A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer who is very unhappy with her job and desperately wants to change it and become an explorer, but feels like she must stay in her current job for the good of her hive! The story details her becoming less happy and satisfied, until she eventually makes new friends in her fiction-reading group who encourage her to tell the hive-manager that she’s unhappy and wants to switch jobs. She does this, and becomes much happier, and finds a new valuable type of fungus for the colony, that is eventually used to make a new kind of antibacterial. It is clearly written with a moral lesson to tell people about your problems and not just tough them out.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG, featuring several books of additional content based on other series, and a wide variety of different powersets. Nearly three hundred different personality traits are listed in the original alone, all with various mechanical benefits and downsides. 

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. An additional eight powersets, 412 character traits, and new faction-loyalty and relationship mechanics for the RPG above are included, all inspired by this series. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.

A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer who is very unhappy with her job and desperately wants to change it and become an explorer, but feels like she must stay in her current job for the good of her hive! The story details her becoming less happy and satisfied, until she eventually makes new friends in her fiction-reading group who encourage her to tell the hive-manager that she’s unhappy and wants to switch jobs. She does this, and becomes much happier, and finds a new valuable type of fungus for the colony, that is eventually used to make a new kind of antibacterial. It is clearly written with a moral lesson to tell people about your problems and not just tough them out.

TILES is excited to see this and it is straightforwardly approved; while the moral lesson is straightforward, it's a good and prosocial one!

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

TILES is excited to read this, with the caveat that the morality of capital punishment in alien hives may be quite different from the morality of capital punishment in their own world and that readers should not read too much into such as describing the relevant moral considerations and factors in their own social milieu.

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG, featuring several books of additional content based on other series, and a wide variety of different powersets. Nearly three hundred different personality traits are listed in the original alone, all with various mechanical benefits and downsides. 

There's... considerable debate over this one. The aliens' views of the benefits and downsides of different personality traits are not consistent with Towertopian psychologists' views on these matters -- in fact, some of the personality traits described don't even identifiably exist in Towertopia! Whether the book is intended to be accurate or merely fun is also disputed among TILES members. Additionally, without the other series that some of this is based on, some members of TILES are loath to approve it for fear that outside content will prove inappropriate.

Ultimately, though, this is approved for publication, with an introduction and translator's note that emphasizes that it should be treated as based on an alien psychology and not necessarily accurate to Towertopian experience, but nevertheless interesting as a reflection on an alien culture and psychology.

A spacehistory-romance-tragic novel (it is marked as such on the cover) about how three people (a persecuted aristocrat, a time-traveler from the past and a scientist/schemer) try and fail to fix a horribly flawed and tragic culture, the aristocrat carefully working within its evil and arbitrary rules, the time-traveler lying to achieve power so she can use it to improve the system, and the scientist/schemer openly defying the rules and trying to reinvent morality on her own, who end up in a complicated love-dodecahedron with each other and with several other equally tragic characters. There are no sex scenes on page but lots and lots of characters being unhappy about how the decisions they're making For The Greater Good are ruining their love lives. Over the course of the story, all of the protagonists are destroyed by the compromises they make and thereby come into conflict, and at the end they all fail and the society continues unfixed. The culture is apparently post-apocalyptic; people paying attention may notice that the pre-apocalyptic culture was also post-apocalyptic. Also there are multipage spaceship battles, most of which seem to exist primarily so characters can make agonized moral choices during them; an author's appendix at the end explains that everything is a melded adaptation of six different adaptations of an ancient legend theoretically based on history, and spends several pages on detailing all the inspirations; the cultural translator's appendix adds several more, including an explanation of the variety of the default-standard-fictional-setting-with-spaceships that they are using and how the spaceships do not technically violate the known laws of physics but also would not work.

(Also, the Aevylmarch wants to know Towertopia's fanfiction policies.)

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. An additional eight powersets, 412 character traits, and new faction-loyalty and relationship mechanics for the RPG above are included, all inspired by this series. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.

When the TILES evaluators finally get through reading all of this, listening to the music, and running several sessions of an experimental RPG campaign (several of the TILES people really like RPGs, OK?) they approve it as an inspiring tale, with a cautionary note that one should of course not in fact bargain with hostile otherworldly creatures in real life. Chaste intimate friendships are a popular theme in Towertopian culture, so this seems likely to find an audience, at least among those who are willing to get Really Into a continuity... and Towertopia has lots of those!

Green has enclosed a cultural note. Greens are frequently bisexual and have had relatively unmarked gay marriage for basically their whole history. Any story with more than about ten people in it is going to have somebody in there who is mentioned to have at least kissed somebody of the same sex. They are willing to allow that Towers can edit the genders of characters, if they really want, preferably the most minor characters possible, though this won't capture all the cases; but they don't want to ship the stories in that format because censorship confuses them so they might over- or under-do it, and if the books are old or whatever it would be hard to have the original author do the editing.

--

A doorstopper novel about a newly oathed Committed of Truth having a handwaved physics lab accident while there as a witness to the experimental results, and landing in an alternate universe where being committed to tell the truth is a serious liability. He wins over a local girl after she's initially incredibly suspicious of him because sliders are rare and sliders who aren't just pretending that they have to tell the truth as a thin tactic to make their lies believable are rarer, but he sticks to his oath through dangerous situations and she realizes he means it and helps him navigate the world in which they find themselves. They manage to send his family a letter but he does not go home.

A children's book about talking big cats (anthropomorphic enough to eat sandwiches and manipulate objects manifestly designed for human hands, but not enough to wear clothes); the protagonist is a tiger, and goes to a demystification program to get tours of factories and offices and see how performers practice and prepare backstage and stuff like that. It's a long book but each chapter is quite short.

A nonfiction memoir about someone's deconversion from an animist sect, driven by her frustration about how all the spirits supposedly around her were not in fact capable of good faith negotiation like a normal person and in fact if she wanted her disk reader to work she had to take it to a repair shop, which wasn't even owned by an animist, and force it to; in fact if she wanted her house clean she had to clean it, not ask nicely; in general if she wants stuff to happen correctly she has to think of inanimate objects like things and not like spirits. Describes her gradual reconciliation with her family after she suffers a long period of alienation because of being reactively allergic to all their propitiation rituals.

A rambly cowritten story about a planet with castes that is mistreating one of the castes and the travails of this one family and the people they confide in as they try, desperately, in a way that could destroy them all if discovered, to nudge the arc of history towards justice at a critical juncture.

A middle-grade nonfiction demystification book about engineering bridges; the careful textbooks which measure are represented as helpfully color-coded and well-organized, and every step of building a bridge is touched upon, though it doesn't specify exactly where e.g. the steel girders they order come from, just what specifications they have to order them to.

A long-running TV show available in broadcast, dense, and padded formats depending on whether you want the fight scenes and atmospheric shots and isolated plot-irrelevant jokes and metatextual fake advertisements and surplus seconds of anything else the trimmers had their eye on removed so you can just blitz through the core story, or if you want all of that and also stuff they cut for broadcast length included. It's about the future people of Green sending FTL spaceships out to make contact with other species, mostly though not all lower tech, having lots of alien-of-the-week diplomacy conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-arc diplomatic conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-series precursor ruins research project. Also ensemble drama. Lots of that.

A musical about ten generations of a family that breeds a particular kind of dog (it takes care of sheep - like, mostly it herds them, but it can also detect if they're sick or parasitized or injured, and be trained to assist with shearing (there's a number about how the dog would certainly do it itself if it had hands and a character who gets sidetracked trying to invent a device that will allow that despite handlessness).

A spacehistory-romance-tragic novel (it is marked as such on the cover) about how three people (a persecuted aristocrat, a time-traveler from the past and a scientist/schemer) try and fail to fix a horribly flawed and tragic culture, the aristocrat carefully working within its evil and arbitrary rules, the time-traveler lying to achieve power so she can use it to improve the system, and the scientist/schemer openly defying the rules and trying to reinvent morality on her own, who end up in a complicated love-dodecahedron with each other and with several other equally tragic characters. There are no sex scenes on page but lots and lots of characters being unhappy about how the decisions they're making For The Greater Good are ruining their love lives. Over the course of the story, all of the protagonists are destroyed by the compromises they make and thereby come into conflict, and at the end they all fail and the society continues unfixed. The culture is apparently post-apocalyptic; people paying attention may notice that the pre-apocalyptic culture was also post-apocalyptic. Also there are multipage spaceship battles, most of which seem to exist primarily so characters can make agonized moral choices during them; an author's appendix at the end explains that everything is a melded adaptation of six different adaptations of an ancient legend theoretically based on history, and spends several pages on detailing all the inspirations; the cultural translator's appendix adds several more, including an explanation of the variety of the default-standard-fictional-setting-with-spaceships that they are using and how the spaceships do not technically violate the known laws of physics but also would not work.

TILES approves this work, though it is released with a somewhat heavy-handed introduction about how this story illustrates the Perils of Moral Compromise and obviously people should not actually act like these characters in real life. A minor fandom arises, but seems much more interested in the fictional spaceships and technology used, debating what the pre- and pre-pre-apocalyptic culture should have looked like, etc. than in the actual characters.

(Also, the Aevylmarch wants to know Towertopia's fanfiction policies.)

Towertopia is fine with fanfiction, though if the original author requests against such it's considered in bad taste to write it. Towertopia also has shorter copyright terms than Earth, so things enter the public domain more quickly.

An epic poem about an ancient king, presented in the original with extensive annotations. Full translations are going to be legitimately tricky; it's long, it's gorgeous, and the poetic form is pretty strict and doesn't adapt well to the rhythms of other languages, but the writer keeps doing this thing where the rhyme scheme and meter highlight underlying thematic connections between different lines—anyway. The plot begins with an introductory section where the king is going around doing atrocities in a very badass ancient-legendary-figure sort of way, right up until a random peasant girl lights him on fire with her magic powers and he immediately falls madly in love and drops everything to beg her to marry him, then spends the next two-thirds of the poem gradually lightening up on the atrocities front, partly because he has now realized that peasants are people and partly because his wife keeps arguing with him and occasionally threatening to light him on fire again, which he always responds to with a confused mix of fear, adoration, and occasionally anger. The queen's power to set fire to her husband is depicted very obviously and straightforwardly, discussed in the text and the dialogue; the king's reciprocal power to have his wife executed is left completely to subtext and implication, only barely hinted at by means such as using epithets for her that emphasize her fearlessness whenever he gets angry. Accompanying notes explain that the poem is an allegory for real historical events, with the queen standing in for the entire Phoenix archetype, which did appear during that approximate historical era and did have those approximate powers and did have approximately that effect on ancient kings' tendency to oppress people although the exact mechanism was obviously very different.

Extremely well-researched historical fiction detailing the life of a high priestess of the River Kingdom who, by contrast to most high priestesses of the River Kingdom, did actual politics instead of spending all her time managing the movement of water. One gets the impression that the author wishes they could spend all their time managing the movement of water; lovingly detailed descriptions of River Kingdom plumbing and water management take up a solid third of the book, intermingled with plenty of inner monologue from the high priestess and lots of interactions with very well-fleshed-out side characters. An appendix carefully distinguishes side characters for whom there is historical evidence (and what that evidence covered) from side characters the author made up (and the census data and contemporary sources from which they extrapolated those characters' likely traits). An additional appendix tries to explain the context of the Ondine archetype so the aliens can properly appreciate it, but the author admits that they're not very good at explaining this sort of thing and recommends some other reference material to interested reader.

A duology of very long fantasy novels, which turn out to be collectively about 40% appendix by pagecount. The appendices cover worldbuilding, conlangs, and a set of six different detailed maps of the world, each from the perspective of one of the major nations involved in the plot, all of which have subtle disagreements with each other on matters such as which landmarks are important, what they are called, and who owns them. The plot consists of a ragtag yet lovable ensemble cast, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control which accidentally leave them the only people in the world capable of saving it from a cataclysmic threat, having breakdowns about how they're not ready for this and then going ahead and doing their best anyway. In the end, they pull it off by the skin of their teeth and with rather more casualties than any of them are comfortable with. The second volume has a long denouement consisting mostly of our heroes leaning on each other and their friends and loved ones to help them cope with all their realistically-described trauma once the crisis is over; the last chapter concludes when they're all psychologically stable again and leading healthy, thriving lives, and the epilogue shows a bittersweet scene of the six of them holding a private memorial ceremony together ten years later, after which they are going to attend a massive celebration being held in their honour on the anniversary of their success.

A book for first-school children (aged six through eight) in which a small child is abused by her parents and decides that this is unacceptable behavior on her parents' part. She sets out to find a different family. It is mostly a comedic fish-out-of-water story about the difficulty she has adjusting to various other families' rules-- this one prays together as a family, this one doesn't let anyone watch television, this one goes hiking constantly, this one will only let her have ONE dessert-- until eventually she goes to live with the monk who runs her Children's After School Club. She lives happily ever after. The abuse isn't exactly graphic, but it is clearly depicted: the girl is scared of her parents because they hit her and call her nasty names. The book also seems to think that going and looking for a different family if your current family abuses you is perfectly reasonable behavior.

Green has enclosed a cultural note. Greens are frequently bisexual and have had relatively unmarked gay marriage for basically their whole history. Any story with more than about ten people in it is going to have somebody in there who is mentioned to have at least kissed somebody of the same sex. They are willing to allow that Towers can edit the genders of characters, if they really want, preferably the most minor characters possible, though this won't capture all the cases; but they don't want to ship the stories in that format because censorship confuses them so they might over- or under-do it, and if the books are old or whatever it would be hard to have the original author do the editing.

This leads to a lot of controversy among the TILES panel. Sexuality between people of the same sex is of course known to Towertopians, but it is considered contrary to the natural law and a degradation of the beauty of intimate chaste friendships. Some of the panelists want all Green fiction suppressed for this reason. Ultimately, though, the panel decides that they will analyze it on a case-by-case basis and make edits as needed, ideally editing sexual relationships into chaste ones rather than changing character genders where possible, though for marriages they will likely have to bite the bullet and pick a character to genderswap.

A doorstopper novel about a newly oathed Committed of Truth having a handwaved physics lab accident while there as a witness to the experimental results, and landing in an alternate universe where being committed to tell the truth is a serious liability. He wins over a local girl after she's initially incredibly suspicious of him because sliders are rare and sliders who aren't just pretending that they have to tell the truth as a thin tactic to make their lies believable are rarer, but he sticks to his oath through dangerous situations and she realizes he means it and helps him navigate the world in which they find themselves. They manage to send his family a letter but he does not go home.

TILES approves this as an inspiring tale of loyalty to Truth even when it's hard, though it's not entirely sure what a Committed of Truth actually is.

A children's book about talking big cats (anthropomorphic enough to eat sandwiches and manipulate objects manifestly designed for human hands, but not enough to wear clothes); the protagonist is a tiger, and goes to a demystification program to get tours of factories and offices and see how performers practice and prepare backstage and stuff like that. It's a long book but each chapter is quite short.

This is straightforwardly approved. Not necessarily the most challenging literature or whatever but it's interesting to see this sort of thing from other cultures.

A nonfiction memoir about someone's deconversion from an animist sect, driven by her frustration about how all the spirits supposedly around her were not in fact capable of good faith negotiation like a normal person and in fact if she wanted her disk reader to work she had to take it to a repair shop, which wasn't even owned by an animist, and force it to; in fact if she wanted her house clean she had to clean it, not ask nicely; in general if she wants stuff to happen correctly she has to think of inanimate objects like things and not like spirits. Describes her gradual reconciliation with her family after she suffers a long period of alienation because of being reactively allergic to all their propitiation rituals.

Approved! The reviewers write nice things about how this story illustrates both a superstitious perspective and also the admirable struggle to escape from such, to be loyal to the truth even when that leads to consequences, and so on. That said, they totally miss that it's nonfiction, as animism has not endured in Towertopia and hence this seems like a fantasy conceit and metaphor for smaller-scale superstition -- if the Green author ever finds out about this she may be perplexed at the popularity of her "fictional memoir"!

A rambly cowritten story about a planet with castes that is mistreating one of the castes and the travails of this one family and the people they confide in as they try, desperately, in a way that could destroy them all if discovered, to nudge the arc of history towards justice at a critical juncture.

