The Secant is filled with nonhuman civilizations, the discovery of which triggers the split within human culture between Xenophobes and, well, the rest. The rest who are curious and excited and simply do not understand the fear driving those who wish to isolate humankind from…the Others.
Obviously this is a metaphor for all the intolerances and fears that inform our fraught lives now. On another level, I’ve always wondered what would have happened had Europeans stumbled on America and found a robust culture that had not been decimated by disease, could in fact have given as good as they got.
Again, nothing new in science fiction, but I tried to wring some novel twists out of it.
One thing I explored was the idea that not all civilizations encountered would be “organic” in the sense of developing from original instantiation to the present. Some of them mighty be wholly created or manufactured by other cultures. Hey, if we can play with the idea of genetic manipulation, so can aliens. Hence in Compass Reach, we have two species that may be complete artifacts: the Ranonan and the Vohec.
The Ranonan are a species created to serve as diplomats. I’ll get into them in another post.
The Vohec, on the other hand, serve very different functions.
It is not known just how old the Vohec are as a species. They are insular and their martial reputation dissuades prying. But they are also one of the most malleable. No one, it seems, know just what a Vohec looks like in its “natural” form. More than simple shapeshifters, they can also incorporate tech in novel ways, becoming whatever they to become in order to fulfill whatever mission required.
We meet one in Compass Reach: Rhil Apellon.
Apellon is tasked with safeguarding Fargo, Lis, and Stephen while on Earth. One mimics a human form, but is clearly not human in any sense. They are called Projections. The question is, projections of what? Is the actually Vohec inside the form or elsewhere? Do they even exist within this plane? In other stories, they manifest in different shapes. It is rumored that the Rahalen created both. While the Ranonan readily acknowledge this, the Vohec say nothing.
They can be commissioned by any civilization. There is always the sense, though, that there may be certain lines they will not cross. No one wants to find out where that line is.