As we head into the summer building and convention season, we’re pleased to bring you a genuine, original science-fiction short story and concept art to serve as inspiration for Numereji 2421, written and illustrated by Brandon “Catsy” Bannerman.

We’re keeping “building standards” pretty loose right now, with the exception of tan as the primary background color for the landscape and white for salvaged ship sections. Follow the discussion in the dedicated group on Flickr. In the meantime, happy reading!

“See the stars,” said the recruitment holos, brimming with high-saturation images of well-fed colonists farming an expansive homestead under a sky with multiple moons. “Find a new life in the Stellar Diaspora.” To the inhabitants of Old Earth, it was a compelling argument — Sol 3 was, in the parlance of the time, a “dump”. Two centuries of industrial civilization and a population of billions staggering inexorably towards a Malthusian terminal scenario had turned the planet into a concrete and steel wasteland of cityscapes — a place where a gallon of clean water cost more than a day in a simsense VR pod, solitary living quarters were an expensive luxury, and blue sky was a thing of old twenty-first century threedys. Day-to-day life on Earth was defined by escaping from it as much as possible — and space was the ultimate escape.

Thus began the Stellar Diaspora: mankind’s search for a new home worthy of the name. It began with the generation ships, colossal megastructures the size of a spacescraper intended to support hundreds of families at sublight speeds on the long journey to the nearest extrasolar planets with hydrogen in their spectral lines. But with the invention of the Cheyden faster-than-light drive, the number of worlds with the potential for colonization went from less than ten to more than a hundred virtually overnight.

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