TILES approves this story as well, but it receives somewhat poor reviews for the rambly nature, which is generally frowned upon in Towertopian fiction and which some misinterpret as reflective of the authors as being insufficiently sensitive to the disturbing nature of the subject matter.

A middle-grade nonfiction demystification book about engineering bridges; the careful textbooks which measure are represented as helpfully color-coded and well-organized, and every step of building a bridge is touched upon, though it doesn't specify exactly where e.g. the steel girders they order come from, just what specifications they have to order them to.

This is sent to the Materials Sciences department of a Towertopian university to ensure that Green physics and building techniques are going to be enough the same as Towertopian physics and building techniques for this to be safe to publish -- if such a book contained errors that could prove catastrophic! Depending on whether the university thinks building physical test bridges following the book's instructions is necessary, it may be viewed as out of budget to actually test this and the book will be quietly shelved.

A long-running TV show available in broadcast, dense, and padded formats depending on whether you want the fight scenes and atmospheric shots and isolated plot-irrelevant jokes and metatextual fake advertisements and surplus seconds of anything else the trimmers had their eye on removed so you can just blitz through the core story, or if you want all of that and also stuff they cut for broadcast length included. It's about the future people of Green sending FTL spaceships out to make contact with other species, mostly though not all lower tech, having lots of alien-of-the-week diplomacy conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-arc diplomatic conundra interspersed with alien-of-the-series precursor ruins research project. Also ensemble drama. Lots of that.

The idea of releasing a show in several different formats like this is not familiar to Towertopians, and there's a spirited debate about which version of the show is best. Ultimately, though, the decision is made by censorship considerations rather than by artistic ones, and TILES ends up releasing an even more trimmed version of this that removes certain romance subplots -- unlike with written fiction, mimicking the style of a television series to perform content edits is somewhat out of scope.

A musical about ten generations of a family that breeds a particular kind of dog (it takes care of sheep - like, mostly it herds them, but it can also detect if they're sick or parasitized or injured, and be trained to assist with shearing (there's a number about how the dog would certainly do it itself if it had hands and a character who gets sidetracked trying to invent a device that will allow that despite handlessness).

TILES approves this one and considers it fun and family-friendly.

A work of interactive fiction, in which the player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a more romantically intimate way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall. (The creator is very proud of having successfully edited all the sexual content out of this version.)

An extremely elaborate npctrade-historicaldevelopment-competitivesingleplayervictorypointrace (a term originally derogatory but now widely used among fans) board game about how technological development changes economics! Each of 2 to 6 players plays as a sequence of trading companies, all of which steadily decay in economic efficiency until the player stops playing them and starts playing a new company instead; each company is trying to establish trade routes to ship goods from place to place to sell at a profit while overcoming transport costs, but every location on the map has its own supply and demand curves for every good it produces (don't worry, there's very clear tracking tools to stop keeping track of this from getting wildly out of hand). As the game progresses, new technologies for transport, consumption and production of goods are semi-randomly selected to appear, shifting the economic calculus, sometimes wildly. Almost all technologies has prerequisites but no technology is guaranteed to appear in the game, and after a fixed number of turns the players are scored based on how much consumer surplus they generated. A historical booklet twice the length of the rulebook explains the decisions they made when deciding what technologies to include and what to choose as their prerequisites, and a how-to-play-tactically guide is also included which is the first several moves of a tournament game that changes wildly when the industrial revolution in textiles started on the third move and both sides had to adjust very, very quickly.

An also elaborate strategy-mappainter-historicalfantasy-diplomacy game based in exhaustive detail on a long Aevylmarcher series of novels about a nine-year war between six fictional city-states, all of which had rapidly shifting coalitions and complicated internal politics. Each has its own special rules for extracting resources from the country and its people and for earning victory points; all of them, though, want to seize territory in the borderland between them and defeat their enemies to advance their goals. The game has a board, dice, cards, tokens, land and sea, and complicated magic systems for each player the more villainous of which involve summoning hostile entities from other dimensions and human sacrifice. All players have multiple separate goals, some of them mutually contradictory, and each hour-and-a-half-long round of the game is a single campaigning season, starting with raising armies, hiring mercenaries and drawing up initial campaign goals, and ending with withdrawing them into winter quarters, with a diplomacy phase between campaigning seasons used to redraw coalitions for the next campaign. The rules are very short but involve lots of references to short terms for more complicated concepts explained in a very long cultural appendix, as well as a discussion of how patents for game mechanics apply in the Aevylmarch (they're very short-lived but it's customary to tithe a portion of the game's revenues to people who invented the things it uses, which these people are doing). The cards are all based on events in the novel, which means that they don't make a whole lot of sense to people who haven't read it, but do give the impression of a gorgeous, dangerous world full of tragedy and good intentions and magic and wonder and politics and villains who are really cool but should not be imitated and will eventually die well-deserved deaths.

An epic poem about an ancient king, presented in the original with extensive annotations. Full translations are going to be legitimately tricky; it's long, it's gorgeous, and the poetic form is pretty strict and doesn't adapt well to the rhythms of other languages, but the writer keeps doing this thing where the rhyme scheme and meter highlight underlying thematic connections between different lines—anyway. The plot begins with an introductory section where the king is going around doing atrocities in a very badass ancient-legendary-figure sort of way, right up until a random peasant girl lights him on fire with her magic powers and he immediately falls madly in love and drops everything to beg her to marry him, then spends the next two-thirds of the poem gradually lightening up on the atrocities front, partly because he has now realized that peasants are people and partly because his wife keeps arguing with him and occasionally threatening to light him on fire again, which he always responds to with a confused mix of fear, adoration, and occasionally anger. The queen's power to set fire to her husband is depicted very obviously and straightforwardly, discussed in the text and the dialogue; the king's reciprocal power to have his wife executed is left completely to subtext and implication, only barely hinted at by means such as using epithets for her that emphasize her fearlessness whenever he gets angry. Accompanying notes explain that the poem is an allegory for real historical events, with the queen standing in for the entire Phoenix archetype, which did appear during that approximate historical era and did have those approximate powers and did have approximately that effect on ancient kings' tendency to oppress people although the exact mechanism was obviously very different.

Some of the subtlety and nuance of this work is lost in translation, and it provokes extended... not really debates, but not precisely discussions either among the TILES panelists? This work is approved as a "quasi-historical epic" with major content warnings for atrocities, unjust use of authority, and so on. Most Towertopians who read this find it odd and not that inspiring -- perhaps the fault of the stilted translation -- but among the small fandom that emerges, there is an extended dispute about whether the girl's fire powers (and emergence of the Phoenix archetype more broadly) should be considered evidence of divine intervention. The consensus opinion tends positive.

Extremely well-researched historical fiction detailing the life of a high priestess of the River Kingdom who, by contrast to most high priestesses of the River Kingdom, did actual politics instead of spending all her time managing the movement of water. One gets the impression that the author wishes they could spend all their time managing the movement of water; lovingly detailed descriptions of River Kingdom plumbing and water management take up a solid third of the book, intermingled with plenty of inner monologue from the high priestess and lots of interactions with very well-fleshed-out side characters. An appendix carefully distinguishes side characters for whom there is historical evidence (and what that evidence covered) from side characters the author made up (and the census data and contemporary sources from which they extrapolated those characters' likely traits). An additional appendix tries to explain the context of the Ondine archetype so the aliens can properly appreciate it, but the author admits that they're not very good at explaining this sort of thing and recommends some other reference material to interested reader.

Like the poem about the ancient king, this work may be approved but it is not well-understood -- though this one is somewhat more "conventional" in its plot and therefore perhaps less interesting. That said, the author's intense descriptions of water management and detailed historical appendix elicits respect from Towertopian readers who push through that far.

A duology of very long fantasy novels, which turn out to be collectively about 40% appendix by pagecount. The appendices cover worldbuilding, conlangs, and a set of six different detailed maps of the world, each from the perspective of one of the major nations involved in the plot, all of which have subtle disagreements with each other on matters such as which landmarks are important, what they are called, and who owns them. The plot consists of a ragtag yet lovable ensemble cast, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control which accidentally leave them the only people in the world capable of saving it from a cataclysmic threat, having breakdowns about how they're not ready for this and then going ahead and doing their best anyway. In the end, they pull it off by the skin of their teeth and with rather more casualties than any of them are comfortable with. The second volume has a long denouement consisting mostly of our heroes leaning on each other and their friends and loved ones to help them cope with all their realistically-described trauma once the crisis is over; the last chapter concludes when they're all psychologically stable again and leading healthy, thriving lives, and the epilogue shows a bittersweet scene of the six of them holding a private memorial ceremony together ten years later, after which they are going to attend a massive celebration being held in their honour on the anniversary of their success.

This work is approved by TILES and is the most popular of any of the Grapeverse works mentioned thus far among Towertopians. It is considered a beautiful paean to the importance of standing up while no one else is willing, even when one is not as prepared as would be ideal. The degree of psychological breakdown and trauma depicted is unusual for a Towertopian audience and treated with contempt by some, especially adolescents, but others view it as an important component of what this work is trying to do. A large fandom develops for this novel, fueled by both the moving plot and the intense worldbuilding present in the appendices. Some years after these books' release, some in its Towertopian fandom attempt to create their vision of what the success anniversary celebration would look like, while others consider this disrespectful to the author's intent.

A book for first-school children (aged six through eight) in which a small child is abused by her parents and decides that this is unacceptable behavior on her parents' part. She sets out to find a different family. It is mostly a comedic fish-out-of-water story about the difficulty she has adjusting to various other families' rules-- this one prays together as a family, this one doesn't let anyone watch television, this one goes hiking constantly, this one will only let her have ONE dessert-- until eventually she goes to live with the monk who runs her Children's After School Club. She lives happily ever after. The abuse isn't exactly graphic, but it is clearly depicted: the girl is scared of her parents because they hit her and call her nasty names. The book also seems to think that going and looking for a different family if your current family abuses you is perfectly reasonable behavior.

This is probably the most controversial of any of the works of literature reviewed thus far, as it seemingly sets the important values of "escaping abusive behavior" and "respect for one's family" at odds with one another. Additionally, some of the reasons that she leaves other families seem frivolous or unsound despite being played for comedy. One faction within TILES thinks this book should be banned, another thinks it should be approved, a third thinks it should be edited so that the child clearly tries other options first and these do not work, while a fourth faction attempts to set forth the "compromise" position that the work should be edited to make the parents' behavior more abusive so as to make it obvious that the child's reaction is justified!

Ultimately the work is approved without internal modifications, but has parental guidance warnings added for those considering buying the book, as well as a heavy-handed concluding note tacked on about how the girl was right to finally go to an authority figure about this and that luckily, you -- the young reader -- live in a society where authority figures are both stronger and more trusted than in the world this book comes from.

Some Updates To The Rules Are Necessary!

Following various submissions to the TILES project, TILES would like to announce some additional clarifying notes to be promulgated to all interdimensional fiction sourcing partners:

• No, a work that includes detailed sex scenes that are intended to arouse the prurient interest is not justified, even if all the sex scenes are purportedly necessary for the plot development. The opinion of TILES is that anything that is worth expressing and can be expressed via such means can also be expressed without such means; insofar as artistic expression compels one to address these themes, they should do so via more appropriate methods.

• Works that describe horrific atrocities in intense detail are very unlikely to be approved, even if they do so with an overall positive and uplifting message that clearly condemns those atrocities; there may be exceptions on a case-by-case basis, but this is especially unlikely insofar as those atrocities involve sexual abuses.

• Some works of horror, descriptions of war crimes, etc. may similarly be considered too psychologically disturbing to be justified even if in service of an overall positive theme.

A work of interactive fiction, in which the player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a more romantically intimate way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall. (The creator is very proud of having successfully edited all the sexual content out of this version.)

TILES subjects this work to extensive testing of different routes, which makes the testers assigned to the more abusive routes feel pretty bad! Testing reveals that the work is indeed not sexual in nature, though -- TILES holds that its intent seems to be to illustrate a range of ways in which one can treat others (and demonstrate the consequences thereof). This game is approved for Towertopian readers/players, though it contains major content warnings about the potential to portray abuse and trauma. Some reviewers hold that these options should not even have been included in the game, though most are placated by the fact that pursuing such a path leads to an ultimately ashen and empty result. When finally released, this work is considered moderately interesting though somewhat heavy-handed.

An extremely elaborate npctrade-historicaldevelopment-competitivesingleplayervictorypointrace (a term originally derogatory but now widely used among fans) board game about how technological development changes economics! Each of 2 to 6 players plays as a sequence of trading companies, all of which steadily decay in economic efficiency until the player stops playing them and starts playing a new company instead; each company is trying to establish trade routes to ship goods from place to place to sell at a profit while overcoming transport costs, but every location on the map has its own supply and demand curves for every good it produces (don't worry, there's very clear tracking tools to stop keeping track of this from getting wildly out of hand). As the game progresses, new technologies for transport, consumption and production of goods are semi-randomly selected to appear, shifting the economic calculus, sometimes wildly. Almost all technologies has prerequisites but no technology is guaranteed to appear in the game, and after a fixed number of turns the players are scored based on how much consumer surplus they generated. A historical booklet twice the length of the rulebook explains the decisions they made when deciding what technologies to include and what to choose as their prerequisites, and a how-to-play-tactically guide is also included which is the first several moves of a tournament game that changes wildly when the industrial revolution in textiles started on the third move and both sides had to adjust very, very quickly.

This game is approved by TILES; its genre is not the most popular in Towertopia but it finds a niche audience. Towertopians really appreciate the extensive historical documentation!

An also elaborate strategy-mappainter-historicalfantasy-diplomacy game based in exhaustive detail on a long Aevylmarcher series of novels about a nine-year war between six fictional city-states, all of which had rapidly shifting coalitions and complicated internal politics. Each has its own special rules for extracting resources from the country and its people and for earning victory points; all of them, though, want to seize territory in the borderland between them and defeat their enemies to advance their goals. The game has a board, dice, cards, tokens, land and sea, and complicated magic systems for each player the more villainous of which involve summoning hostile entities from other dimensions and human sacrifice. All players have multiple separate goals, some of them mutually contradictory, and each hour-and-a-half-long round of the game is a single campaigning season, starting with raising armies, hiring mercenaries and drawing up initial campaign goals, and ending with withdrawing them into winter quarters, with a diplomacy phase between campaigning seasons used to redraw coalitions for the next campaign. The rules are very short but involve lots of references to short terms for more complicated concepts explained in a very long cultural appendix, as well as a discussion of how patents for game mechanics apply in the Aevylmarch (they're very short-lived but it's customary to tithe a portion of the game's revenues to people who invented the things it uses, which these people are doing). The cards are all based on events in the novel, which means that they don't make a whole lot of sense to people who haven't read it, but do give the impression of a gorgeous, dangerous world full of tragedy and good intentions and magic and wonder and politics and villains who are really cool but should not be imitated and will eventually die well-deserved deaths.

The unavailability of the actual novels in question makes it difficult for TILES to fully evaluate this, but the game itself is great! The coolness of some of the villains gives TILES qualms, but their ultimate arcs seem quite reasonable and good. This genre of game is again not the most popular in Towertopia -- 1v1 competitive experiences are by far the most popular -- but nevertheless it is a strong example of its class, and becomes popular with those who like getting together for a long day's set of campaigns with their friends.

The Aevylmarch game mechanic patents lead to a considerable debate on the BoardGameTower forums about what the best way to reward game designers is. Some decide to try and unilaterally adopt this system without the benefit of Law behind it and with full knowledge that others may defect, which works out... fairly well, actually?

TILES notes that, insofar as the novels in question are ever actually brought to Towertopia (at present they have not been submitted for review), their case will perhaps have to be handled with extra delicacy given that the popularity of the game means that they will be more likely to make a splash than works unrelated to such. However, given the relatively quick turnover of game fandoms, it's possible that the game will be old news by the time that the novels come out, even if they are submitted for review later on.

Some More Guideline Updates Are Needed!

• TILES would like to remind those unfamiliar with Towertopian culture that "polyamory", while perhaps historically permitted in certain early stages of civilizational development, is considered ultimately contrary to human dignity and morality. It is not unacceptable to depict such relationships as existing, but they should not be portrayed as centrally uplifting or positive. (Works that depict such may in some cases be suitable for editing such that there is only one romantic relationship and others are intimate-but-chaste friendships.)

