November 2024: Blueprints for Heaven
Astra Planeta turned ten years old yesterday.
At least, as measured from the first post date of the original skae design on my old DeviantArt account. November 6, 2014 is when I first started dreaming up a starbound future I could believe in. Though it started as a simple speculative biology project, over the last decade this world has taken the shape of an idealist future for our own kind: at last embracing both our destiny as humble explorers of the infinite, and each other as our only solace in a vast and quiet cosmos.
I apologize for completely skipping over the October log entry. October is always a busy time for me, and this year it was especially so. Between that and still recovering from burnout, I didn't really make any progress on the world last month. But now... [TJ Trewin voice] WorldEmber Is Coming! WE is usually a mad scramble for me (I wouldn't have it any other way, hahah) but this year, I'm going in with IDEAS. I have a backlog of stub drafts that I want to prioritize, and time/motivation permitting I may even get to tackling a few big ones that need attention, like Technoculture and the actual Coalition article. In preparation for WE I'm working on fixing up all the map pins and, hopefully, fixing up the the timeline as well. My goal, as always, is to at least make the 10000 word minimum for the month, but with everything I have to write about i might aim for double that.
I won't lie to you, readers, the... events... of the last few days have certainly demoralized me quite a bit. I briefly contemplated giving up the project entirely --how could I imagine such a bright future when our own looks darker than ever? But I can't just throw away a decade of work. In fact, now it is more important than ever to hold onto our hopes for a brighter world: nothing ever got better until someone first imagined it could. Thus I leave you all with my personal motto, renewed in strength and ringing clear as a bell on a still night:
Astra Planeta will forever be one of my favourite worldbuilding projects I've ever gotten the privilege of reading. The world is not at its best right now - all the more reason Astra Planeta shines as a hopeful and bright future.