads while they walk. Failing all those, they always have the option to use a bag that they sling over their shoulders and front paws.
However, being a place where animals of all kinds live in relative harmony, size logistics are integral to nearly every part of society, and is regulated quite heavily to ensure accessibility for all. The Universal Animal Access (UAA) Staging Guidelines is a collection of documents and engineering standards with the lofty goal statement of “providing all animals, regardless of species, political affiliation, residence status, or ability, safe and equitable access to all resources offered by built-up, urbanized, or industrialized development; while avoiding segregation and the development of parallel, closed off, scale specific infrastructure, whenever possible.”
UAA categorizes animals into four rough size categories. They are officially denoted as either size groups 1, 2, 3 and 4, with 1 being the smallest or and 4 being the largest, and are more colloquially referred to as Micro, Small, Medium, and Large, often abbreviated as Mi, S, M, and L. These categories are qualitative and on a spectrum, but generally:
Micro animals: Insects, Worms, up to Hummingbirds
Small animals: Most songbirds, most rodents, up to rabbits and hares.
Medium animals: Canines, Vulpines, Most Felines, Raptors
Large animals: Ungulates like deer and cows, the largest birds, all the way up to whales.
What is often referred to as the “UAA paradigm” of engineering and civil planning has the following principles:
Wherever possible and safe to do, animals of different sizes should be allowed to occupy the same space and be free to interact with each other, as opposed to being separated by barriers. Example: A corridor where animals walk through should accommodate both large and small animals in the same space, this generally means ensuring the ceiling and wall clearance can accommodate large animals, while the floor and any inclines must be flat enough for even the smallest paws to navigate.
Redundant fixtures that are more efficiently suited for each size group should be installed close to each other. Example: A door will have a button to open it or an access control device low to the ground for small and micro animals, to reach without having to climb, and a separate button higher off the ground so medium and large animals don’t have to hunch over, as well as for smaller flying animals. And the buttons will most likely be capacitive touch based instead of a mechanical switch, so small animals don’t have to worry that they can’t apply enough force to activate it. Also, personal items like books, computers, paw-held tools, and anything else one is expected to have to themselves should be produced in a variety of sizes, each accommodating a different size group.
Oversizing is better than undersizing. This is due to the fact that in nature, smaller animals exist in a world with a lot more empty space in relation to their bodies, and therefore will feel more natural and comfortable than, say, a large animal being squeezed into a space that can barely fit in.
The safety of animals must be prioritized. For example, you’ll never see a conventional airplane in the Unified Territories, as for an aircraft to be sky legal, it must be able to stop anywhere, including hovering in place, and be able to fly arbitrarily slowly when low to the ground. So as to not smash into any flying birds or bugs. Tires rolling across the meadow is also unacceptable. For this reason, hovercrafts are the preferred motorized vehicle, as are trains with complete grade separation and active track intrusion detection.
So this is well and good on paper, but do the actual infrastructure follow these guidelines? The answer is one part “meh” and one part “it depends”. The Unified Territories is the most comprehensive single jurisdiction in terms of implementing UAA, but even then it is only totally comprehensive for small and medium sized animals, with accommodation of micros being almost as good with a few yet unaddressed woes, but limited consideration for large animals. This is mainly because the vast majority of the UT population are micro, small, and medium sized animals, and the argument is often made that because there are no large sized member species and it is unclear if there will be in the foreseeable future, it’s unreasonable to size everything for the largest animals when the extra space is unlikely to be used before the infrastructure reaches end of life and would have to be renovated or rebuilt anyway. Though this is controversial as some large animals do pass through the Unified Territories.
Feline territory is mostly designed for medium animals, having lost nearly all the big cats to extinction ages ago, but after they signed that treaty saying they won’t eat other animals anymore, they have been making strides in implementing UAA in their infrastructure for the influx of small and micro animals who are now welcomed in their territory. There are still other territories that do not implement UAA in any appreciable sense, be it because most of the residents are about the same size and they therefore do not see a reason to spend their limited resources implementing something that hardly anyone will take advantage of. But other territories are far more intentional in their refusal to implement UAA, as they do not want other species there at all.
One last thing, when it comes to medicine, medical practitioners have to be certified to treat specific size groups. Most doctors are certified to treat their own size group and taxonomic group, maybe also the adjacent groups. For example, you can have a doctor who is certified for small and medium mammals, or one who treats large avians, or a medicine bug that handles micro insects. Obviously this is waved for emergencies where the “correct” doctor is unavailable, and there is a line somewhere between “a cat and a mouse is trapped in a cave and the mouse goes into cardiac arrest, and the cat had to give chest compression even though they could accidentally squish them or dig their claws into them” and “your feline clinic is the closest to my burrow and come on I’m not that small!”, but that’s up to the malpractice courts to decide. There have also been problems with when a large animal has a medical emergency in a place where most of the residents are small, the medkits nearby might literally not contain enough medicine to reach a therapeutic dose. This is remedied by simply having larger stocks of critical, life saving medicine like epinephrine and insulin when putting together a first aid kit.