• Similarly, sexual relationships between people of the same sex are considered debasements of both sexuality and of intimate chaste friendships between people of the same sex. Again, it is not unacceptable to depict such relationships as existing, but they should not be portrayed as centrally uplifting or positive. (Works that depict such may in some cases be suitable for editing into intimate-but-chaste relationships or having one character's gender changed.)

• TILES wishes to note that, despite the above two clarifications, works should also not praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse unjust discrimination towards or vigilante persecution against individuals who have engaged or are engaging in these practices.

• Works that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse hubris, revenge, and vendettas between families or other social groups are also condemned.

• Works that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse the subversion/evasion of (or successful rebellion against) a just justice system (including cosmic/divine justice, though of course that is not possible in reality) are very strongly condemned. Works that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse the subversion/evasion of (or successful rebellion against) an unjust justice system are not condemned, though one might have to be careful about certain implications.

A Rules Update:

• Material that focuses primarily on low humor (crude slapstick, scatological jokes, etc.) will be rejected, especially if directed primarily towards children. The works evaluated by TILES are in some sense "ambassadors" of their cultures to a new world.

A Guidelines Update:

• TILES is distressed to have to note that infanticide and "eugenics" are both contrary to public health and public morals and works that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse such will not be approved.

It has come to the attention of some Greens that the editor-Towers are sometimes changing romances into nonromances to make them not gay? There's not a strong consensus here but many of the authors prefer that, where possible, they instead just flip the gender of whichever character has less narrative focus. (This is a strong enough consensus that they would also like it to apply to works with dead authors.) Since most Greens are bisexual a genderflip doesn't fundamentally change the underlying character of what's going on - it might make the flipped character a weird example of their new gender but it will not create a relationship-type that the personalities involved weren't actually ("actually") inclined to have. It's relatively okay to patch polyamory by platonicizing it if they must, by comparison. One author will helpfully mention that an earlier draft of a story had a minor character's love interest actually her sister instead but changed it when he noticed that his mental image of them had different ethnicities, but their appearances aren't so firmly described in the text that they can't be sisters in the Tower version.

Also they don't totally understand the "justice" criterion? What things are and are not just is the sort of thing that gets argued even intradimensionally. They will put triage tags on anything that seems like it might be in the general neighborhood but if the Towers want things evaluated for "justice" they will have to do that themselves.

--

Movie series about continent- and ocean-spirits who have children with humans in order to produce more local spirits for things like rivers and mountains. The spirit children can also choose not to adopt a thing to be a spirit of and live among humans. The ensemble cast has various romances and childrearing adventures in each film. In the fourth movie, a three-quarter-spirit person is incredibly powerful and ultimately boards a spaceship to become the spirit of the Moon.

Portal fantasy about a ten year old who previously lived with not-too-close aunts and uncles and upon portalizing has no immediate prospects for getting home. After a while roughing it (in conveniently-not-too-rough circumstances but still sleeping outdoors and such) he decides to attempt to integrate into the culture and locate a new family. The concept that a formal system might be required for this is thought about in passing but the project is in practice DIY; he integrates by degrees into the foreign culture, tries lots of strategies for making friends, and eventually winds up bouncing between a family of dimensionaliens* who make notmaple products and a lady who lives in the woods and helps him improve his roughing-it skills in case this ever comes up again. If they like this one there are sequels!

A restaurant that can use abstract concepts as ingredients serves as the centerpiece of this short story collection by twelve different authors; characters go on ingredient-collecting expeditions, or finally save up enough to reserve a seat at the restaurant and then experience indecision about how to use their limited opportunity when there are so many things to try, or apply for a job in the kitchen, or occupy themselves with updating the restaurant's decor, or are food critic secret shoppers, or are waiters having romantic drama, or are an epistolary told in menu and notes-for-the-kitchen-about-substitutions format, etcetera.

Time travel is invented but can only go at least a hundred million years partly due to technical limitations and partly due to technobabble about how that's long enough for all the "noise" introduced by a traveler to "smooth out". Characters go back in time and meet dinosaurs and discover an ancient dinosaur civilization. At the end they take some dinosaurs who were helpful to them and are coming off poorly in their dinosaur political situation back to the present with them.

A series about an SRO facility for adolescents who are not yet prepared to strike out completely on their own suddenly responsible for absolutely everything, but need to definitely not be living under the same roof as their families at least for a while - except this one is an interdimensional/planetary one, with a colorful panoply of aliens and sliders and magical beings of all descriptions. Some interstitial narration is from the point of view of the residence coordinator, a harried half-human half-spirit-of-the-building who coordinates with her-mom-the-building to run things, but each book in the series focuses on an individual resident of the facility, sometimes encountering protagonists or side characters of past or future installments. The same author has also done a series of shorter works about a similarly-premised emergency vacation resort (and that series has a moderate amount of sex in it), and a bunch of one-offs on the same theme (bookstore, restaurant, karaoke joint, game shop, gymnasium/sports facility, etc.), as well as her completely unrelated debut novel in which someone trying to catalogue each of the fictional magic systems invented in all fiction ever via multidimensional analysis gains the power to wield some of those powers by pinpointing their location in the perfected multidimensional grid, but the SRO one is the one that took off. Somebody has sent along an earnest attempt at mapping the dependencies if you want to understand the references and influences but it seems perhaps an insurmountable task.

A Boy And His Dog go on a daunting adventure: running an errand to the hardware store for brackets and screws. (The boy is four years old.)

Series about shapeshifters who slide between dimensions all the time as a species trait. One of them has a sliding disability and when an uncontrollable universe-flinging crisis occurs she's lost somewhere, unable to get back to any of the dimensions where her lifemate will be looking for her. The series mostly focuses on the lifemate's episodic adventures through various universes checking to see if her lifemate is there.

Kids' book about attending magic school. There are fifteen different magic types and characters have one to fifteen of them; the antagonist (another student in the school who just super rubs the main character the wrong way at first, but then it escalates from there) has fifteen and the main character has just three but is very creative.

*Green distinguishes between "space aliens" and "sliders" but the still-at-home-where-they-came-from kind of slider doesn't have a graceful English translation.

The story of a revolution by which one city-state transitioned from an oligarchic council of seven with near-absolute power to a republic with a broad franchise.  It began as a conspiracy of a few individuals who objected to the government's policies (including suppression of the press but also high taxes and neglect of the city walls in favor of funding the oligarchs' lavish lifestyles). The conspiracy recruits additional members from every stratum of society--members of the city militia, merchants, beggars, the sheltered but principled teenage child of one of the council members--who all contribute to the new constitution they're writing in secret.

The conspirators have a lot of long debates about the role of government in society and how the people can maintain the final say over their rulers; one of the conspirators was a real person who kept a diary and relevant entries are inserted directly into the text. There are a lot of footnotes and insets with historical context, clarifications of the author's uncertainty about what was going on, maps, explanations of the paper cryptographic and steganographic protocols the conspirators were using sufficient to use them oneself, etc.

Eventually the conspiracy encompasses ten percent of the city and has identified broad sympathetic sentiment among people they haven't brought in on it, so they triumphantly reveal themselves in the public square and call for a new government under their new constitution. There's a brief but bloody fight between the loyalist and revolutionary factions of the guard with much of the populace joining in on the latter side, in which some named characters die tragically. Eventually the revolutionaries win, establish the new government, and raise two memorials: one to the heroism of the dead revolutionaries expressing the hope that they'll build something worthy of their sacrifice, another to the dead on both sides grieving that the city's freedom was paid for in blood.

It has come to the attention of some Greens that the editor-Towers are sometimes changing romances into nonromances to make them not gay? There's not a strong consensus here but many of the authors prefer that, where possible, they instead just flip the gender of whichever character has less narrative focus. (This is a strong enough consensus that they would also like it to apply to works with dead authors.) Since most Greens are bisexual a genderflip doesn't fundamentally change the underlying character of what's going on - it might make the flipped character a weird example of their new gender but it will not create a relationship-type that the personalities involved weren't actually ("actually") inclined to have. It's relatively okay to patch polyamory by platonicizing it if they must, by comparison. One author will helpfully mention that an earlier draft of a story had a minor character's love interest actually her sister instead but changed it when he noticed that his mental image of them had different ethnicities, but their appearances aren't so firmly described in the text that they can't be sisters in the Tower version.

Alas -- Green fiction will be re-edited as appropriate, though TILES is quite surprised that changing non-marriage romances into nonromantic close friendships would be seen as a more serious alteration than changing a character's gender!

Movie series about continent- and ocean-spirits who have children with humans in order to produce more local spirits for things like rivers and mountains. The spirit children can also choose not to adopt a thing to be a spirit of and live among humans. The ensemble cast has various romances and childrearing adventures in each film. In the fourth movie, a three-quarter-spirit person is incredibly powerful and ulitimately boards a spaceship to become the spirit of the Moon.

TILES looks a bit askance at this one for showing romance between humans and nonhumans, but ultimately approves it on the grounds that it is clearly fantasy and continent- and ocean-spirits don't exist, plus they are clearly sapient... if continent- and ocean-spirits are found to exist the metaphysicians are going to have to do some thinking about these sorts of situations but for now the work is approved!

Portal fantasy about a ten year old who previously lived with not-too-close aunts and uncles and upon portalizing has no immediate prospects for getting home. After a while roughing it (in conveniently-not-too-rough circumstances but still sleeping outdoors and such) he decides to attempt to integrate into the culture and locate a new family. The concept that a formal system might be required for this is thought about in passing but the project is in practice DIY; he integrates by degrees into the foreign culture, tries lots of strategies for making friends, and eventually winds up bouncing between a family of dimensionaliens* who make notmaple products and a lady who lives in the woods and helps him improve his roughing-it skills in case this ever comes up again. If they like this one there are sequels!

*Green distinguishes between "space aliens" and "sliders" but the still-at-home-where-they-came-from kind of slider doesn't have a graceful English translation.

TILES approves this one with gusto -- the metaphysicians consider stories like this admirable reflections of the universality of the natural law. Sequels are welcome!

A restaurant that can use abstract concepts as ingredients serves as the centerpiece of this short story collection by twelve different authors; characters go on ingredient-collecting expeditions, or finally save up enough to reserve a seat at the restaurant and then experience indecision about how to use their limited opportunity when there are so many things to try, or apply for a job in the kitchen, or occupy themselves with updating the restaurant's decor, or are food critic secret shoppers, or are waiters having romantic drama, or are an epistolary told in menu and notes-for-the-kitchen-about-substitutions format, etcetera.

This story collection is approved and considered charming! Towertopians are in fact rather fond of short stories, more so than some of the more "traditional" formats. More short story collections would be welcome!

Time travel is invented but can only go at least a hundred million years partly due to technical limitations and partly due to technobabble about how that's long enough for all the "noise" introduced by a traveler to "smooth out". Characters go back in time and meet dinosaurs and discover an ancient dinosaur civilization. At the end they take some dinosaurs who were helpful to them and are coming off poorly in their dinosaur political situation back to the present with them.

TILES uncontroversially approves this one, but confers with archeologists and metaphysicians before deciding to add a historical note emphasizing that dinosaurs were not, in their best estimations, ever sapient or capable of building an advanced civilization of any kind.

A series about an SRO facility for adolescents who are not yet prepared to strike out completely on their own suddenly responsible for absolutely everything, but need to definitely not be living under the same roof as their families at least for a while - except this one is an interdimensional/planetary one, with a colorful panoply of aliens and sliders and magical beings of all descriptions. Some interstitial narration is from the point of view of the residence coordinator, a harried half-human half-spirit-of-the-building who coordinates with her-mom-the-building to run things, but each book in the series focuses on an individual resident of the facility, sometimes encountering protagonists or side characters of past or future installments. The same author has also done a series of shorter works about a similarly-premised emergency vacation resort (and that series has a moderate amount of sex in it), and a bunch of one-offs on the same theme (bookstore, restaurant, karaoke joint, game shop, gymnasium/sports facility, etc.), as well as her completely unrelated debut novel in which someone trying to catalogue each of the fictional magic systems invented in all fiction ever via multidimensional analysis gains the power to wield some of those powers by pinpointing their location in the perfected multidimensional grid, but the SRO one is the one that took off. Somebody has sent along an earnest attempt at mapping the dependencies if you want to understand the references and influences but it seems perhaps an insurmountable task.

A few TILES panelists attempt to understand the dependency map but it seems extremely complicated and likely out of scope. This is ultimately approved but it's not really the kind of thing that Towertopians are all that into. Ironically, the "emergency vacation resort" series would probably be more appealing to Towertopians than the SRO version of this concept if not for the sexual elements -- Towertopians are big on stories of weird emergencies!

A Boy And His Dog go on a daunting adventure: running an errand to the hardware store for brackets and screws. (The boy is four years old.)

TILES approves this and considers it a nice description of an early milestone in child development -- running independent errands!

Series about shapeshifters who slide between dimensions all the time as a species trait. One of them has a sliding disability and when an uncontrollable universe-flinging crisis occurs she's lost somewhere, unable to get back to any of the dimensions where her lifemate will be looking for her. The series mostly focuses on the lifemate's episodic adventures through various universes checking to see if her lifemate is there.

TILES approves this with content warnings about how the use of shapeshifting might entail major deception if it became available in reality, and that the ethics of such methods would be subject to substantial review.

Kids' book about attending magic school. There are fifteen different magic types and characters have one to fifteen of them; the antagonist (another student in the school who just super rubs the main character the wrong way at first, but then it escalates from there) has fifteen and the main character has just three but is very creative.

This sort of thing is very appealing to Towertopians and is approved with the standard "book for kids about magic" warnings about how claims of magic are false and/or evil and no one should attempt to perform magic or explore occult practices in real life, but that a fictionalized fantasy version of such nevertheless presents interesting storytelling options.

The story of a revolution by which one city-state transitioned from an oligarchic council of seven with near-absolute power to a republic with a broad franchise.  It began as a conspiracy of a few individuals who objected to the government's policies (including suppression of the press but also high taxes and neglect of the city walls in favor of funding the oligarchs' lavish lifestyles). The conspiracy recruits additional members from every stratum of society--members of the city militia, merchants, beggars, the sheltered but principled teenage child of one of the council members--who all contribute to the new constitution they're writing in secret.

The conspirators have a lot of long debates about the role of government in society and how the people can maintain the final say over their rulers; one of the conspirators was a real person who kept a diary and relevant entries are inserted directly into the text. There are a lot of footnotes and insets with historical context, clarifications of the author's uncertainty about what was going on, maps, explanations of the paper cryptographic and steganographic protocols the conspirators were using sufficient to use them oneself, etc.

Eventually the conspiracy encompasses ten percent of the city and has identified broad sympathetic sentiment among people they haven't brought in on it, so they triumphantly reveal themselves in the public square and call for a new government under their new constitution. There's a brief but bloody fight between the loyalist and revolutionary factions of the guard with much of the populace joining in on the latter side, in which some named characters die tragically. Eventually the revolutionaries win, establish the new government, and raise two memorials: one to the heroism of the dead revolutionaries expressing the hope that they'll build something worthy of their sacrifice, another to the dead on both sides grieving that the city's freedom was paid for in blood.

This story leads to widespread debate among TILES panelists as to whether it should be permitted or not. On the one hand, political revolutions are often disasters and can be gravely damaging to Law, and stories that encourage such could perhaps be considered offenses against public morality. On the other hand, the revolution described seems to have perhaps in fact been just and to have led to a good outcome, and tyrannical rule is also gravely damaging to Law.

Various points that are brought up in the dispute include:

• Discussion as to whether the original ruling council was sufficiently unjust to justify such drastic measures

• Whether the work would be improved by making the council more unjust so as to make it clearer that such was legitimate (this is popular with the same faction that wanted to make the parents worse in the Teachingsphere story from earlier about a child running away from home!)

• Whether the positive and hopeful ending is tempered enough by tragedy to make it clear that such things are very risky to implement (the aforementioned faction would maybe like it to be more bittersweet!)

• Moral and political philosophers and metaphysicians are consulted as to the proper way to address these issues.

Disputes continue for some time, but ultimately the work is approved for publication without modifications, though it is ultimately published with major content warnings and a cautionary introduction that plays up the injustice of the council and the bittersweet cost of the war and invites readers to consider both the grave importance and the cost of such deeds, even when carried out for a good cause.

