The Grain: A World Bible in Eleven Modules

Working title. A near-future hard-SF setting for a short story collection. What this is A shared world, not a plot. Eleven modules, each deriving from the ones before it, ending in a kit for making individual stories. Nothing here is a premise on its own; everything here is a condition stories happen inside. The setting is the solar system, after reusable lift and orbital refuelling made offworld industry possible. It has no dates and refuses to acquire any — progression is tracked by which thresholds a place has crossed, not by a year, and Module 10 explains how to site a story without a chronology. Travel is slow, power is scarce, mass is precious, conversation at range becomes correspondence, and bodies do not last. None of those constraints lift. Someone in it A suit fitter, three terms into a works, wants her daughter to be able to leave. The leaving is the cheap part — down the well costs almost nothing, and that is the trap, because the girl grew here and the well will take her…