Author's Commentary

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MANIFEST

• I love in-universe documentation, especially when you can use it to give a Dramatis Personae page some flair. Right off the bat, we have not only everyone's full name and pronouns, but some details about the world: the time frame, AIs that get coequal billing with humans, Korean reunification, Lunar settlements, space elevators, and some logistical details about Malang.
• Alexandria is very much a mix of Janet from The Good Place (general appearance and genderlessness), Sulla from O Human Star (being both literally and metaphorically trans, having a very awkward relationship with the circumstances of their creation), and Hatsune Miku (blue color scheme, fashion icon, very large and at times extremely horny fandom.)
• Although I've hardly seen any Star Trek, the crew's composition owes a lot to the template it pioneered: a diverse set of people who each have a personal tie to some aspect of the future's politics, plus a non-human crewmate who can Philosophize.
• I'm not interested in clarifying Arjun's assigned sex at birth, since "Transmasc and enjoys 'scruffy grad student' gender euphoria" and "Genderweird AMAB nerd who's happy to table the issue forever" are both very good.
• Every human crew member is partially named after a friend from college, and I only realized later that "Phạm" also works as a reference to Phạm Tuân, which fits perfectly with Lunar naming conventions.
• The character who would eventually become Kuiper was originally Vietnamese-Australian, but as soon as I established that the Moon had its own communities, I thought "well of course I need a crew member from there."
• While compiling the timeline at the end, I realized that no specific events happened in the 2200s, so I moved every date from 2200 onward a century forward, which I think helps the setting feel more cohesive anyway. (And there might eventually be a big timeskip forward...)

Day 0

• First thing
• Second thing
• Third thing

Babel

• First glimpses of the state of Earth in the late 23rd century: Lagos has become the world's largest city, thanks in part to the world's first space elevator being built in Gabon. I wanted this world to have some huge political realignments, with West Africa and South Asia as the primary hubs of political and economic power, with only vague hints about what happened to America and China beyond "they fractured very badly."
• Second thing
• Third thing

Day 1

• Oblast Strike Tactics was very briefly mentioned in Parhelion, but here I could flesh it out as a pop-cultural interpretation of Russian military history.
• Second thing
• Third thing

Anthropocene

• Some more context on the history of the ERA and what it does. I wanted it to be a bit inevitably bloated and inefficient, but still doing important work on a scale nobody else could achieve.
• The name "New York City" is now a distant historical trivia fact, like "Siam" or "Constantinople." I didn't get a chance to bring this up in the text, but the backstory here is that as the US fell apart, a protest-occupation a la Alcatraz in 1969 just kept going until it became the legitimate government.
• Third thing

Day 5

• First thing
• Second thing
• Third thing

Dead Weight

• Nations rise and fall, long-standing barriers and feuds are broken, but sullen teenagers are eternal.
• Here we have the first mention (and rough date) of the War of the South China Sea, a late-21st-century war that boiled over into global war and environmental meltdown, prompting the creation of Lunar greenhouses, the ERA, and massive political realignments.
• There are some details here and there about how China has fallen apart alongside America, like "To so many people, Pyongyang carried the same charge as Carthage, Stalingrad, or Beijing." But even before that, the fact that there could be a South-led reunification is already a sign that the international order is very different. (At present, China will never allow a country with that many American troops to border it.)
• It was a fun challenge to write about someone taking a train trip to Busan without ever using the exact phrase "train to Busan."
• "Unity Park, a national park that coincidentally bisected the country along the 38th parallel" is possibly my favorite gag in the story. (Slots 2 and 3 are the Alexandria fandom and the MicroHab Portable Airtight Living Quarters.)

Delve

• The "Day X" naming convention of the Malang chapters breaks as the central plot begins!
• Chapter-count-wise, this is the middle of the story, but only about a quarter of the way through the pages/words. These chapters balloon a lot, but I think that's okay - there's an escalating cycle of more things to reference and more ways to expand on them.
• The payoff from their backstory chapters: Arjun sees old buried ruins as neat places to explore, and Eun Sol sees them as dark places to never be messed with.