One of the TILES panelists writes a "rebuttal story" with a similar plot structure and setting where the rulers are not unjust and the revolutionary protagonists  are a combination of power-hungry, self-deceived, and tragically misled; in this version of the story far fewer people are swayed to support the revolutionary faction, but even with less public support the more aggressive rebel leaders decide to attack anyway in the hopes that they will be able to present their deeds to the population a fait accompli and that the public will fall in behind them once they see the weakness of the ruling authority. Their plan almost works but at the critical juncture the rebellion is defeated at immense cost on both sides, almost all the main characters die, and the book ends with the most sympathetic and tragically misled of the revolutionary leaders captured and exiled from the still-burning city to live as a hermit and do penance for her deeds.

Both the original novel and the "rebuttal story" (which comes out only weeks later) prove popular with Towertopians; the panelist who wrote the rebuttal is removed from the panel after its publication, as it is considered to have been a minor abuse of authority for her to use her advance knowledge to get a "head start" on writing a reply before the original story had actually been published to the broader public. Perceptive readers note certain similarities between the author and the sympathetic-but-tragically-misled revolutionaries and ask her whether the rebellion is meant to be a metaphor for her experiences with TILES; she prudently decides not to comment further on that matter, at least in public.

The author(A) of the original novel is so happy aliens wrote fanfic of A's work! Arguably it's more like fanfic of the original historical events the work was set in but that's still neat!

It's excitingly different in tone and structure from a lot of Firstplanet's alternatehistory fic; local works tend to change only one or two things at a time or go full secondary-world if they want to show different characters in the same situation. It's also really grim, wow, usually people who want historical grimness just read the abundance of grim nonfiction and save fiction for exploring ways things could have gone better.

A popular historyblogger comments on the similarities and differences between the new plotline and various real historical events from other city-states whose transitions to republics were messier. A popular literary critic writes an analysis of the concepts of hermithood as a social and personal practice on both planets.  (Anomalan hermits were usually not exiles but rather seeking a personal connection to the land; modernly those people tend to go into geology and ecology fieldwork.)

The rebuttal doesn't end up as a best-seller, but gains a small fandom among people who like both the period in question and tragedies.

A short story collection on the theme of censorship and secrecy being a fundamentally hostile attitude for a government to take towards its citizens. Stories include a metaphor about refusing sex education to children while self-servingly rationalizing about it, parables about the apparatus of censorship metastasizing to encompass things their well-intentioned creators never intended, someone escaping a cult (it seems to be some kind of linguistic prescriptivism and also sex cult) and learning to trust that the wider world does not systematically mislead them about anything, an attempt at keeping information that seemed to have triggered psychosis in a character's mother away from that character in the hopes that she will not suffer the same psychosis only for her to succumb to a psychotic episode anyway that's substantially worsened by the fact that everybody's been hiding things for her entire life, and aliens discovering that their taboo about discussing certain topics has been holding them back catastrophically in magical engineering in ways that would not have been foreseeable at the time the taboo was instituted.

A graphic novel about a little boy trying to find a teacher he likes enough to put up with school happening upon a person who washed out of actual teacher school due to executive dysfunction and limited energy but clicks with him really well; he winds up going over to her house all the time and shadowing her and asking her questions and eventually convincing his parents to pay the tuition budget to her. It includes a lot of the educational conversations and since it's a graphic novel they're accompanied by helpful visual aids, though it doesn't cover any single topic in much depth.

Not-quite-fiction about human (well, Green) evolutionary biology with an emphasis on fictionalized-anonymized nifty case studies from obscure insular cultures and some completely whole cloth just-so suppositions, supporting or in tension with this or that theory.

Basically just Flowers for Algernon with less sex in it and the strong implication that the main character's parents would have preferred the main character to have Down's instead of a less visible problem, since that's obvious at birth and you can commit infanticide about it.

A musical that is a biography of a famous orator who was active in political movements of his time including increased trade even with odious neighbors for positive sum prosperity, increased research into pharmaceuticals to help people on habit forming drugs, a major reform to his country's orphanage system which was still bad afterwards but not nearly as much so, and popularizing the idea that sex is kind of addictive and should be saved until you're in a place in your life where you will have reasonable and routine access. The songs are derived from his speeches but not in the exact words; they've been adapted for updated language drift and also to scan better. There is a narrator character who sings opposite him to discuss practicalities as they are understood in modern times, in addition to the chorus of extras representing other contemporary views.

A story about the household formation process for someone who has assumed for her entire life that one day she would live ALONE and no one would BOTHER her and she would listen to LOUD MUSIC and she would pick her nose in ANY room of the apartment she damn well pleased. She gradually accumulates friends and a love interest and realizes that it is possible to find living with other people actively desirable. The epilogue has the main character's toddler picking her nose in the middle of the dining room and the main character going "you know what, fair" about that. Also, everyone in the story has a prehensile tail, and there is light worldbuilding about how that would affect things, but it leaves Green largely recognizable.

Civ-builder-in-space video game with more focus on urban planning and making your farms aesthetically arranged than on warring with your neighbors, though there is some of that if you piss them off enough or turn the difficulty way up. The mainline win condition is uploading your population, whereupon you get to civ build with all the cheats on as long as you want, but it is also possible to officially win the game by creating a stable federation of all the political units on the planet, uplifting a cute alien species, or sending out multiple successful colonization missions to additional celestial bodies.

A book for small children about a little girl, aged six, who has outgrown her previous aesthetic of all-sunflowers-all-the-time upon discovering that she doesn't like to eat sunflower seeds and honestly doesn't like yellow as much as she once did, but isn't sure what theme to get her next wave of possessions and personalization-objects in. She changes her desktop background and borrows clothes and stares at office supplies in the store. Then she visits a farm and a cow licks her hair and she is enchanted and decides to get things in cow print... except, at the end of the book, when she is getting a sheet of stickers, she passes over the cow ones and grabs a sheet with Jupiter and Saturn images, winking at the reader about the likely longevity of the cow print phase. (Cow print in this case is roan with white mottled markings.)

A coming of age book where a kid from a House of Truth family decides after much waffling not to become a member themselves. While this is doctrinally fine - the House of Truth doesn't expect everyone to live by their rules and there is no official expectation that it run in families instead of using lateral transmission - it does make some people unsettled, wondering what he's keeping from them or plans to in the future, whether something about his upbringing soured him on the idea, etcetera. It doesn't really have an ending so much as a section after which there are not more pages.

A comedic musical about a scientist who is studying how it can be that they are in a musical, since the fact that people sometimes burst into coordinated song and dance does not have any obvious grounding in the otherwise solid laws of physics nor a clear sociological cause. There is a "flashback" scene where they speculate about prehistoric people doing numbers about domesticating dogs and inventing fire, and a series of frustrating dead ends when they try to harness the phenomenon for various practical purposes by setting up rhymes and such.

A short story collection on the theme of censorship and secrecy being a fundamentally hostile attitude for a government to take towards its citizens. Stories include a metaphor about refusing sex education to children while self-servingly rationalizing about it, parables about the apparatus of censorship metastasizing to encompass things their well-intentioned creators never intended, someone escaping a cult (it seems to be some kind of linguistic prescriptivism and also sex cult) and learning to trust that the wider world does not systematically mislead them about anything, an attempt at keeping information that seemed to have triggered psychosis in a character's mother away from that character in the hopes that she will not suffer the same psychosis only for her to succumb to a psychotic episode anyway that's substantially worsened by the fact that everybody's been hiding things for her entire life, and aliens discovering that their taboo about discussing certain topics has been holding them back catastrophically in magical engineering in ways that would not have been foreseeable at the time the taboo was instituted.

TILES is very split on this one. Overall, Towertopian attitudes towards censorship -- much like many uses of Law and Authority -- is that it is important to a properly-ordered society but also a tool for great evil if misused. This work focuses entirely on the evils of misuse, but that is an important concept in itself and not intrinsically something that should necessarily be rejected (though more conservative panelists disagree!). Some different perspectives that are brought up during the discussion of what to do about this work include:

1. This collection should be suppressed as morally bad for its un-nuanced opposition to the important government function of censorship

2. This collection should be published, but with substantial content editing or censorship (the irony of this approach is not lost on the TILES panel and basically undermines the case for this option)

3. The collection should be re-edited and published with the most questionable/objectionable stories removed but no edits or censorship other than that

4. This collection should be published as is as a cautionary tale of how the abuse of authority can lead people to reject even basic functions of government

5. This collection should be published as is because we can in fact trust people to understand that this applies only to misuses of censorship

Ultimately, the fourth option wins out -- this collection is published more-or-less as is (there are some of the "standard edits" to Green fiction for sexuality), but with an introduction from the TILES panel framing these as cautionary tales of what can happen if authorities abuse their power of censorship.

A heavy-handed concluding note tacked on about how the girl was right to finally go to an authority figure about this and that luckily, you -- the young reader -- live in a society where authority figures are both stronger and more trusted than in the world this book comes from.

The author of the book is incredibly offended by this conclusion and wants to retract the book from publication unless a more suitable concluding note is agreed upon. She agrees that children should not be misled about the appropriate way to react in your society if your parents are abusing you, but in the Teachingsphere children typically arrange their own adoptions, and this is not because monks aren't trustworthy! It's because children have an easier time transitioning out of an abusive household if they are going to be raise by an adult they know and trust. There is nothing wrong with the Towertopian approach-- different societies have different needs-- but that "luckily" is very offensive. She will accept a neutral note explaining the concept of cultural differences and the appropriate way for Towertopian children to respond to their parents being abusive. 

A working group has been put together to curate a collection of some the Union's most significant or impressive works. These are some of the selections they've made for fiction. (The form of the submission is a box containing paper books, naturally.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since this is transitive, and most souls are eaten after death, some small part of most people lives on for hundreds or thousands of years after their death, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (which is equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and impulses. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. Soon learning that a large group of monsters have penetrated civilization's defensive lines and are now heading inwards, towards populated areas, he sets off for the nearby large city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things---the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very fast. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

(There are other books of lies, designed to be deceptive taking into account that you expect to be deceived, those are much more dangerous and the curators thought it best not to send any to other worlds just yet.)

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot, in comparison, is rather straightforward and unsurprising.

*'Accuracy' in this context, seems to be related to how safe it is to draw conclusions about the world from a work. In the case of fiction, it mainly has to do if the work's implicit or explicit models of psychology, sociology, economics, biology, etc. are accurate.

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.  We have several characters pushing for new theocracies (but disagreeing on which religious sects to favor - a few of them still agree with the Zadians' teaching just not the strictness of their practices), some other characters advocating a more secular aristocratic-democracy, and others who want each town choose its own course.  The book majors on their debates and their interaction with the city around them.

(The author's brief prologue explains that in actual history, the Zadian Theocracy was overthrown by foreign armies some time before this book was set.)

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages (before the rise of global trade, the translator's preface explains), where magical elves kidnap some novice Historian-Monks, and they must use their historical and philosophical training to resolve the elves' political dispute and convince someone to bring them back home.  Along the way, they convince two elves to take Historian-Monk vows and set up their own Elven monastery.

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

(The translator explains that the Barren-Power war was Ev's last major war, about a century before the present.  It was started by the Barren-Power ideology, which condemned abstract philosophy as useless, advocated whatever led to success, and saw successful dictatorship as its own justification.)

One person did it out of cowardice when they temporarily conquered his town; he's horrified at what he did and can't imagine how to atone.  The other person felt that a stronger Barren-Power movement would push the world out of their suboptimal equilibrium; he agrees he did wrong but thinks it was worth it.  We follow their psychological and religious journey while under sentence of death for treason.  The first person finally forgives himself and begs to be kept away from any similar situation; the second person finally trusts in God and other people to handle the situation.

In the end, both their sentences are commuted to lifelong vows as Astronomy-Monks.

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

A graphic novel about a little boy trying to find a teacher he likes enough to put up with school happening upon a person who washed out of actual teacher school due to executive dysfunction and limited energy but clicks with him really well; he winds up going over to her house all the time and shadowing her and asking her questions and eventually convincing his parents to pay the tuition budget to her. It includes a lot of the educational conversations and since it's a graphic novel they're accompanied by helpful visual aids, though it doesn't cover any single topic in much depth.

TILES approves this as offering interesting insight into childhood in an alien society, despite the fact that the conventions here are quite unlike those Towertopian societies have established with respect to education.

Not-quite-fiction about human (well, Green) evolutionary biology with an emphasis on fictionalized-anonymized nifty case studies from obscure insular cultures and some completely whole cloth just-so suppositions, supporting or in tension with this or that theory.

TILES evaluates this work as fun but potentially dangerous and it is ultimately sent to Towertopian universities for scientific review; depending on the results of this process it may be accepted or rejected, or in the event that the process is considerably disputed it may find itself stuck in the bureaucracy (and therefore not approved). Some degree of leniency will likely be extended thanks to the fact that it describes an alien version of this process, but insofar as its theories are wildly off they may be 

Basically just Flowers for Algernon with less sex in it and the strong implication that the main character's parents would have preferred the main character to have Down's instead of a less visible problem, since that's obvious at birth and you can commit infanticide about it.

This work was rejected on first submission after a cursory review, but has returned with an author appeal clarifying that the main character's parents are intended to be extremely negative figures. The TILES appeals group reevaluates the story in light of that and approves it for publication, though they add a preface describing how the parents in this story betray Authority and Love with their misconduct and are not intended to be admirable figures.

A musical that is a biography of a famous orator who was active in political movements of his time including increased trade even with odious neighbors for positive sum prosperity, increased research into pharmaceuticals to help people on habit forming drugs, a major reform to his country's orphanage system which was still bad afterwards but not nearly as much so, and popularizing the idea that sex is kind of addictive and should be saved until you're in a place in your life where you will have reasonable and routine access. The songs are derived from his speeches but not in the exact words; they've been adapted for updated language drift and also to scan better. There is a narrator character who sings opposite him to discuss practicalities as they are understood in modern times, in addition to the chorus of extras representing other contemporary views.

This work is heavily disputed among TILES panelists because the political movements involved seem like quite a mixed bag! The odious neighbors part is at least questionable (depending on just how odious those neighbors are), the research into pharmaceuticals and orphanage reform seem quite desirable, and the sex one seems... uh... not exactly what Towertopia would support but at least conceivably a step in the right direction? Additionally, given Green responses to previous efforts for editing, the TILES panel is quite unclear as to what editing (if any) would be acceptable-to-Greens in this case. It marks this one as "pending further historical review" and sends back some questions for expansion on the historical details of this orator's life.

If they want more detail on the historical circumstances of the orator's life they can have them! Here are the non-musical versions of his speeches and essays; here is the Educational Libretto for people who use interest in musicals as a way to absorb the facts contained therein and enjoy additional facts to pin to their appreciation of the show tunes; here are some books about the history of the odious neighbors (this one was a theocracy, that one was a conquering government considered to be illegally occupying their state, this other one was the base for a lot of smuggling, that last one had a long low-key simmer of resentment between them and the orator's country due to a falling out between their monarchs a few centuries previously that never really got smoothed out enough to restore the benefit of the doubt). They don't really know what editing Towertopia could possibly mean to do here? The orator had these views and not different views. They suppose they could cut some of the songs if they don't like the idea of representing all of his activities. Censorship is weird.

This is a 6 hour film which shows an image of an empty room with plain beige walls and an undecorated concrete floor.  It is seemingly a static image.  However, as time passes, it is revealed to indeed be film: the spot of light from an out-of-frame window slowly passes from one side of the floor to the other.  Nothing else happens.  A note with the submission mentions that this is the most frequently suggested work for people who demand censorship, as it contains literally nothing that someone could potentially find offensive. 

—

On a similar but opposite end is this old children’s book titled How Plants Work which is covered in heavy warnings: nudity, sex, reproduction, genital mutilation, etc etc.  All of the warnings are *technically* correct - the plants are not covering their reproductive organs (flowers) with any form of clothing.  One image has a person picking flowers and putting them in a vase to be admired.  Other flowers which are not picked get pollinated and form seed-bearing fruit to continue the life cycle.

The warnings are clearly tacked on by someone other than the author, and a further note by the cultural translator mentions that it frequently mass-sent to any censorship bureau or other censored publication list as a meme and is therefore the #1 most challenged book on Therrune despite being entirely harmless.  Nearly every creche-district library has a copy, where it performs its intended task as being an informative book for children just learning how to read.

