Lavender Skies

plenty of people simply like to eat food, but in principle, humans no longer explicitly need food to survive except in the sense of providing raw material for self-repairs - though this can be ingested by other means besides eating (such as injection, or even aerosol absorption). however, in the 22nd-23rd centuries as brain-in-a-jar cyberization got properly under way and the beginnings of mind uploading came onto the horizon, a series of settlements was negotiated as the agricultural industries faced the prospect of diminishing human reliance on food and a massive contraction of agricultural markets. these settlements established the precedent that human cyberware would be built dependent on food for energy for the foreseeable future. today there are many places, outside the capitalist world of the Liruma Mandate and its satellites, where food for energy has been abolished. however, it is a useful tool of shoring up social control through scarcity, and sees a considerable degree of public support in sectors where small landowners are forced to sell food to survive (not unlike small peasant farmers in the third world today, lest they fall into worse forms of destitution). "boycotts on food", on the other hand, and the jailbreaking of relevant cyberware restrictions, are a not-unheard of form of revolt in places where the cost of living skyrockets.

to move away from economics, though, there is plenty of passion among cyberized humans for food - and cuisine in Liruma and across Known Space has exploded in variety thanks to the cyberization of the ecology, alongside many dishes recognizable today. although novel foods born from the application of molecular gastonomy are very much a thing today, ecocybernetics takes it to another level as strange new foods can be grown that way from the start, from such things as rainbow "meat" to vegetables with artistic, chandelier-like designs to "smoothie fruits" whose insides freeze into a slush upon being cracked open, similar to a glowstick, and much more. the flexibility of "mechabiology" and nutrient synthesis also means food can be produced without harm to organisms, made of nonliving matter, not unlike milk and honey. in the wake of the end of meat production and particularly the American beef industry in the late 21st-22nd centuries, in favor of less wasteful and more autarkic forms of agriculture not beholden to dependence on American agriculture, many foods adopted new names: chicken nuggets for instance are known today as "American nuggets".

few things i forgot i wanted to add, now that i'm feeling less rushed for time: no longer having need for food doesn't mean that nobody likes food, to be sure - people love food, and i'm a big food appreciator myself. part of Ruby and Diane's story is that they are food traveloguers a la Anthony Bourdain, for one, using it as a vehicle for social commentary as tourists from the quasi-socialist world of the Ibadan Peoples' Industrial Compact to the rest of Known Space. "biochemical translators" are also a common technology: nanotech-based devices that coat the maw and throat and process foods that would otherwise be too alien to digest into biochemically compatible substances, allowing people to sample (or survive) on a wide range of cuisines. that said, it would certainly be nice not to need to eat just to survive.

aside from the American nuggets tidbit, Liruma hosts colonies of all the Mandate superpowers, including Folsom-Fremont, a nation of mixed American and Indonesian heritage which sees a considerable amount of tourism thanks to a resurgent popularity of American aesthetics and admiration for Imperial America by the superpowers of the current era, though considerably warped by the lens of history, a la modern imitators of Rome or Egypt. think perhaps of those funny Brazillian or Korean pizzas and apply a similar logic to the rest of American cuisine - such are the trends of junk food culture across Liruma and the wider Mandate, often served in restaurants superficially aping American aesthetics drawn at random from a wide range of historical periods, from colonial bluecoats to cowboys to Y2K and beyond. and thanks to modern gastrochemistry, you can kind of eat as much junk food as you can pay for with little consequence.

another area where i've given more concrete thought to food in Standard Candles is the Rubija sector - the heavily Maghrebi-Middle Eastern region of the transhuman world where Fumi and her girlfriends live, home to a vibrant culture of coffee houses that serve as both restaurants where most people take their daily meals and hubs where much of the functioning of civil society is carried out, similar in a way to convenience stores in Taiwan. you might grab rainbow shwarma with your friends for breakfast and dinner and do your taxes in the same day in the same building. at the same time, Maori cuisine is fairly popular in the sector via hangi barbecue food carts, which have spread across the border with the Liruma Mandate.

you can find everything about my kobolds' and dragons' world in the mothership safira tag 🐲

thank you! it's because my friend to whom the Mother's Grace belongs was inspired by the Eclipse Star Destroyer and wanted something of similar grandeur. i've always had a healthy appreciation for giant ships myself, though, and i suppose i simply think the idea of nomadic ship-nations is quite neat; the dragon Motherships of Mothership Safira certainly qualify. Liruma Polis from Standard Candles is in a sense a giant alien spaceship, with alien ruins stretching through its caverns that brought humans into the multiverse in what they call the Great Abduction, though nobody has figured out how to turn them on again. it is nice to imagine being able to bring home to places far away, and to imagine places that travel far and wide, in general.

polises (large space habitats) all feature some kind of ecology, not least because the ecology and human machinery are now largely the same thing, in the transhuman milieu of my worlds. this is what i call ecocybernetics in my (nevertheless incredibly lengthy, lol) introductory guide to my worlds, although more precisely, ecocybernetics refers to the general practice of ecological engineering (hence cybernetics, in the classical sense of the science of complex systems).

for the humans of Standard Candles, ecocybernetics developed out of the dovetailing needs of long-term space colonization and ecological repair in the wake of the climate catastrophe. having the ability to fabricate an ecology from whole cloth and adapt to unorthodox problems, such as the soil chemistry or gravity levels of other planets or the mixed gravity levels of an artificial-gee space colony, means you are in a much better position to tell what's going wrong in an ecosystem and fix its problems.

over time, ecological engineering increasingly entwined with biotech, nanotech, robotics and industrial machinery. thus, over the course of centuries - much like humans themselves, who are uploaded minds living in (varyingly) bio-alike, immortal robotic bodies - the ecology itself has become "robotized", taking the form of a variety of mechaflora and mechafauna - "fusing green and machine into new kinds of forest that communicate by wi-fi and chitter with artificial intelligence, wired to the grid". this serves several purposes for intercosmic civilization:

1. more efficient production of complex chemicals and materials that would otherwise require conventional agriculture / forestry or petrochemical industry, such as food, textiles, plastics, composites, all sorts of polymers. nanotech almost goes without saying, especially since much nanotech derives from biochemistry. as a side effect of this, predator-prey relationships and meat production have been abolished in favor of less wasteful relations of mutual benefit and coordination between organisms.
2. industrial waste can be completely recycled by ecosystems. because industry and the ecology are made of the same stuff (and are now largely the same thing), and are part of the same "nutrient cycle", human industry is not toxic to the ecology. robotic wetlands and bushy trees are a crucial feature of the recycling infrastructure of any large colony, especially a Polis.
3. the "industrial stack" required to sustain multiversal civilization, and the population levels needed to manage it, can be greatly shrunk. hybridizing industry with the ecology means that industrial products from pipes to spaceship parts can literally grow on trees.
4. devices and buildings can now self-repair, sporting circulatory systems and "organs" to manage healing. these may be relatively concealed, but if you crack your smartphone you will find veins oozing rubbery sealant that quickly scabs over.

because of this, greenery is standard for space colonies in Standard Candles, often lush. at the same time, many things that resemble familiar flora and fauna actually serve quite different functions, and look different from biological counterparts. because the ecosystem is wired into the utility grid, leaves often aren't used for solar power, but for filtering particles and chemicals out of the air and managing wind flow. the "organs" of a cyber-plant might look boxy and angular as easily as organic. etc.