There is a planet that human scientists identified as Doliea 581d. It’s a lonely, dark place, powered by a class-M red dwarf star that gives off approximately 65% the light of Earth’s sun. Once, not too long ago on the scale of things measured in trillions of light years, 581d had been nothing but a lump of ice spinning through space.
Then some kind of cosmic collision, likely a far-circling comet, knocked the planet out of its distant orbit, cracking the ice and jolting it closer towards the Doliea star. Temperatures on the surface of 581d soared above freezing and the cracks became vast fissures, while energy generated by the collision jumpstarted the planet’s core. Battered by increased solar energy from above and internal heating from below, the miles of ice encasing 581d went through an extremely rapid melt and the frozen rock became a vast water world.
It was in this churning, tumultuous growth spurt that the first recognizable forms of life emerged. Fossil records have been difficult to recover from the deep oceans that still cover Doliea 581d, but modern flora and fauna are comparable to Kepler 7C or Hesphast, with a high proportion of invertebrates. A more complete examination of the various species on Doliea 581d can be found in later chapters.
Here we focus on Caterva immaterialis, the beings that have popularly if inaccurately come to be known as ‘the Dolieans.’
The Dolieans are not the first sentient species encountered by human explorers but they are one of the most unique. They have no permanent physical form and seem to consist of pure energy, a collection of particles moving in loose concert. When Earth drones first landed on 581d, they categorized these lifeforms as clouds of bioluminescent algae, a surprising and encouraging find on such a darkened world.
Then human explorers followed their robot counterparts and discovered what no machine could: a sentient, shared, telepathic consciousness, as vast as it was unbound, and completely unlike anything we had ever encountered.
The earliest researchers compared them to eusocial insects like ants or honey bees, with individual organisms communicating through a hierarchal hive mind; yet that analogy fails to explain how Caterva immaterialis fulfill the immaterial part of their name. For scientists raised in a post-Higgs-Boson world, the concept of ‘life without matter’ was as revolutionary as that first brush with extra-terrestrial life on Encedalus.
The discovery sparked a flurry of explorations to Doliea 581d. From atop vast and distant space stations, humans launched probes and aimed their high-power telescopes towards the planet’s surface. Once conventional means of communication proved futile, special psi-units were brought all the way from Earth Mark III to visit the planet’s surface and establish dialogue between the two species.
The psi-units returned with only one major revelation about this unique species:
They are dying.
The second was my novel for National Novel Writing Month two years ago:
My novel is tentatively called "Nature Boy," a magical realism urban fairytale about a young werewolf cat burglar who falls in love with the married couple whose house he broke into (though he kind of falls in love with the house first). The wife is consensually possessed by a demon and the husband takes pictures in his sleep that become famous works of art. Without knowing about the burglary, they fall in love back. But will they find out the truth?I wrote a whole 50,000 words of it already for NaNoWriMo, but really in terms of plot it's only about half-finished. So, definitely a full-length novel.
Obviously they're two incredibly different stories, in genre and tone. One is about space and death and identity: in order to survive the extinction of her species, the alien protagonist of the novel gives up her true form and takes a human body. The other is about magic and life and self-acceptance: to win the love of his dream couple, the werewolf protagonist has to come to terms with his deeply troubled past and his lycanthropy.
