Ad Luna #2: The Book! And Tree-People

Firstly, Ad Luna is now available in paperback and ebook form on Amazon! Please do check it out – I’m pretty proud of it.

Want to know a little more about the story and the process before you read, though? Well that’s what last week’s post, and this one, are for.

This week I want to talk about tree-people. Specifically, the tree-people who, according to Lucian of Samosata, are a subspecies of the space-elves who live on the Moon in the True History. Here’s how he describes them:

They have a kind of men whom they call the Arboreals, who are brought into the world as follows: Exsecting a man’s right genital gland, they plant it in the ground. From it grows a very large tree of flesh, resembling the emblem of Priapus: it has branches and leaves, and its fruit is acorns a cubit thick. When these ripen, they harvest them and shell out the men.

Mad, right? Leaving aside how disturbing a ‘tree of flesh’ is, it’s amazing to see Lucian so casually describing an alien species in this way. More than that, it’s technically an alien subspecies, as the ordinary Lunars of the True History are very different. They’re essentially elves in space, with several weird differences I won’t get into in this post – but alien as they are they’re still conceived in the… traditional way. Well, I say traditional – Lucian’s Moon has only one gender (male, unsurprisingly), which complicates matters a little – but again that’s a story for another post.

I wanted the Arboreals to figure in Ad Luna. But I didn’t want them to just be men born from trees of flesh. Thankfully, another bit of Lucian’s description gave me a slightly different idea:

Another thing, they have artificial parts that are sometimes of ivory and sometimes, with the poor, of wood, and make use of them in their intercourse.

When coupled with the Lunar clothing of “malleable glass” and bronze, it’s implied, though never stated, that Lucian’s Lunars are able to shape materials like wood and metal in ways we on Earth would never have thought possible – especially in the second century.

So to recap: on one hand, people born out of weird trees, and on the other wood that can be used as a prosthetic… extremity with no hint of ill effects or unnatural movement.

See where I’m going with this?

Here’s a little extract from Ad Luna:

He wished he had paid more attention in school, when he had learned a little of the sciences. The means by which the copperwood tenders had managed to alter the contents of the seed-pods by slow degrees, breeding and crossing and splicing all the strata of the species, were a mystery to Dio. The results were not. He looked down at the striding golems as he spoke, seeing them for the first time as Lucian did; marvels of engineering and biology both. They were so ubiquitous that barely anyone noticed them anymore. Arboreals, in their many specialised forms, were the perfect labourers, haulers, servants. They were strong, and durable, and obeyed orders without question; they did not tire and they did not need to eat. All the sustenance they required came from the water piped into their sleeping-pods, and, when it shone, from the sun above.

Wooden golems! Why have men born of trees of flesh when you can have men born of trees – and not just men, either. Once I’d thought of reimagining the Arboreals this way, the concept of these wooden life-forms spread into a few other places where Lucian’s description left some convenient holes… But you’ll have to read the book to find those for now.

This is just one place where I tried to take Lucian and recast his ideas in a different light. I’ll have more for you next week.

For now, consider getting a copy of Ad Luna for yourself – that way when you read next week’s post you’ll know what I’m talking about.