—

Said cultural translator, being a rare person with any diplomatic skills, takes pity and decides to offer a more genuine story.  It is a film showing the heavily extrapolated-upon life of a popular artist from around 250 years ago.  It never got much traction on Therrune due to its heavily filtered-against warnings (pregnancy, children, deadly illness, disability) but might be better received elsewhere. 

Rulin Sepia9483 had no real drive or ambition when they were young.  Nearly as soon as their clutch was ready to move out of the creche-district they moved back in as an incubator (via artificial insemination, as was still the technological standard back then), then became a clutch-parent to their offspring’s clutch.  They got on well with the 6 children under their care and had a sibling-close bond with their two fellow parents, weathering the various trials that came their way including the wave of a dangerous illness which killed one of the children and paralyzed one of the other parents.  

As the children became teenagers and began to prepare for their own lives and future careers in the adult districts, Rulin once again felt lost and unsure what to do.  However, Tyrese Seafoam9927, one of the children in their care, was passionate about carpentry and often brought their study material home.  They bonded over the work rather than growing distant as Tyrese reached adulthood.  Rulin joined Tyrese at their carpentry classes and later moved out of the creche-district with their now-ex ward.  

They got a commission to replace an old dovecote and built a truly impressive double-helix-shaped sculpture which both pigeons and passers-by loved!  The two of them went on to build dozens more, each unique works of art, and brought about the fad of extravagant dovecotes which continues to this day. Rulin died of a lung infection about 20 years after their first sculpture, and Tyrese continued to work for another 40, eventually moving on to apartment buildings for humans.  The last few minutes of the film is a reel of photographs of their work, as well as video of the original double-helix structure which has been consistently rebuilt as needed in the same place with a bronze plaque showing its artists displayed beside it.

If they want more detail on the historical circumstances of the orator's life they can have them! Here are the non-musical versions of his speeches and essays; here is the Educational Libretto for people who use interest in musicals as a way to absorb the facts contained therein and enjoy additional facts to pin to their appreciation of the show tunes; here are some books about the history of the odious neighbors (this one was a theocracy, that one was a conquering government considered to be illegally occupying their state, this other one was the base for a lot of smuggling, that last one had a long low-key simmer of resentment between them and the orator's country due to a falling out between their monarchs a few centuries previously that never really got smoothed out enough to restore the benefit of the doubt). They don't really know what editing Towertopia could possibly mean to do here? The orator had these views and not different views. They suppose they could cut some of the songs if they don't like the idea of representing all of his activities. Censorship is weird. 

With these updates, the musical is released along with a lot of other material explaining the historical context, explanatory notes from TILES that their context is not our context and that some of their deeds would likely be disendorsed if attempted here, and so on. The daunting amount of reference material makes the musical perhaps less popular as "light entertainment", though the large amount of "worldbuilding" material quite appeals to other Towertopians. A cultural dispute arises as to whether or not fandom for interdimensional history is Problematic, whether it's okay to make fan wikis based on the history books provided, and so on.

A story about the household formation process for someone who has assumed for her entire life that one day she would live ALONE and no one would BOTHER her and she would listen to LOUD MUSIC and she would pick her nose in ANY room of the apartment she damn well pleased. She gradually accumulates friends and a love interest and realizes that it is possible to find living with other people actively desirable. The epilogue has the main character's toddler picking her nose in the middle of the dining room and the main character going "you know what, fair" about that. Also, everyone in the story has a prehensile tail, and there is light worldbuilding about how that would affect things, but it leaves Green largely recognizable.

This story is straightforwardly approved as a fascinating picture of how an alien society handles communal living, though if the main character and her love interest aren't married in canon, well, they're sure going to be now! The illustration of how what one thought one might like as a young person can change dramatically over time is considered quite appealing as well.

Civ-builder-in-space video game with more focus on urban planning and making your farms aesthetically arranged than on warring with your neighbors, though there is some of that if you piss them off enough or turn the difficulty way up. The mainline win condition is uploading your population, whereupon you get to civ build with all the cheats on as long as you want, but it is also possible to officially win the game by creating a stable federation of all the political units on the planet, uplifting a cute alien species, or sending out multiple successful colonization missions to additional celestial bodies.

While controversial for its portrayal of transhumanism (trans-alienism?) as a win condition, this is nevertheless approved as an interesting artifact from a foreign world and foreign gaming culture! Towertopians are highly inclined towards competitive multiplayer but this sort of thing is a fun option, and the focus on aesthetic arrangements appeals to Towertopian sensibilities -- games where the in-game strongest option (best armor set in an MMO, best base arrangement in an RTS, etc.) is aesthetically ugly are known to be controversial among Towertopians, and this game steers away from that obstacle.

A book for small children about a little girl, aged six, who has outgrown her previous aesthetic of all-sunflowers-all-the-time upon discovering that she doesn't like to eat sunflower seeds and honestly doesn't like yellow as much as she once did, but isn't sure what theme to get her next wave of possessions and personalization-objects in. She changes her desktop background and borrows clothes and stares at office supplies in the store. Then she visits a farm and a cow licks her hair and she is enchanted and decides to get things in cow print... except, at the end of the book, when she is getting a sheet of stickers, she passes over the cow ones and grabs a sheet with Jupiter and Saturn images, winking at the reader about the likely longevity of the cow print phase. (Cow print in this case is roan with white mottled markings.)

Adorable and definitely approved! Some enterprising retailers start selling various items with roan cow print, which becomes something of an inside joke among Towertopians.

A coming of age book where a kid from a House of Truth family decides after much waffling not to become a member themselves. While this is doctrinally fine - the House of Truth doesn't expect everyone to live by their rules and there is no official expectation that it run in families instead of using lateral transmission - it does make some people unsettled, wondering what he's keeping from them or plans to in the future, whether something about his upbringing soured him on the idea, etcetera. It doesn't really have an ending so much as a section after which there are not more pages.

TILES approves this work as an interesting look both at an alien culture and at cultural transmission through adolescence, though it is published flagged as "incomplete".

A comedic musical about a scientist who is studying how it can be that they are in a musical, since the fact that people sometimes burst into coordinated song and dance does not have any obvious grounding in the otherwise solid laws of physics nor a clear sociological cause. There is a "flashback" scene where they speculate about prehistoric people doing numbers about domesticating dogs and inventing fire, and a series of frustrating dead ends when they try to harness the phenomenon for various practical purposes by setting up rhymes and such.

Sounds like light-hearted and TILES-approved fun! Musicals are not the most popular genre in Towertopia but are not unknown by any means, so the core concept of people suddenly breaking into coordinated song and dance is pretty culturally accessible.

The author of the book is incredibly offended by this conclusion and wants to retract the book from publication unless a more suitable concluding note is agreed upon. She agrees that children should not be misled about the appropriate way to react in your society if your parents are abusing you, but in the Teachingsphere children typically arrange their own adoptions, and this is not because monks aren't trustworthy! It's because children have an easier time transitioning out of an abusive household if they are going to be raise by an adult they know and trust. There is nothing wrong with the Towertopian approach-- different societies have different needs-- but that "luckily" is very offensive. She will accept a neutral note explaining the concept of cultural differences and the appropriate way for Towertopian children to respond to their parents being abusive. 

The TILES panelist reviewing this request puts his head in his hands. Given the brief blurbs he had seen about the known cultural factors of various worlds, he had thought the Teachingsphere was one of the most promising cultures in terms of prospect for TILES-approved edifying literature, but there must have been some kind of terrible misunderstanding or translation error... not only were many of the works submitted totally unacceptable, but somehow the one Teachingsphere book they actually published thus far has nevertheless led to incredible offense and controversy.

The book is indeed withdrawn so as to avoid exacerbating diplomatic problems between Towertopia and the Teachingsphere.

Tree has stories for TILES! The stories treat the cultural default as assuming that obviously everyone is going to live together with a group of friends -- a cultural note explains that they've heard TILES is opposed to "polyamory," and they're not totally sure what this means, but generally speaking these groups of people are not having sex with each other.

A historical fiction novel set roughly five hundred years in Tree's past, discussing the attempts of a (real) scholar attempting to prove that another (real) scholar's work was in part fraudulent. A significant part of the work is devoted to the protagonist's attempts to determine whether the work is fraudulent, not-fraudulent-but-sloppy, or whether in fact the protagonist is wrong (although the protagonist is clearly assuming throughout the work that they are not wrong). Other major subplots include: the protagonist mourning the death of rir eldest sibling while simultaneously struggling with complicated feelings about the fact that ae died in an assassination attempt on two members of the de-facto rulers of a neighboring city, the surviving member of which is a major supporter of several of rir friends' scholarship; several background political debates on a war that seems to be going on nearby; and a handful of sex scenes in which rem and rir spouse attempt to conceive a second child while spending the entire time miserable about it. (It does not seem to have even occurred to the submitter that this might qualify as pornography.) An attached cultural-context guide notes that everything about the story is consistent with the current state of knowledge about the events in question, but notes a few specific places where the narrative in the story conflicts with the current leading hypothesis (though not with an alternative reasonably-plausible hypothesis) and several more places where the story just completely made up details that could be true but probably aren't.

A song about spaceflight, primarily focusing on how different people from all sorts of walks of life can contribute to the project of one day settling the stars, with a bittersweet emphasis on what it means to build something you'll never live to see.

A pair of short stories, both set in the same world, but each following a different teenage character as the protagonist. In this world, some people have access to limited magical powers allowing them to affect their own mind in various ways, as well as enabling minor acts of telekinesis, which can be used in various prosocial ways, most notably energy generation. However, unbeknownst to them, using these powers requires falsely believing that anyone can in principle learn to use these powers. (In fact, even absent this condition, not everyone has the potential to use these powers.) Children with the potential for these powers are raised separately from the rest of the society, in order to allow for this lie to be maintained. The two protagonists, who are friends, jointly discover evidence conclusively suggesting this is untrue, and simultaneously discover the fact that knowing this is untrue makes you lose access to your powers. Both of them realize what is happening in time that they could, in principle, use their powers to self-modify to forget this fact (which would allow them to retain their magical powers); one of them decides pe is unwilling to force pemself to believe something false, while the other decides ze would rather keep zir powers, and chooses to forget. The stories conclude with the first character mourning the fact that the second is willing to choose to believe something untrue, while the second character mistakenly believes that zir friend chose to abandon zem and pir work (in fact pe was expelled from the commune).

A bureaucratictasksassistant saves jir boss from a murder attempt, which is implied to be an ideologicalmurder, killing the attempted murderer in the process. The judge interviewing jem determines je is not legally culpable, but je wrestles with guilt out of the belief that if je had been trying harder not to kill the murderer, the murderer would also have survived. Je dedicates jemself to the project of trying to make up for what je perceives as jem having killed someone, which makes up the bulk of the novel. Je eventually discovers that one of jir close friends, whom je had been concerned about throughout the novel but had not expected to literally be a murderer, is planning to kill someone. Je attempts to talk jir friend down, seemingly fails but picks up some specifics about fir plan, confronts fem in person in an attempt to stop fem, and ends up choosing between having to kill jir friend, let jir friend carry out the murder, or risk jir own life and likely die trying to take fem down non-violently. Je takes the third option; the friend fails to force femself to kill or seriously harm jem and proceeds to have a breakdown about how if fe were more committed to fir beliefs fe'd have been able to just go through with it anyways. The story ends ambiguously, with it unclear what any of these people are going to do from there.

A novel set on a world in which people are immortal and unaging, and also live on floating islands in the sky. (The exact magical mechanism for the floating islands is left largely unclear.) At the start of the novel, it appears that the floating islands are universally difficult to travel between. The protagonist, an astronomer, lives on an island ruled by a single "first citizen" who essentially serves as an absolute monarch. At first, it appears that the absolute monarch is doing chir best given resource constraints, but the protagonist, an astronomer, uncovers evidence that travel between the floating islands ought to be relatively easy unless something is actively interfering. Ae attempts to publish air research, but is informed that it violates a law preventing the promulgation of misinformation. Terrified of accidentally misleading people, ae tracks down the person responsible for the decision and demands an explanation; when ae fails to get a satisfactory one, ae attempts to build a prototype ship to travel between the islands. As ae prepares to test the prototype, ae is confronted by the island's first citizen, who informs aem that the other islands contain various seemingly-good developments that would actually be harmful to life on the island. Ae decides that in that case, ae definitely has to be the one to check out the islands, so that no one else is put at risk. Ae investigates the other islands, concludes that the monarch believes what che said but is wrong, and returns with as much information as ae can bring. Ae attempts to persuade the monarch of this, fails, and concludes that the monarch believed this when che implemented the initial rules, but that che is continuing this policy because che is worried that if the populace finds out what they're missing out on they'll revolt. The monarch attempts to prevent aem from leaving, but fails due to some of the inventions from other islands ae brought back with aem. Ae wrestles with what to do, before ultimately deciding to inform the populace of the possibility of inter-island travel and what other islands are like, without specifically accusing the monarch of lying; ae does this by using a "typewriter" from another island to hand-type instructions on how to create an islandship, going into the central forum of the city, and handing them out to everyone in sight. The monarch comes to try to arrest aem under false pretenses, at which point ae points out that the truth is already out and arresting them won't actually do anything. The story ends with the monarch fleeing to another island, a significant portion of the populace emigrating, and the protagonist and various supporting characters debating what system of government to implement on the island with the departure of the monarch.

A Further Guidelines Update:

• Stories that describe sexual and/or fetishistic behaviors in the form of detailed descriptions of lustful thoughts, fantasies, pinings, hypothetical conversations, suggestive letters or messages, etc. will often be considered obscene and unworthy of publication even if the behaviors being fantasized about or discussed do not ever actually take place within the world of the narrative. (The concept of characters being attracted to one another, even lustfully or otherwise immorally so, is of course permissible, but certain specifics of that are not.)

• Stories that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse the idea that all moral authority is fundamentally invalid and one needs to rethink everything for oneself should be considered immoral and unworthy of publication.

• Stories that contain detailed instructions on chemical processes, formulas, etc. that can be used to create addictive drugs, deadly and innocuous-seeming poisons, or other hazardous substances should be considered dangerous to public health and morals and unworthy of publication.

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since this is transitive, and most souls are eaten after death, some small part of most people lives on for hundreds or thousands of years after their death, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (which is equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and impulses. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. Soon learning that a large group of monsters have penetrated civilization's defensive lines and are now heading inwards, towards populated areas, he sets off for the nearby large city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

This novel is approved as an interesting fantasy, but publication is held up by a spirited dispute as to whether TILES should mandate that a word other than 'souls' be used in this translation to avoid unfortunate implications, or whether the word 'souls' should be retained in order to make the novel more of a metaphor for the intercession of the saints. The TILES panel is unable to resolve this disagreement on its own and the matter is referred to the metaphysicians.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things---the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very fast. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

The Hadarite religion is of course not practiced in Towertopia, but its emphasis on truth is popular among Towertopians. This memoir is nevertheless approved both for its extremely in-depth look at two different cultures and their interactions. Interestingly, it becomes popular with a wider audience for its humor -- the "humorous misunderstandings" genre is very popular in Towertopia.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

Both this book and its answer sheet are subjected to in-depth evaluations by the TILES panel and subject-matter experts brought in to look at specific claims. Unfortunately, some of the claims rely on events that happened in an alternate world with history and psychology that seems relevantly different from that of Towertopia, making them difficult for Towertopians to properly evaluate -- both here on the TILES panel and more broadly, As a result this book is ultimately approved as an unusual and interesting alien cultural artifact, but its efficacy for its purported purpose is somewhat challenged by the historical and psychological differences between Towertopia and Olam.

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot, in comparison, is rather straightforward and unsurprising.

This book, like many of the otherworldly books that contain large amounts of reference material, finds an audience with Towertopians. "Rebuilding after a disaster" is a somewhat popular subgenre in Towertopia, but this one is interesting in that it not only involves new cultures emerging after such a disaster, but the culture culture that is being rebuilt from is itself rather alien! This book, once approved by TILES, adds further fuel to the debate about whether it's appropriate to treat actual events of otherworldly history as one would a fandom.