Social Climbing

• I wish I could've shown off more of Lunar culture and aesthetics from an outsider's point of view (although the Lunatown segment later on kind of fills that role.)
• Lunar culture converged from several factors: it began with emergency seed vaults and greenhouses during the worst of Earth's environmental crises; living in space makes people desperate for greenery at all; tech in space should be kept to a minimum of electronics and moving parts for ease of repair; strenuous farm labor is a good way to counteract muscle atrophy. Thus, smug Moon hippies.
• The Lunar Federation is based a lot on Anarres from The Dispossessed, and a mirror-image of Terra Ignota's Utopians. They keep the Utopian culture-hero naming convention, but their aesthetic is very willfully rustic, they don't have much burning desire to reach for new worlds, and the antipathy with the broader world is almost all from their side.
• An ad-hoc explanation for why Lunar name references stop in the 21st century: the first days of the Lunar Federation were a thrilling, terrifying time of nation-building, and as people often do, they named their kids (and renamed themselves) after beloved cultural heroes. Yet as Lunar society grew to reject Great Man History, the name corpus stopped growing, but names like Hypatia and Stanislaw and Kuiper just sound "normal" in the same way that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (by themselves) don't sound like Biblical references.
• Thus, the names also play well with the Moon's "rustic cabins in space"/"deeply conservative Utopianism" theme: "All the most exciting luminaries of at least three hundred years ago!"
• Iceland is another inspiration for the Lunar Federation: a very remote, hard-to-settle place with a weird mix of ancient and hyper-modern design, which most people either don't think about or only know as an exaggerated cartoon.
• My conception of the Lunar accent is Scandosotan plus Vietnamese-style intonations. (And I have been informed by a friend who grew up in the Midwest that this accent already exists.)
• I wanted to leave Lunar family structures deliberately vague, except for biological ties not being that important; Huygens is deliberately a quasi-parental figure, and maybe I'll explore the dynamics more in any spinoffs.
• The Lunar web domain was originally .lu, which it turns out is already the national domain of Luxembourg; .lun worked better anyway, but I like the idea of a "plot twist" that the Lunar Federation is actually Luxembourg blasted into space.
• The Schiaparelli Resort and Casino was inspired by, among other things: the Fyre Festival, shopping centers that are either on their last legs or were never fully finished, and Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino (a paraphrased line from Four Out of Five is in Jun's social media header.)

Memoriam

• First thing
• Second thing
• The grand reveal of what Trilaterals look like! Their general look and feel stayed fairly stable since their concept first congealed around when I was writing Delve.

Immaterial

• I'm very proud of this title's triple-meaning: "intangible," "related to the soul," and "irrelevant."
• In my pipe-dream animated adaptation of the story, most of it is in stylized 2D animation but this chapter is rendered in Source Filmmaker or something.
• Åse and Erlend are both the names of college classmates.
• Another hint at the world's political shakeups: "the Black Bauhinia festival of Hong Kong."
• This chapter was meant to play off of Memoriam in the sense of "Yes, this is deeply fucked-up, but if only every existential mystery had a tidy answer and a Q&A session with God." (But would you even want that?)
• I had debated sprinkling in references to Alexandria as a consumer product in previous chapters, but I'm glad I held off on it to make it the reader's discovery just as much as Alexandria's.
• A small Easter egg: Alexandria was created by a Persian.

Pioneer

• First thing
• Second thing
• Third thing

Aptitude

• This chapter was meant as the story's last hurrah for the Earth worldbuilding, while also introducing a bunch of new things that can be later referenced in Stellar Elegy. (And it'll have a bit of its own Earth worldbuilding!)
• Translucent-Titties, firmly upholding the editorial standards of alexxxandria.club, is possibly my favorite super-minor character.
• There are several real Japanese restaurants named Honshu (the name of Japan's central island), but I've never been to any of them - I just think it's a great name.
• I had a lot of fun putting the screws to Emmanuel - I love characters saying things that cut very deep for reasons they don't, or can't know.
• From the start, I knew I wanted this chapter to end with Emmanuel gazing down at Lagos, but the structure of how it came about was fairly late.

Orison

• I didn't want to dilute the energy of the finale too much, since Aptitude was already monstrously long and had a nice thematic flow into both Day 0 and Babel.
• This chapter serves a few functions: recapping some core plot beats, reiterating some themes (especially "sending out messages you might never hear a response to") and hinting at a structural change that will come in Stellar Elegy.

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