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#WritersCoffeeClub Feb 20: How has a setting surprised you?

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    #WritersCoffeeClub Footnote: "Destiny" tends to show up more in fantasy than SF. On my to-do list is a hard-SF Chosen One narrative—our protag knows from an early age they're not like the other kids in the hive. Only as they near adulthood do they learn that they're a member of a rival eusocial hominin subspecies, and they've been created to infiltrate a neighbouring hive and kill and replace the queen ... Like, "Hellstrom's Hive" meets this whackiness in ants: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w
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    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?I write genre fiction and it is *surprisingly hard* to write a novel in which nobody dies; death tends to be trivialized or used to advance the plot and seldom traumatizes the survivors.To which I say, to hell with that!(Current WIP massacres with gleeful abandon, but it's SF set in a future with lossy mind uploading and replay, so they've effectively got mechanised reincarnation. Societal whackiness ensues.)
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    Ooh I thought of another aspect of letters within fiction. A letter or any other text message is unlike dialog in that it persists to be re-read later, maybe not by the intended recipient, and can be loaded with hidden meanings that you wouldn't expect someone to pick up on or remember accurately if they heard the same words spoken.I used this twice in The Silk Mind, in a letter to the Badger Survey from Doctor Grey, and rather pointed diplomatic letters between him and Celandine.
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    @cstross This reminds me when I was looking for the reading order of the Laundry Files, and stumbled upon some disgruntled Christian's review where he warns others that 'The Fuller Memorandum' contains stuff that he considers very offensive to his beliefs. And then I started listening to 'The Apocalypse Codex' and kept giggling whenever I imagined the poor sod's face when he started this one...