This book is set in a world that is like the Teachingsphere, except that magic people wander the non-Teachingsphere parts of the earth and kill monsters. (Gods exist, but are understood by the magic people as being a particularly formidable kind of monster that is sometimes too helpful to need killing.) A poor village hires seven magic people to defend them from magic-people bandits by lying and claiming they have money to pay; when it turns out they don't, there's conflict, but all seven magic people eventually decide to defend the village. The seven magic people have varying kinds of trauma, which are discussed but not resolved over the course of the story; four of them die. The theme is that being a peasant is much better morally and for one's happiness than being a magic person who kills people. Six of the magic people are men, and one is a woman. The woman cooks, repairs clothing, and doesn't fight, but is also in charge of tactics and is universally obeyed by the men. The fighting is described in enthusiastic detail, and mostly used as a means of characterizing the protagonists. A subplot about the woman's husband atoning for having sex with a village girl was tacked on for the Towertopians at the last minute. (The sex was in the original book.) The man is deeply upset by how having sex with the girl offended the logos and harmed the social fabric because people couldn't rely on him not to have sex with people other than his wife. His wife comforts him about it, and the narrative seems totally unaware of the possibility that she might have had any objections to him having sex with someone else.

A slightly complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends.

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.  We have several characters pushing for new theocracies (but disagreeing on which religious sects to favor - a few of them still agree with the Zadians' teaching just not the strictness of their practices), some other characters advocating a more secular aristocratic-democracy, and others who want each town choose its own course.  The book majors on their debates and their interaction with the city around them.

(The author's brief prologue explains that in actual history, the Zadian Theocracy was overthrown by foreign armies some time before this book was set.)

TILES approves this work as an interesting take on an alternate world's history and on the merit of various governmental systems.

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages (before the rise of global trade, the translator's preface explains), where magical elves kidnap some novice Historian-Monks, and they must use their historical and philosophical training to resolve the elves' political dispute and convince someone to bring them back home.  Along the way, they convince two elves to take Historian-Monk vows and set up their own Elven monastery.

Approved, and indeed very appealing to a Towertopian audience!

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

(The translator explains that the Barren-Power war was Ev's last major war, about a century before the present.  It was started by the Barren-Power ideology, which condemned abstract philosophy as useless, advocated whatever led to success, and saw successful dictatorship as its own justification.)

One person did it out of cowardice when they temporarily conquered his town; he's horrified at what he did and can't imagine how to atone.  The other person felt that a stronger Barren-Power movement would push the world out of their suboptimal equilibrium; he agrees he did wrong but thinks it was worth it.  We follow their psychological and religious journey while under sentence of death for treason.  The first person finally forgives himself and begs to be kept away from any similar situation; the second person finally trusts in God and other people to handle the situation.

In the end, both their sentences are commuted to lifelong vows as Astronomy-Monks.

This work is quickly approved and becomes popular both for its history and for its narrative -- these sorts of "psychological" works are popular with Towertopians, especially around themes of redemption and repentance. The Barren-Power ideology is also prime "villain material".

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

Astronomical information of a similar nature is transmitted back in return!

This is a 6 hour film which shows an image of an empty room with plain beige walls and an undecorated concrete floor.  It is seemingly a static image.  However, as time passes, it is revealed to indeed be film: the spot of light from an out-of-frame window slowly passes from one side of the floor to the other.  Nothing else happens.  A note with the submission mentions that this is the most frequently suggested work for people who demand censorship, as it contains literally nothing that someone could potentially find offensive. 

This work is approved, including the explanatory note. One Towertopian art museum puts it on passive-aggressive display on a screen near the entrance with the caption "This is what anti-censorship cultures think our art must be like." If one walks past the screen, they find a balcony looking out over beautiful collections of art produced under Towertopian censorship.

On a similar but opposite end is this old children’s book titled How Plants Work which is covered in heavy warnings: nudity, sex, reproduction, genital mutilation, etc etc.  All of the warnings are *technically* correct - the plants are not covering their reproductive organs (flowers) with any form of clothing.  One image has a person picking flowers and putting them in a vase to be admired.  Other flowers which are not picked get pollinated and form seed-bearing fruit to continue the life cycle.

The warnings are clearly tacked on by someone other than the author, and a further note by the cultural translator mentions that it frequently mass-sent to any censorship bureau or other censored publication list as a meme and is therefore the #1 most challenged book on Therrune despite being entirely harmless.  Nearly every creche-district library has a copy, where it performs its intended task as being an informative book for children just learning how to read.

The TILES panelists reading this work are initially confused as to whether the content warnings are meant sincerely and this is a culture that views plant reproduction as immoral to depict -- upon reading the cultural translator's note at the end, they have to admit it's a funny joke. The plants depicted are somewhat different to those that are well-known in Towertopia and the work is approved as a foreign cultural artifact, though it is not considered suitable for children thanks to the warnings etc.

Said cultural translator, being a rare person with any diplomatic skills, takes pity and decides to offer a more genuine story.  It is a film showing the heavily extrapolated-upon life of a popular artist from around 250 years ago.  It never got much traction on Therrune due to its heavily filtered-against warnings (pregnancy, children, deadly illness, disability) but might be better received elsewhere. 

Rulin Sepia9483 had no real drive or ambition when they were young.  Nearly as soon as their clutch was ready to move out of the creche-district they moved back in as an incubator (via artificial insemination, as was still the technological standard back then), then became a clutch-parent to their offspring’s clutch.  They got on well with the 6 children under their care and had a sibling-close bond with their two fellow parents, weathering the various trials that came their way including the wave of a dangerous illness which killed one of the children and paralyzed one of the other parents.  

As the children became teenagers and began to prepare for their own lives and future careers in the adult districts, Rulin once again felt lost and unsure what to do.  However, Tyrese Seafoam9927, one of the children in their care, was passionate about carpentry and often brought their study material home.  They bonded over the work rather than growing distant as Tyrese reached adulthood.  Rulin joined Tyrese at their carpentry classes and later moved out of the creche-district with their now-ex ward.  

They got a commission to replace an old dovecote and built a truly impressive double-helix-shaped sculpture which both pigeons and passers-by loved!  The two of them went on to build dozens more, each unique works of art, and brought about the fad of extravagant dovecotes which continues to this day. Rulin died of a lung infection about 20 years after their first sculpture, and Tyrese continued to work for another 40, eventually moving on to apartment buildings for humans.  The last few minutes of the film is a reel of photographs of their work, as well as video of the original double-helix structure which has been consistently rebuilt as needed in the same place with a bronze plaque showing its artists displayed beside it.

This work poses major difficulties for the TILES panel. On the one hand, the primary story of a parent overcoming uncertainty about their path in life by working together with a child on artistic projects is interesting and inspiring, especially against the backdrop of what is by Towertopian standards a horrible and dehumanizing system.. On the other hand, the idea that pregnancy or children would be considered a content warning is itself somewhat objectionable, and the portrayal of group "clutch-parenting" and the birth of children via artificial insemination is highly contrary to Towertopian sexual ethics, even though it's by no means the focus of the story.

Ultimately, this work is approved with various additional warnings added -- some view it as an interesting cultural artifact of a very foreign culture, while it also has some popular artistic appeal as a perhaps unusually optimistic example of the Towertopian "triumph amidst dystopia" genre, as a lot of things in this genre normally end with the triumph being a glorious martyrdom.

This is a story about a planet colonized by premodern magical exploration that has developed separately from the author's world since then (one can derive this from footnotes explaining worldbuilding details, of which there are a lot), and it's got dragons on it, and the colonists make friends with them and ride them around to do slash-and-burn agriculture and defend against less friendly megafauna and deliver messages long distances.

A crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. Tags: heavy worldbuilding, heavy magicbuilding, large cast, death school, setting-crossover, magic-combat, fantasy, drama. The characters each bring some form of magic or powers from their respective worlds. They are tasked with surviving for four years so they can "graduate" and return to their respective worlds with new and more powerful magic. The academy itself is hostile, and produces a variety of threats both environmental and active each year. However, the primary challenge is the end-of-year exams, which test the students on magical knowledge (in particular, each other's magic systems,) and which pass only the top 50% of the class each year; the bottom half are turned into books by the library. Dead students are treated as having gotten a score of 0, so students are incentivized to kill each other to increase their chances of passing each exam. The magics brought by the various characters are not at all balanced against each other, and the characters also vary greatly in competence, but beyond these factors, it is difficult to tell which characters will die or fail and which will survive; some characters get more screentime than others but there are no clear primary protagonists. A fair amount of sex is implied but it occurs offscreen, and pairbonding is not a focus; most characters are too busy not dying. The sexual implications should be pretty easy to edit out when they're gay, if you like. Conveniently, all but one of the pairbonds that do occur are heterosexual-coded. It should be easy to edit the last one to give one girl a preference for guys, which would naturally lead her partner to decide to be a guy, right? Anyway, death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy is a popular enough combination of tropes to constitute its own genre. This series is an exemplar due to the variety of novel magic-and-power-classification systems studied and invented by the characters, a few of which are groundbreaking by Auderan standards and many of which are refinements of popular classification systems, and which have since entered common usage. The settings and characters involved are not actually from other works; the team of authors who worked on this series took great pride in its originality and scope, and there's a perceptible aesthetic that holds across the diverse settings. There are numerous appendices expounding on the settings and their magic systems. At the end of each novel, this information is included for all of the characters who have died, to minimize spoilers in the intended reading experience.

Here's a fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. Tags: light worldbuilding, light magicbuilding, discrete-spells, nondiscrete-spells, costly magic, whimsical cosmology, dystopia, nonsexual friendship-romance, magic-combat, fantasy. The protagonist is targeted by the setting's magocracy, who want to get the star back and exploit it for its magical properties. The protagonist's primary character traits are his curiosity, impulsiveness, and creativity. The star is sapient, and is depicted as naive, intelligent, alien, and adorable. The deuteragonist is a girl who has run away from a family of genetically modified mercenaries with superhuman physical abilities but drastically shortened lifespans. She joins the protagonist and the star on their journey and lends them her acute tactical intellect, her abilities in combat, and her well-honed paranoia. The deuteragonist never expresses vulnerability in an obvious way, but there is a lot of adorable cuddling and casual handholding. The featured magic system centers around sacrificing knowledge to evoke magical effects: to perform magic, a wizard focus on some area of their understanding of the world and figuratively "burns" it to power the effect. Efficiency of knowledge use scales with specificity, accuracy, and relevance of the knowledge used. Overdrawing on knowledge is easy and potentially disastrous, as it can not only undo years of study, but in extreme cases erase fundamental intuitions about the world that can't be easily relearned, such as a wizard's instinctive understanding of heat or gravity. This is played for horror, and depicted as one of the most awful things that can happen to a person ever. A central element of the setting is that anyone at all with significant scientific knowledge can perform magic, potentially to great destructive effect, and so the magocracy has outlawed literacy and study of the natural world among the populace. The novel ends with somewhat abruptly with the main characters overthrowing the magocracy. The characters dealing with the resulting chaos, implementing a better way to deal with the dangers of magic, studying sufficient astrophysics to return the star to the sky, and studying sufficient biology to save the deuteragonist from dying in her 30s is implied to be the plot of one or more sequels. This novel is notable for having been written by a particularly young author, whose style is a bit unrefined in a way that many Auderan readers find refreshing. It's also an example of a work with less heavy magicbuilding.

A novel about a young girl who has to come to terms with the years long horrific crime spree she engaged in while being raised by a small gang who committed similarly depraved acts. The novel starts after she has been separated from her 'family' and largely doesn't onscreen any gruesome acts. She starts off reveling in her violent activities but as she makes friends she begins to find ways to relate to people that aren't gruesome torture based. For much of this process she avoiding thinking about her past, feeling empathy for her new friends but not her past victims. In the climax of the novel she slips up and torturously near murders a new friend's brother after he upsets her friend. Realizing what she did, and how she can't deny how her past led to her present, she breaks down realizing that her previous victims were no different from the people she's grown to love and care for. She runs away from her new home, only to realize that she can't avoid her problems - returning to try to be better.

At the end of the novel a section provides discussion questions for grade school teachers to go over with their students.

Tree has stories for TILES! The stories treat the cultural default as assuming that obviously everyone is going to live together with a group of friends -- a cultural note explains that they've heard TILES is opposed to "polyamory," and they're not totally sure what this means, but generally speaking these groups of people are not having sex with each other.

An alarming beginning, but TILES forges on.

A historical fiction novel set roughly five hundred years in Tree's past, discussing the attempts of a (real) scholar attempting to prove that another (real) scholar's work was in part fraudulent. A significant part of the work is devoted to the protagonist's attempts to determine whether the work is fraudulent, not-fraudulent-but-sloppy, or whether in fact the protagonist is wrong (although the protagonist is clearly assuming throughout the work that they are not wrong). Other major subplots include: the protagonist mourning the death of rir eldest sibling while simultaneously struggling with complicated feelings about the fact that ae died in an assassination attempt on two members of the de-facto rulers of a neighboring city, the surviving member of which is a major supporter of several of rir friends' scholarship; several background political debates on a war that seems to be going on nearby; and a handful of sex scenes in which rem and rir spouse attempt to conceive a second child while spending the entire time miserable about it. (It does not seem to have even occurred to the submitter that this might qualify as pornography.) An attached cultural-context guide notes that everything about the story is consistent with the current state of knowledge about the events in question, but notes a few specific places where the narrative in the story conflicts with the current leading hypothesis (though not with an alternative reasonably-plausible hypothesis) and several more places where the story just completely made up details that could be true but probably aren't.

This work is an interesting foreign example of a "quest for truth" story, a genre that is popular among Towertopians, and it acknowledges multiple possibilities in a way that makes the story more engaging. (The stereotypical "bad teenage writing" version of the quest for truth story involves a protagonist who is Obviously Right and does not much consider the possibility that they are erring or even overconfident, just that they haven't found the right arguments yet.) While the work does contain sexual elements, they seem clearly not intended to arouse the prurient interest and the work is hence approved, albeit with major content warnings.

A song about spaceflight, primarily focusing on how different people from all sorts of walks of life can contribute to the project of one day settling the stars, with a bittersweet emphasis on what it means to build something you'll never live to see.

TILES approves this song -- a popular fan-made Towertopian music video draws sentimental parallels between the scenario described in the song and the workers who built a famous historical cathedral which took centuries to construct.

A pair of short stories, both set in the same world, but each following a different teenage character as the protagonist. In this world, some people have access to limited magical powers allowing them to affect their own mind in various ways, as well as enabling minor acts of telekinesis, which can be used in various prosocial ways, most notably energy generation. However, unbeknownst to them, using these powers requires falsely believing that anyone can in principle learn to use these powers. (In fact, even absent this condition, not everyone has the potential to use these powers.) Children with the potential for these powers are raised separately from the rest of the society, in order to allow for this lie to be maintained. The two protagonists, who are friends, jointly discover evidence conclusively suggesting this is untrue, and simultaneously discover the fact that knowing this is untrue makes you lose access to your powers. Both of them realize what is happening in time that they could, in principle, use their powers to self-modify to forget this fact (which would allow them to retain their magical powers); one of them decides pe is unwilling to force pemself to believe something false, while the other decides ze would rather keep zir powers, and chooses to forget. The stories conclude with the first character mourning the fact that the second is willing to choose to believe something untrue, while the second character mistakenly believes that zir friend chose to abandon zem and pir work (in fact pe was expelled from the commune).

These stories are accepted with the caveat that they must be published together, as the second story would be considered perhaps contrary to public morality if released on its own. When paired, though, this is beautiful art that speaks to the importance of standing up for the truth -- even when it hurts -- and the importance of resisting even useful lies. Beliefs are for true things!

A bureaucratictasksassistant saves jir boss from a murder attempt, which is implied to be an ideologicalmurder, killing the attempted murderer in the process. The judge interviewing jem determines je is not legally culpable, but je wrestles with guilt out of the belief that if je had been trying harder not to kill the murderer, the murderer would also have survived. Je dedicates jemself to the project of trying to make up for what je perceives as jem having killed someone, which makes up the bulk of the novel. Je eventually discovers that one of jir close friends, whom je had been concerned about throughout the novel but had not expected to literally be a murderer, is planning to kill someone. Je attempts to talk jir friend down, seemingly fails but picks up some specifics about fir plan, confronts fem in person in an attempt to stop fem, and ends up choosing between having to kill jir friend, let jir friend carry out the murder, or risk jir own life and likely die trying to take fem down non-violently. Je takes the third option; the friend fails to force femself to kill or seriously harm jem and proceeds to have a breakdown about how if fe were more committed to fir beliefs fe'd have been able to just go through with it anyways. The story ends ambiguously, with it unclear what any of these people are going to do from there.

