oligopsony

Please click here if you like worldbuilding or outsider art or planetary science or basically anything that would cause me to associate with you at all, really.

Obviously Middle-Earth was influential in a number of ways, but what drove it for Tolkien? Let's simplify and say you have a hard core of scientific-artistic interest in his area of expertise, languages, around which accretes political leanings (localist conservatism) emotional notes that he finds especially compelling (lacrimae rerum and all that) Catholicism et cetera. The appeal and achievement emerges from all of this as a gestalt.

Planetocopia is like that, except it's anarchocommunist idyll and furry fanart accreting around the hard core of physical geography. A number of the planets are explicit homages/loving corrections to Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin, which shouldn't surprise. If a committee were designing this - if I were designing this - the furry stuff would go right out, there'd be all sorts of political and military conflict, and (of course) it would be worse.

I head back to here every so often and, very rarely, there's an update. It's great!