Fandom Promos

[galerian_ash]

Have you already decided what fandom(s) to write for? If so, how about doing a little promoting? :D

We've all chosen tiny obscure canons, needless to say. But by posting here you might be able to entice someone else to give it a try — or perhaps you'll even run into a fellow fan, who can't wait to read your coming fic.

Your promo can be long or short, and contain whatever you feel like. Want to post a couple of intriguing screencaps from a movie? Quote a few paragraphs from a book? Rec the best episode of an anime or a TV series? Talk about why you love your favorite character and/or pairing from your fandom? It's all good; anything goes!

Comments

[atamascolily]

The League of Peoples series by James Alan Gardner is a set of sci-fi novels from the late '90s and early '00s--each one is an independent story and can be read as a stand-alone, but there are a number of recurring characters and occasional references to the events of earlier installments. Each book is written in first person, with a strong narrative voice; there are lots of female characters, and several poly and queer relationships.

The premise is that humanity has finally spread out across the galaxy, but they aren't alone; the aforementioned League contains a wide range of sentient species, some of which are so advanced they might as well be gods. The number one rule of the League is extremely simple: "No dangerous non-sentient creature will ever be allowed to move from its home system to another star system"--and 'dangerous non-sentient' means any creature ready to kill a sentient creature or let a sentient creature die through inaction. No human understands how it works, but is so thoroughly and completely enforced, it might as well be a law of nature; if you attempt to jump to another system before/after committing murder, you will simply disappear en route.

Of course, humanity is still humanity, so you still have people being aggressive and stupid, it's just channeled into things other than outright wars.

The volume I'm focusing on for this challenge is Vigilant (1999), which follows Faye Smallwood, a human on the planet Demoth, as she copes with a fatal plague that is wiping out her non-human neighbors, the Oolom. (This was an intense sequence back in the day and is even more so post-2020.) A chance encounter with a dying Oolom woman named Zillif inspires Faye to eventually join the Vigil, a planet-wide watchdog organization dedicated to wiping our corruption. Members of the Vigil are implanted with a link-seed, a cybernetic implant that gives them access to a tremendous amount of data and resources that forces them to remain objective--but has the power to fry their minds if they misuse it. As someone starts assassinating her co-workers, Faye is caught up in a mystery involving a sentient rogue wormhole and the ancient civilization that manufactured the plague thousands of years earlier. Her allies are her crazy Oolom supervisor, a unexpectedly sentient AI, and Festina Ramos, the protagonist of previous volumes, who pops in unexpectedly when the larger human government beyond Demoth starts poking its nose in Faye's business.

All of the League of People novels I've read to date have been solid speculative space adventures with creative world-building and lots of snarky banter. Gardner has a real knack for introducing details early on that come back and smack you in the face before the end. I like them all, but Vigilant is my favorite because the institution of the Vigil is so fascinating and compelling, and we don't get to see as much of it as I'd like... hence the impetus to write fic for it. I find Faye and Zillif's relationship particularly moving, and I wonder what Faye's life might have looked like if Zillif had lived.

This series is out of print and fairly obscure; I've picked up my copies in used bookstores, but you can probably find it online as well.