The categories used in this work are somewhat unlike those of Towertopian society, but the plot is quite appealing despite the ambiguous ending. The amount of attempted murder going on in the bureaucratictasksassistant's life seems alarming, though Towertopian readers are uncertain whether that is reflective of actual high incidences of murder in Tree society or whether it's just one of those things you're supposed to overlook -- similar to how detective fiction protagonists often seem to encounter a really weirdly high amount of murder given actual historical crime rates for their setting etc. etc. 

A novel set on a world in which people are immortal and unaging, and also live on floating islands in the sky. (The exact magical mechanism for the floating islands is left largely unclear.) At the start of the novel, it appears that the floating islands are universally difficult to travel between. The protagonist, an astronomer, lives on an island ruled by a single "first citizen" who essentially serves as an absolute monarch. At first, it appears that the absolute monarch is doing air best given resource constraints, but the protagonist, an astronomer, uncovers evidence that travel between the floating islands ought to be relatively easy unless something is actively interfering. Ae attempts to publish air research, but is informed that it violates a law preventing the promulgation of misinformation. Terrified of accidentally misleading people, ae tracks down the person responsible for the decision and demands an explanation; when ae fails to get a satisfactory one, ae attempts to build a prototype ship to travel between the islands. As ae prepares to test the prototype, ae is confronted by the island's first citizen, who informs aem that the other islands contain various seemingly-good developments that would actually be harmful to life on the island. Ae decides that in that case, ae definitely has to be the one to check out the islands, so that no one else is put at risk. Ae investigates the other islands, concludes that the monarch believes what che said but is wrong, and returns with as much information as ae can bring. Ae attempts to persuade the monarch of this, fails, and concludes that the monarch believed this when che implemented the initial rules, but that che is continuing this policy because che is worried that if the populace finds out what they're missing out on they'll revolt. The monarch attempts to prevent aem from leaving, but fails due to some of the inventions from other islands ae brought back with aem. Ae wrestles with what to do, before ultimately deciding to inform the populace of the possibility of inter-island travel and what other islands are like, without specifically accusing the monarch of lying; ae does this by using a "typewriter" from another island to hand-type instructions on how to create an islandship, going into the central forum of the city, and handing them out to everyone in sight. The monarch comes to try to arrest aem under false pretenses, at which point ae points out that the truth is already out and arresting them won't actually do anything. The story ends with the monarch fleeing to another island, a significant portion of the populace emigrating, and the protagonist and various supporting characters debating what system of government to implement on the island with the departure of the monarch.

This one leads to more controversy -- the novel is interesting as a potential example of the virtue of truthseeking and the perils of unjust censorship, but the main character's actions are at least questionably obedient, but the "first citizen" also seems to be ruling unjustly, but it isn't entirely clear whether the main character had sufficient reason to know that, but also the "first citizen" is ruling in a fashion overtly contrary to Truth... ultimately this work is TILES-approved but with an introduction and summary that frames the "first citizen" as sinister from the beginning, which somewhat detracts from the dramatic tension of the work.

This book is set in a world that is like the Teachingsphere, except that magic people wander the non-Teachingsphere parts of the earth and kill monsters. (Gods exist, but are understood by the magic people as being a particularly formidable kind of monster that is sometimes too helpful to need killing.) A poor village hires seven magic people to defend them from magic-people bandits by lying and claiming they have money to pay; when it turns out they don't, there's conflict, but all seven magic people eventually decide to defend the village. The seven magic people have varying kinds of trauma, which are discussed but not resolved over the course of the story; four of them die. The theme is that being a peasant is much better morally and for one's happiness than being a magic person who kills people. Six of the magic people are men, and one is a woman. The woman cooks, repairs clothing, and doesn't fight, but is also in charge of tactics and is universally obeyed by the men. The fighting is described in enthusiastic detail, and mostly used as a means of characterizing the protagonists. A subplot about the woman's husband atoning for having sex with a village girl was tacked on for the Towertopians at the last minute. (The sex was in the original book.) The man is deeply upset by how having sex with the girl offended the logos and harmed the social fabric because people couldn't rely on him not to have sex with people other than his wife. His wife comforts him about it, and the narrative seems totally unaware of the possibility that she might have had any objections to him having sex with someone else.

TILES approves this book, though it's certainly not without controversy or content warnings. While some of moral themes in this work are popular with Towertopian readers, reviewers criticize the female magic person as not fitting well into the narrative -- she is seen as unrealistically saintly and selfless in a way that undermines the core theme about the moral superiority of the peasants to the magic people.

Some Additional Guidelines

• Works that are clearly lewd or fetishistic in their core setting or fundamental concept will not be approved even if the directly sexual elements have been removed prior to sending them to TILES.

• A previous guideline held that works that promoted infanticide or eugenics would be considered immoral. Infanticide because a child is deformed is still infanticide. In fact, it arguably counts as both infanticide and eugenics. Such will not be approved.

• Works that portray sufficiently outrageous offenses against natural law as worthy of serious consideration will be rejected even if those offenses are ultimately rejected within the narrative; this does not mean that one cannot have morally errant characters, but some things are really just beyond the pale!

• Works that praise, glorify, revel in, or endorse lying shall be considered hazardous to public morals.

A slightly complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends.

This work is approved, though it is by Towertopian standards not really that short. The moral heroism of the protagonist in refusing to go along with an evil regime is admirable, and the difficult details of questioning that authority and undergoing a crisis of faith are especially welcome. That said, the TILES panelists look a bit askance both at the amount of cuddling in the end (though it seems to be chaste and innocent?) and whether such would really be popular among ants!

Extremely! They’re a very cuddly kind of people! Do… do aliens not cuddle??

Extremely! They’re a very cuddly kind of people! Do… do aliens not cuddle??

We do... sometimes? But cuddling is somewhat private and intimate for us, and is also associated with things that ants (or at least our ants?) are typically considered to lack, such as softness and warmth.

This is a story about a planet colonized by premodern magical exploration that has developed separately from the author's world since then (one can derive this from footnotes explaining worldbuilding details, of which there are a lot), and it's got dragons on it, and the colonists make friends with them and ride them around to do slash-and-burn agriculture and defend against less friendly megafauna and deliver messages long distances.

Delightful! For some reason Towertopian authors never came up with the idea of using dragons for agricultural purposes, though in retrospect it seems to make a lot of sense! TILES approves this work as a mostly fun and whimsical exploration -- not necessarily the most psychologically intense sort of literature or anything, but sometimes you want high impact stories about wrestling with crises of faith and authority, and sometimes you want exciting adventures in an unexplored new frontier with dragon friends by your side!

The first chapter of a serial fiction detailing life on a recently-colonized alien planet; It is presented as a collection of colony summary statistics, reports from the colony's governing officers, and a small number of letters from colonists to their families back home. An author's note explains that the nature of the wormhole allowing access to the colony limits communication to infrequent size-limited transmissions, and that the work will simply be a collection of those transmissions; A second note explains that the author has agreed to release the existing installments to the wider interdimensional community on an accelerated catch-up schedule, but that she's not going to dump the whole thing on them all at once.

A tragedy-of-sorts about a Very Wise Person living in an ancient despotism; She derives from first-principles a number of economic and social reforms that would make the country richer and better for its people. She works her way up through the bureaucracy and about halfway through the book presents her ideas to the Despot, who is impressed and elevates her to be one of his ministers. Three days later someone poisons her food and she dies. The rest of the book is blank.

Yet Another TILES Guidelines Update

• A previous guideline clarified that works that provide sufficiently detailed instructions on how to produce hazardous substances will be considered dangerous to public health and morals. This principle also applies to works that provide detailed instructions as to how to commit criminal, immoral, or otherwise destabilizing actions. This applies even if the likelihood of such action actually being carried out seems low -- for instance, technical descriptions of how an individual with sufficient resources could unilaterally modify the moon's orbit, causing widespread destruction, will not be approved.

Further selections from the working group (likewise certified for accuracy) include the following.

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. This book is more than a hundred years old, set in the Union of that time. It alternates perspective between the two main characters, a boy and girl who meet as children, become friends, slowly fall in love as they grow older, get married as young adults, and build a life together. Romance, as depicted in this story, is primarily composed of friendship, trust, and some understated lust, which culminates in joyous, certain-as-the-sun-rises love. This is not to say that they don't have disagreements, but all are resolved amicably.For Towertopia the curators have edited out all of the sex scenes, although some sexual content is still implied to have happened (mostly after, and not before, marriage). Their comings-of-age include of course increasing knowledge and sexual awakening, but the story also places great emphasis on seizing one's agency and the way the couple grows into each other, simultaneously adapting to their relationship and the world around them to together form an integrated whole.

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). The magic system works in such a way that it is possible (albeit difficult) for even the lowliest mortal beings to ascend to great power (and for even the greatest to be usurped). The story follows a woman of great ambition and deadly cleverness. After the spillover of a battle between two mid-level entities destroys most of her hometown, she becomes determined to gain the power necessary to control her fate in a chaotic world. The first act tells the story of her quest, the trials she undergoes, the stratagems she employs, the people she meets, the fantastical locations she visits, the entities she slays. Most of her victories are the result of her intelligence and strategic acumen (or, perhaps, her lack of mistakes). Notably, she does not at any point use deception to get ahead, although there are plenty of situations where it seems advantageous to do so, and several occasions on which she would gain from dishonoring agreements she has made. The second act begins as she nears the peak of power. At this point, she becomes more contemplative, stepping back from her schemes to gain power that she might think about how to use the power she has gained. She comes to realize that, despite the unending struggle and change, the nature of that struggle is constant. ("What did you expect? That you would climb to the top, seize power, and find waiting for you a switch to flip and fix the world? This world runs in cycles of cycles, and if it were easy to break them it would have happened already. When everything changes, nothing changes.") So she seeks a way to undermine those patterns, to make way for a world which is less chaotic and truly different. But—she decides—despite the constraints of the ecology they all participate in, everyone makes their own choices, and there is no reason it is impossible for them to make different ones. In the third act, she brings her vision into reality, persuading and bargaining for people to change their behavior, to work together to build something better. The costs of her honor are repaid many times over, as she alone has the credibility to make this plan succeed. What makes the difference is helping others to see the truth, to recognize the fundamental stupidity of collectively choosing to create a world rent by conflict. Over many thousands of years, the forces of coordination creep forward, and eventually overcome those of conflict. Peace at last.

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid* team and play together. At first, they aren't very good: unskilled, uncoordinated, and prone to blunders. As the book goes on, they learn from their mistakes, get better, and eventually become one of the better teams in the region. The story focuses most on the camaraderie and friendship between them, as well as the humor they share together and find in their situation—despite numerous losses, they do not become dispirited, instead joking about their ineptitude. The incompetence only enhances its effectiveness as an ode to boyhood friendship. Almost as an afterthought, the story offers detailed insight into the tactical dynamics and competitive landscape of kravmabid—the narrator often describes the characteristics of skilled play as an ironic contrast to what the boys are actually doing—as well as what it feels like from the inside to slowly get better at something by experimenting and learning from your mistakes.

*This is a sport on Olam, combining hiking, navigation, tracking, archery, and martial arts into a sort of multiday wilderness wargame. It was originally developed for training soldiers, and has since evolved into a more fun recreational activity. Play is dominated by maneuver, team coordination, stealth, and tracking.

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist. He is often inconsiderate, and treats the people close to him poorly, but is exceptionally good at justifying his actions to himself. Since the entire book is from his—often warped—perspective, readers may initially believe that he is in the right, and underestimate the depth of his shortcomings. Eventually, he upsets someone in a way, and to a degree, that he cannot explain away, and for practically the first time is actually confused about why they feel as they do. He carries this confusion with him for several weeks, ruminating over it until he is eventually forced to conclude that he is responsible, and has very deeply fucked up. This triggers a long process of introspection, and attempts to change. Slowly, haltingly, with great difficulty, he is able to see through some of the illusions that have afflicted him, and comes to understand himself and others better. He repairs some of his relationships, and at the books end, makes a heartfelt apology to the person he has wronged the most (their reaction is not shown).

An incredibly long magic-people-wandering-the-earth-killing-monsters story. The protagonist is a genius; he invents a lot of the spells used in other stories. The primary plot is an incredibly complicated and thorny political intrigue that blends into both a murder mystery and a war story, which is mostly rooted in the fact that everyone is taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to so-and-so taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to and so on and so forth. (It is strongly implied that the cycle of revenge began long before the book started, although the protagonist assumes that it began because the person he knows least well was Just Evil.) Further complicating the situation, everyone insists on adopting any orphaned child they happen to come across-- of which there are many, because of all the revenge-- and then is incredibly surprised when it turns out that those orphans had previously been adopted by people they hate. Everyone has a bunch of secrets and is incredibly bad at communicating with each other, leading to a lot of dramatic irony; these end up compounding the political intrigue. Everyone is also wildly traumatized, which informs their actions. You can understand everyone's point of view and really desperately want them to be okay. In theory, the heroes are supposed to be killing monsters, but in practice they are too busy with their political intrigue and the monsters rampage around killing peasants. The primary plot is the protagonist and his best friends, all of whom were originally invested in revenge and under the impression that their clans were correct, gradually becoming more fed up with the revenge thing.

The climax is thirty thousand words of the world's most painful and awkward group therapy session, in which everyone is stuck in a room together because of one of the monsters they'd been ignoring and finally discuss their feelings and reveal their secrets. Most of the characters wind up fundamentally broken and are implied to never be okay again. The protagonist and his best friends decide that they are SO FED UP WITH THIS SHIT, kill the monster, and decide to wander the earth with their adopted child killing monsters and never talk to any of these people ever again.

Interestingly, no character in the story is depicted as being in a romantic relationship with or having sex with any other character. While there are a variety of close relationships, these relationships are all referred to in the story as "close friendships". All children were originally adopted from assorted peasant couples who died of monsters. One of the major plots of the story is a tonally bizarre series of humorous misunderstandings and miscommuncations between the protagonist and his two best friends, which often parallel and comment on the main plotline. An example of one such scene is when the protagonist thinks his best friend hates him when actually the best friend admires him greatly; the protagonist almost dies saving a girl from a monster, and the best friend is very angry and upset, and the protagonist concludes that it is because the best friend wanted the glory of saving the girl from the monster himself! Another example is when the protagonist's best friend got blackout drunk and sparred with him; reawakening the next morning to see the protagonist bloody and bruised, he concludes that he must have flown into a rage over some unknown insult and assaulted him, and runs away without a word, leaving the protagonist confused and rejected. Best friends are commonly physically affectionate with each other; they cuddle, hold hands, and spar, and when the protagonist resurrects one of his best friends from the dead there are a lot of tender scenes where he has to perform medical examinations on and provide emotional support to his best friend.

In spite of all the passionate desire for revenge, no one commits any act more heinous than straightforward murder in a painless fashion.

One of the earliest stories of the nations of (what is now) the Global Alliance, written down before contact with their extraterrestrial benefactors. It is an epic poem in three parts. Part one follows a capricious river-goddess as she alternately provides for and torments the people of the villages along her banks. In one of her rages, she pulls a town metalworker down beneath the water and he nearly drowns; in the next, she is depicted as pregnant; in her next calm period, she gives the baby to the metalworker she had nearly drowned.

(Without cultural context, readers may or may not put together that “pulling the metalworker under the water” was tasteful concealment of a rape scene.)

The second piece of the epic jumps ahead to when the metalworker’s baby has grown into a young girl. He has just passed away from smallpox and she is crying over his dead body. Desperate for any way to bring her father back, she consults with the town elders, who eventually reveal to her a route to the land of the dead. They warn her that the journey will be dangerous, but she presses on. The girl kills monsters on her journey to the underworld; annotations mention that different versions of the epic include different fantasy creatures here, and it is traditional for new adaptations to add their own. At the climax of the second part, she has to pick her real father out from two imposters, charismatic shapeshifting monsters who had escaped her on her journey. She figures out which one is her real father by asking trivia questions about metalworking; the monsters are stumped but her father answers correctly. She returns to the village in triumph.

