- The future's out to get you.
Avatar had quite a few good ideas, but wasted them. I wanted to see where they went.
TCE is set in the last years of the twenty-first century, where technology force-marched on. Computers and communication technology are cheap and ubiquitous: spectacles can dynamically recognize faces, and newspapers can play video too detailed for the human eye to fully resolve. "Printers" can produce 3D structures from a variety of materials, while the most powerful create entire robots the size of a speck of dust, amongst other Phlebotinum. Medicine can regenerate body parts on demand, and genetically engineered bacteria are used in all aspects of the chemical industry.
The story proper follows a Power Trio, consisting of a Genre Savvy Wonka, a nigh-emotionless Deadpan Snarker, and the nice Straight Man. They arrive on Avalon, the first planet known to host extraterrestrial life. Their mission is quite simple: Use remote-control surrogate bodies to learn as much as they can about the native alien tribe, while also hiding the existence of their own technology. This goes as well as can be expected, with the aliens developing a reluctant trust of the disguised scientists, helped along by direction from the tribe's tree-god.
And then the Imperialist Empire of Kin'ghon arrives.
This contains examples of:
- Human Abduction: Got to get genetic information somehow.
- Alien Invasion: Well, the tribe is being invaded by a group of colonialists...
- Artistic License – Physics: Avalon has a flying mountain. This exact phrase is used.
- Bittersweet Ending: the result of the Moral Guardians reaction to the surrogates.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The aliens can see in ultraviolet, have in-built ethernet jacks, and can feel electromagnetic fields.
- Boldly Coming: Happens, is commented on, gets the Nice Guy in a whole lot of trouble.
- Casual Interstellar Travel: Zig-zags, due to the ansibles.
- Clarke's Third Law: See Deus Ex Machina.
- Crapsack World: Earth's ecology fell apart around 2050 or so.
- Daydream Believer: Well, a certain blockbuster from the turn of the millennium exists in-universe... And then there's the surrogates.
- Deus ex Machina: The most literal interpretation.
- Everyone Are Bastards: Not everyone agrees on what should happen to the other groups they know about.
- Fantastic Racism: Aliens don't get along any better than we do.
- Fantastic Romance: Which gets complicated.
- Gaia's Lament: Gaia is dead. So?
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Genius Bonus: The more obscure Shout Outs. - Going Native: Considered.
- Green-Skinned Space Babe:
- Literary Allusion Title: If you can work out where the more obscure origin of the title, there's the first and second acts.
- Meaningful Name: Lots. The main character is called Jack Stevens Anderson.
- Mighty Whitey: The Empire's representatives try this.
- Moral Guardians: The details of the mission leak. Their reaction is extremely unpleasant.
- Of the People: The humans are accidentally introduced as "the Visitors"
- Planetville: Averted by the Imperial Empire.
- Postmodernism: The computer identifies one of the surrogates as Sam Worthington.
- Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Blue, tailed, noseless.
- Shades of Conflict: (Ideally) Everyone has a point.
- Shout-Out: Lots.
- Subspace Ansible: Used extensively. It's noted that this causes problems.
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Technology Marches On: The Nice Guy is paraplegic. This is not an issue. - Technology Porn
- The Masquerade
- Timey-Wimey Ball: Relativity and ansibles do not mix.
- Troperiffic: Well...
- 20 Minutes in the Future: Begins in the 2090s. Ending is uncertain.
- Working Title
