// Before we begin, quick shoutout to @Rhubarbes_Lab. We’re a big fan of this image — it looks just like Kuyachi Rao from A Star Too Far. Thanks for letting us use your art!
The timeline for Mharcei’s Earth can be generally divided into three phases: pre-bombardments and post-bombardments, plus the orbital assault being called Astral Twilight (AT) on its own. As the universe unfolds and as we, the readers, are able to engage with the stories, it’s easiest to view any story in the author’s universe as one of these three periods. With that, we gain insight into a universe with Earth as a dystopic governing body, the target of a hostile takeover (pun!) or we see it more as a post-apocalyptic reconstructionist project. The latter circumstances putting Earth woefully behind the rest of the universe.
With the release of A Star Too Far, we get a glimpse of one of those rare pre-AT elements to survive the bombardments of Astral Twilight. Both a horror and a nightmare, she’s beautiful in her own way. Kuyachi Rao — saboteur, moody hacker, little sister is out for her own agenda, and she’s still piecing together why she feels the way she does. We aren’t going into that here, in case you’re still reading, but it’s worth pulling back from the story in the novel and considering the larger implications of what has been going on.
In our contemporary real world, artificial intelligence is a hot topic for debate. In Mharcei’s universe, AI is a footnote. Society has generally moved passed the concerns of Asimov and Cameron & Hurd. Digital evolution has served up bigger and scarier creatures. The question we should be asking ourselves is whether this was part of the reason for Astral Twilight.
There’s no way to know that answer right now. As readers, all we have is inference and conjecture, largely based on stories about unreliable characters. But there are clues, and we are talking about a universe with serious cyberpunk roots. What do you think is going on with Earth? Is Kuyachi a big enough threat to trigger universal attention?
