Hey writing gang. Just checking in to ask a simple question. What's the most unique scifi setting you've ever come up with? This is a genre thick with layered dimensions, space travel, and other such scientifically based fun, so I'm stoked to hear. For me, it would probably have to be a massive three-level Tower from my novel series, Strand. In this series, the Nether Layer (bottom) is the only part of the Tower that touches the planet. It's full of wilderness, wild animals, and tribes subdued by Strand's military. The people here (besides the guards) are considered unfit for biological Augments. In the Terra Layer (middle) there are blue collared workers Augmented for work efficiency and strength. In the Venter Layer (top) are the planners, developers, and designers, who are mentally Augmented, mostly. Curious to hear what some of your best scifi settings are!
just to say as a writer 'most unique' makes my teeth itch - something's ether unique or it isn't, its not comparative
Nothing too special. A few moons/submoons, Ceres, Pluto, and Mars. Though in the first book the primary is mainly a massive battle ship, cruising through space built by the Centurians. In the sequel there is Mars, with a massive city filling up the Melas Chasma. Then good old Earth, with extremely huge sprawling cities, and forests, deserts, and all the things one expects to find on Terra to begin with. So not overly outlandish for the most part, but with all the other elements, you have fairly understandable settings set in the 28th century with fairly reasonable alien species. That and lots, and lots of things going boom, or becoming bloody mangled chunks.
I'd like to turn dystopia on its head. Yes, destroy civilization, but utterly. Yes, destroy society, but put something different in its place, from a radically alternative perspective, as accidental as human survival. Then let it evolve from a few simple ironies and paradoxes. A new twist on Jihad, from an unexpected place, and a final choice. Oblivion, or... So the setting is the 'clean slate', with a twist, right here and now, on Earth. Information and technology 'reboot' a little differently, making the setting drastically different from a post-apocalyptic or dystopian future. Apocalyptopia?
There are only two sci-fi universes that held my interest. The first as/is WH40K and the second was Ian Bainks’ Culture ‘series’ of novels. The worlds were not original I just liked the epic scale of them and the darkness, humour, nitty-gritty atmosphere and the exploration of human nature through such landscapes - and in WH40k the exploration of human nature through an ‘alien’ lens. What you mention above sounds identical to WH40K hive worlds.
Recently, I started thinking about a series of stories chronicling alien colonization of prehistoric Earth and Mars--specifically, Earth's late Triassic period. It would actually be two groups of aliens encountering each other over ancient Earth and then working together to explore and colonize this solar system. The series would end with both colonies wiped out, of course.