I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?
Also, do the Partisans exhibit any traits commonly found in religion/cults even though they’re atheist? Like do they have their own rituals and customs that could be mistaken for parts of a religion even though their whole thing is that they have no religion?
Oh this is great!
The Bright Way is dedicated to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, or as they say bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. They start out benign, but once they start sending out interstellar missions they realize they can’t fund their work on donations alone. They start monetizing the vast array of tech they’ve invented in order to get to that point, at first to fund mission work, but they gradually lose sight of why they’re making money and concentrate on just making more money.
Slavery in this context is a form of debt servitude one is consigned to if they can’t pay their tithes. Treatment of slaves varied greatly. On the yinrih’s homeworld of Yih, slaves were de facto treated as property. On the planet Hearthside, which was a hotbed of traditionalist movements opposed to the Bright Way’s pecuniary interests, serfdom was treated more like an assistance program to help the disadvantaged gain technical skills. Institutions on Hearthside would even “buy” slaves from Yih (really taking on their debt) in order to save them from harsh treatment on the homeworld, as can be seen in this story.
Regarding the Partisans, they got your typical cult of personality surrounding Firefly the Apostate (their leader), but there’s also a literal cult, which emerged more or less organically without the government’s input, that worships the Great Leader a la the Emperor of Mankind from 40K. The Partisan government goes back and forth between persecuting them as they do religion in general, and cynically promoting the cult as a means of control.
Very interesting!
Are there more “pure” Bright Way believers in the sense that they denounce the slavery/exploitation industrial complex and preach more grassroots exploration and extraterrestrial contact? Like Christians who spend their lives in relative poverty helping the poor around them preaching the gospel through their own actions toward others, compared to a group like the Conquistadors trying colonise far away lands and force their religion on them all while enriching themselves?
The Pious Dissolutionists are what you’re looking for. The Bright Way started monetizing the tech they invented in order to fund the missionaries, but that little side hustle turned into all they cared about. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted to purge the organization of its corporate interests. (Incidentally, my avatar is their symbol. The red arch represents an element of Claravian sacred art whereby a golden arch would be drawn behind a saint’s head, analogous to a halo. The usual Bright Way symbol is the bare “star and gear” without the arch.)
Interesting! How powerful are the Pious Dissolutionists? Does the Bright Way declare them as apostates or anything or otherwise try to suppress them?
Initially not very powerful. The movement was most popular among the missionaries (naturally) as well as on the planet Hearthside. The tide turned when a dissolutionist preacher on Hearthside managed to convince half of the Bright Way’s private army (an order of warrior monks called the Knights of the Sun) to join the dissolutionists.
As for how the PD’s were treated by the wider clergy, a lot of them were sent to the Outer Belt to get them out of the way. The Outer Belt was the home of the missionaries (as it’s close to interstellar space) as well as former ecclesiastical slaves both manumitted and runaways, who formed the nucleus of the radical secularists that would become the Partisans.
I summarize things better here, here, and here.
I really like your technical style of worldbuilding. I’m fond of the little details that grand sweeping stories gloss over.
How many species are sapient? All members of the kingdom animalia including microscopic animals like water bears and face mites?
TBH I have only really focused on the small fuzzy woodland creature side of the animal kingdom, but implicitly yes, everyone is spaient.
I specifically intended everyone to be sentient/sapient because part of the reason for me making this world was I hate cop-out “designated food animals” that so many other animals living in harmony stories have. The Lion King and Simba eating bugs for example, or how Zootopia implies that everyone there just eats fish instead of each other. Even when I was a a kid this had always annoyed me because it’s so hypocritical, when it really wouldn’t have needed that much more suspension of disbelief to just say the cats in this world just can digest plants or something. So I specifically chose to have every single animal be sapient so there can be no cop-outs to the predation problem.
I also chose this as to not limit myself in what kind of animals I can have as characters, but admittedly I haven’t developed the lore beyond small fuzzy animals.
So they do address what the predators in Zootopia eat. I’m blind (literally, I have a guide dog) and I guess there was a visual reference to it somewhere that I missed. I was so irritated that the whole point of the film was about predators not eating prey anymore but it didn’t address what they ate instead.
Yeah there’s a shot of a fish market in one of the scenes. It wasn’t directly mentioned, but I think the implication is they eat fish.