Plot/Character/Setting working notes PRE snowflake

Core of the plot - what is it about?

1. A trad sci-fi space opera - rise of Seneca, planned manipulation of the humans into submissions, blah, blah, blah (NO)
2. OR (though more difficult to write) the steady morphing of independent humans into something else - the price that is paid to live on Scott's World, to make it their own, is social coherence, to become, in effect, more like ants. Why would Jude have launched the ship? She would have known? So the settlers knew before they came - but where is the conflict? PLOT 2

Higher Background setting links that tie Senca unobtrusively to Interchange/POSL. 

• Sunstorm is the ship that brought the settlers to Scott's World? Launched at some time after Interchange after all, so makes it part of POSL?
• The Procyon mission was a fake, so Alpha century? Barnard's Star and launched by the Martians of the world that Jude builds after Interchange - it's her way of putting the past truly behind her?
• Why would Jude NOT send it to Procyon?
• After that, Seneca is an independent novel.

Notes on the actual setting

• In broad terms kitchen sink type drama living with what the colony knows it must do. Seneca has modelled the population for optimal distribution of personalities. Not everyone has to be in the system' and Seneca alters as little as possible. EPR (Enhanced personality Restructure is thus available to a few - though this is not 'class based'. Seneca decides how many of the different types of procedures and allocates who.
• Different layers of processing: EPR, partial restructure, no restriction, reject.
• monthly announcements of how many restructuring there are.
• Colony itself, largely underground with a huge dome above that cars as 'open space though some high-class accommodation might be there - important to have the cityscape for Seneca Towers
• Evidence of a failed alien ecology from millennia before - the Haradath. Does this start to get too 'Revelation Space'?

Characters

• Character naming: last name, followed by the first letter of the first name. 'Harvi, R.' would thus be Richard Harvi.
• Personality type/level of reconstruction more important than gender - indeed it defines personal pro-nouns.
• Mental health a key issue.

What the influences are, and what NOT to make it:

Is 'kitchen sink':

• Personal stories - blade runner.
• They are not changing the world.
• sense of creeping assimilation where there is nothing you can do - it has come from within your culture, or so close, that you start to seem absurd resisting as more and more take it on.
• The people not taking on new identities are 'resisting' only in the slow, weary sense that they know that the world is passing them by, and have come to an accommodation with that.
• Kitchen sink.
• Where is happiness?
• Where is despair?
• Evolution, not revolution.

Is not space opera:

• Ancillary Justice
• Chasam City or Revelation space
• Dune, etc

Where is the conflict?

Personal conflict as editing spreads. The Sunstorm will have to leave, it is a vast distorting factor in the colonies survival, so the colony has to be pushed to crisis point as the Sunstorm leaves. This is the story of individual responses to that.

Using the Haradath (IF!!!!):

• Told in flashback. A personal story of a Haradath in a colony that will one day be ruins.
• Or are these really the Orna? Or understand the ink between the musical shaping skills of the Haradath and the Orna's dark music. Are the Haradath a more simple race, from which the Orna learnt the art of shaping? This allows the use of the Haradath without giving away the Dark Music of Matter.