The third part again skips ahead in time; the girl has grown into an adult woman, developed divine powers like her mother’s, started a family of her own, and made journeys up and down the river uniting the villages in an alliance. The alliance is building canals to control the floods and protect themselves from the river-goddess’s rage. Finding herself constrained, the river-goddess tries to assassinate her daughter; all three generations of the family–the metalworker, his daughter, and her children–make their stand against her together. The girl and the goddess have a battle of wills with hydrokinesis, her family backs her up with ordinary weapons, and ultimately they prevail in the fight over the goddess. The defeated goddess repents of her actions and signs a contract with the alliance, promising protection from other gods and monsters in exchange for the alliance’s correct ritual practice and sacrifice. An epilogue of sorts describes the growth of the alliance over the next few generations, with them accumulating wealth, building cities, and educating their children, all thanks to the actions of their heroes, who saved them from the whims of capricious nature.

A crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. Tags: heavy worldbuilding, heavy magicbuilding, large cast, death school, setting-crossover, magic-combat, fantasy, drama. The characters each bring some form of magic or powers from their respective worlds. They are tasked with surviving for four years so they can "graduate" and return to their respective worlds with new and more powerful magic. The academy itself is hostile, and produces a variety of threats both environmental and active each year. However, the primary challenge is the end-of-year exams, which test the students on magical knowledge (in particular, each other's magic systems,) and which pass only the top 50% of the class each year; the bottom half are turned into books by the library. Dead students are treated as having gotten a score of 0, so students are incentivized to kill each other to increase their chances of passing each exam. The magics brought by the various characters are not at all balanced against each other, and the characters also vary greatly in competence, but beyond these factors, it is difficult to tell which characters will die or fail and which will survive; some characters get more screentime than others but there are no clear primary protagonists. A fair amount of sex is implied but it occurs offscreen, and pairbonding is not a focus; most characters are too busy not dying. The sexual implications should be pretty easy to edit out when they're gay, if you like. Conveniently, all but one of the pairbonds that do occur are heterosexual-coded. It should be easy to edit the last one to give one girl a preference for guys, which would naturally lead her partner to decide to be a guy, right? Anyway, death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy is a popular enough combination of tropes to constitute its own genre. This series is an exemplar due to the variety of novel magic-and-power-classification systems studied and invented by the characters, a few of which are groundbreaking by Auderan standards and many of which are refinements of popular classification systems, and which have since entered common usage. The settings and characters involved are not actually from other works; the team of authors who worked on this series took great pride in its originality and scope, and there's a perceptible aesthetic that holds across the diverse settings. There are numerous appendices expounding on the settings and their magic systems. At the end of each novel, this information is included for all of the characters who have died, to minimize spoilers in the intended reading experience.

This is an interesting concept, though of course the setting is deeply horrific. The series ends up getting approved, though TILES decides to edit out most of the sexual implications in general, regardless of whether they are "pairbonded", "gay", etc. The TILES panelists are also quite confused about the author's note about the one girl's partner naturally being led to decide to be a guy under other circumstances!

In terms of how the actual content is received, Towertopian readers like talking about different combinations of abilities and how the characters might have acted differently. One popular theory is that the most ethical behavior available under the circumstances might be to become as spiritually advanced a person as possible and then sacrifice oneself to save others (intentionally failing the exam if needed) so as to leave behind a wise and edifying book that can help future students trapped in this realm.

Here's a fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. Tags: light worldbuilding, light magicbuilding, discrete-spells, nondiscrete-spells, costly magic, whimsical cosmology, dystopia, nonsexual friendship-romance, magic-combat, fantasy. The protagonist is targeted by the setting's magocracy, who want to get the star back and exploit it for its magical properties. The protagonist's primary character traits are his curiosity, impulsiveness, and creativity. The star is sapient, and is depicted as naive, intelligent, alien, and adorable. The deuteragonist is a girl who has run away from a family of genetically modified mercenaries with superhuman physical abilities but drastically shortened lifespans. She joins the protagonist and the star on their journey and lends them her acute tactical intellect, her abilities in combat, and her well-honed paranoia. The deuteragonist never expresses vulnerability in an obvious way, but there is a lot of adorable cuddling and casual handholding. The featured magic system centers around sacrificing knowledge to evoke magical effects: to perform magic, a wizard focus on some area of their understanding of the world and figuratively "burns" it to power the effect. Efficiency of knowledge use scales with specificity, accuracy, and relevance of the knowledge used. Overdrawing on knowledge is easy and potentially disastrous, as it can not only undo years of study, but in extreme cases erase fundamental intuitions about the world that can't be easily relearned, such as a wizard's instinctive understanding of heat or gravity. This is played for horror, and depicted as one of the most awful things that can happen to a person ever. A central element of the setting is that anyone at all with significant scientific knowledge can perform magic, potentially to great destructive effect, and so the magocracy has outlawed literacy and study of the natural world among the populace. The novel ends with somewhat abruptly with the main characters overthrowing the magocracy. The characters dealing with the resulting chaos, implementing a better way to deal with the dangers of magic, studying sufficient astrophysics to return the star to the sky, and studying sufficient biology to save the deuteragonist from dying in her 30s is implied to be the plot of one or more sequels. This novel is notable for having been written by a particularly young author, whose style is a bit unrefined in a way that many Auderan readers find refreshing. It's also an example of a work with less heavy magicbuilding.

This work also presents a very interesting concept! TILES considers delaying its release until after more sequels can come out so it can see whether the plot goes in an approved direction, but ultimately decides that if the plot goes way off the rails, the sequels could be refused permission even if the original is approved.

Like many works, this novel provokes a Towertopian "reverse version" that becomes somewhat popular, though in this case it's a reverse version of the magic system rather than the more typical reversal of characters or moral themes. In the Towertopian version, the magic system (which ends up being used as part of a quite different plot) doesn't sacrifice knowledge of the area being used, but rather sacrifices knowledge of other areas -- as a magic user uses more and more abilities in a particular domain, their other knowledge becomes more and more twisted to be relevant to their domain of focus, even if the utility of that relevance is very limited.The equivalent of losing fundamental intuitions would be becoming so specialized that one can no longer relate to things outside one's specialization. For instance, a fire mage who overdrew his knowledge might see furniture only as kindling and not for its intended purpose at all.

This system creates an interesting dynamic where in order to use power more effectively, one studies one's own field of specialization -- but since one can only sacrifice unrelated areas of knowledge, there are also major incentives to branch out and study unrelated or semi-related matters in order to have other knowledge to sacrifice -- a magic user with limited knowledge of other areas will quickly start losing basic concepts if they draw on their powers too heavily!

A novel about a young girl who has to come to terms with the years long horrific crime spree she engaged in while being raised by a small gang who committed similarly depraved acts. The novel starts after she has been separated from her 'family' and largely doesn't onscreen any gruesome acts. She starts off reveling in her violent activities but as she makes friends she begins to find ways to relate to people that aren't gruesome torture based. For much of this process she avoiding thinking about her past, feeling empathy for her new friends but not her past victims. In the climax of the novel she slips up and torturously near murders a new friend's brother after he upsets her friend. Realizing what she did, and how she can't deny how her past led to her present, she breaks down realizing that her previous victims were no different from the people she's grown to love and care for. She runs away from her new home, only to realize that she can't avoid her problems - returning to try to be better.

At the end of the novel a section provides discussion questions for grade school teachers to go over with their students.

This is an interesting one because the main character's actions and moral state for much of the novel are extremely bad. The idea of a protagonist torturing and coming close to murder over such an issue as the one described towards the end, while clearly not acceptable or portrayed as acceptable, seems like it might well be over the line -- especially since the book is apparently intended for grade school students! At the same time, though, the actual moral message of the book seems profound and important -- repentance from past misdeeds, the struggle to improve yourself, and the idea that your enemies are people too. The TILES panelists reviewing this work end up quite divided. Ultimately the core themes of the work win out over the content and this novel is approved, since the actual terrible acts described are mostly offscreen, but it's very very close.

The final TILES-approved release version also has lots of content warnings and an introduction that emphasizes it deals with very heavy subjects, which means that ultimately it is likely to be read by an older audience in Towertopia than that which it was originally intended for. That said, this book is still something that provokes substantial interest. In some ways, the very extreme and alien nature of the acts committed by the protagonist make this more appealing than a hypothetical similar work that focused on things a grade schooler would be more likely to be tempted to commit -- a version of this story that involves someone lying to gain social standing or similar might be much harder to write in a way that avoids potentially giving people bad ideas!

The first chapter of a serial fiction detailing life on a recently-colonized alien planet; It is presented as a collection of colony summary statistics, reports from the colony's governing officers, and a small number of letters from colonists to their families back home. An author's note explains that the nature of the wormhole allowing access to the colony limits communication to infrequent size-limited transmissions, and that the work will simply be a collection of those transmissions; A second note explains that the author has agreed to release the existing installments to the wider interdimensional community on an accelerated catch-up schedule, but that she's not going to dump the whole thing on them all at once.

This... isn't exactly the format that most appeals to a Towertopian audience, but it's approved nevertheless. The author's decision to release this work on an accelerated catch-up schedule rather than as one compiled work seems logical and appropriate -- this sort of work seems perhaps best appreciated as a set of serial installments.

A tragedy-of-sorts about a Very Wise Person living in an ancient despotism; She derives from first-principles a number of economic and social reforms that would make the country richer and better for its people. She works her way up through the bureaucracy and about halfway through the book presents her ideas to the Despot, who is impressed and elevates her to be one of his ministers. Three days later someone poisons her food and she dies. The rest of the book is blank.

Masterpiece! Masterpiece! TILES swiftly approves this and it becomes very popular among Towertopians, in large part for its brilliant use of a device that not only subverts readers' expectations, but does so as a means of advancing a legitimately meaningful and interesting point. It's not just trolling, it's trolling for a cause! Unfortunately, the nature of this device also means that why the book is so good is difficult to explain -- fortunately, it has an interesting and engaging plot in its own right as well to draw people in!

IMPORTANT TILES UPDATE:

Owing to unusual circumstances, all Faylien media distribution has been suspended pending further evaluation.  This restriction has now been lifted, Faylien media distribution may proceed as normal. (For more information, authorized personnel may wish to peruse TILES case file: "The Girl In The Black and Blue Dress")

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. This book is more than a hundred years old, set in the Union of that time. It alternates perspective between the two main characters, a boy and girl who meet as children, become friends, slowly fall in love as they grow older, get married as young adults, and build a life together. Romance, as depicted in this story, is primarily composed of friendship, trust, and some understated lust, which culminates in joyous, certain-as-the-sun-rises love. This is not to say that they don't have disagreements, but all are resolved amicably. For Towertopia the curators have edited out all of the sex scenes, although some sexual content is still implied to have happened (mostly after, and not before, marriage). Their comings-of-age include of course increasing knowledge and sexual awakening, but the story also places great emphasis on seizing one's agency and the way the couple grows into each other, simultaneously adapting to their relationship and the world around them to together form an integrated whole.

TILES approves this novel, with some content warnings for the implied sexual activity.

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). The magic system works in such a way that it is possible (albeit difficult) for even the lowliest mortal beings to ascend to great power (and for even the greatest to be usurped). The story follows a woman of great ambition and deadly cleverness. After the spillover of a battle between two mid-level entities destroys most of her hometown, she becomes determined to gain the power necessary to control her fate in a chaotic world. The first act tells the story of her quest, the trials she undergoes, the stratagems she employs, the people she meets, the fantastical locations she visits, the entities she slays. Most of her victories are the result of her intelligence and strategic acumen (or, perhaps, her lack of mistakes). Notably, she does not at any point use deception to get ahead, although there are plenty of situations where it seems advantageous to do so, and several occasions on which she would gain from dishonoring agreements she has made. The second act begins as she nears the peak of power. At this point, she becomes more contemplative, stepping back from her schemes to gain power that she might think about how to use the power she has gained. She comes to realize that, despite the unending struggle and change, the nature of that struggle is constant. ("What did you expect? That you would climb to the top, seize power, and find waiting for you a switch to flip and fix the world? This world runs in cycles of cycles, and if it were easy to break them it would have happened already. When everything changes, nothing changes.") So she seeks a way to undermine those patterns, to make way for a world which is less chaotic and truly different. But—she decides—despite the constraints of the ecology they all participate in, everyone makes their own choices, and there is no reason it is impossible for them to make different ones. In the third act, she brings her vision into reality, persuading and bargaining for people to change their behavior, to work together to build something better. The costs of her honor are repaid many times over, as she alone has the credibility to make this plan succeed. What makes the difference is helping others to see the truth, to recognize the fundamental stupidity of collectively choosing to create a world rent by conflict. Over many thousands of years, the forces of coordination creep forward, and eventually overcome those of conflict. Peace at last.

This epic is not just approved but widely praised in the TILES reviews. The main character's honor and unwillingness to break agreements or use deception is a great example of loyalty to truth, but aside from that reviewers really appreciate the fact that the main character realizes that the idea of trivially fixing the world is naive and then proceeds to take constructive long-term action anyway -- this sort of story is psychologically complex and interesting/inspiring in a way that "wildly overpowered main character fixes everything" plots generally aren't.

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid* team and play together. At first, they aren't very good: unskilled, uncoordinated, and prone to blunders. As the book goes on, they learn from their mistakes, get better, and eventually become one of the better teams in the region. The story focuses most on the camaraderie and friendship between them, as well as the humor they share together and find in their situation—despite numerous losses, they do not become dispirited, instead joking about their ineptitude. The incompetence only enhances its effectiveness as an ode to boyhood friendship. Almost as an afterthought, the story offers detailed insight into the tactical dynamics and competitive landscape of kravmabid—the narrator often describes the characteristics of skilled play as an ironic contrast to what the boys are actually doing—as well as what it feels like from the inside to slowly get better at something by experimenting and learning from your mistakes.

*This is a sport on Olam, combining hiking, navigation, tracking, archery, and martial arts into a sort of multiday wilderness wargame. It was originally developed for training soldiers, and has since evolved into a more fun recreational activity. Play is dominated by maneuver, team coordination, stealth, and tracking.

This work is easily approved and becomes quite popular, sparking substantial interest in kravmabid among Towertopian readers. Are there good professional-quality casts of kravmabid games that Olam could send over?

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist. He is often inconsiderate, and treats the people close to him poorly, but is exceptionally good at justifying his actions to himself. Since the entire book is from his—often warped—perspective, readers may initially believe that he is in the right, and underestimate the depth of his shortcomings. Eventually, he upsets someone in a way, and to a degree, that he cannot explain away, and for practically the first time is actually confused about why they feel as they do. He carries this confusion with him for several weeks, ruminating over it until he is eventually forced to conclude that he is responsible, and has very deeply fucked up. This triggers a long process of introspection, and attempts to change. Slowly, haltingly, with great difficulty, he is able to see through some of the illusions that have afflicted him, and comes to understand himself and others better. He repairs some of his relationships, and at the books end, makes a heartfelt apology to the person he has wronged the most (their reaction is not shown).

A novel that shows a flawed person bettering themselves and features growth, change, and noticing confusion? Another work very appealing to Towertopian readers, once again approved and praised!

Kravmabid is by nature very difficult to film, but there have been a few games recorded in extra-narrow-format*. They send over some reels and projection equipment. The editing and voiceover commentary is quite expert, but unable to compensate for the low quality of the recording.

*The Olamite equivalent to Super 8 mm film.

An incredibly long magic-people-wandering-the-earth-killing-monsters story. The protagonist is a genius; he invents a lot of the spells used in other stories. The primary plot is an incredibly complicated and thorny political intrigue that blends into both a murder mystery and a war story, which is mostly rooted in the fact that everyone is taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to so-and-so taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to and so on and so forth. (It is strongly implied that the cycle of revenge began long before the book started, although the protagonist assumes that it began because the person he knows least well was Just Evil.) Further complicating the situation, everyone insists on adopting any orphaned child they happen to come across-- of which there are many, because of all the revenge-- and then is incredibly surprised when it turns out that those orphans had previously been adopted by people they hate. Everyone has a bunch of secrets and is incredibly bad at communicating with each other, leading to a lot of dramatic irony; these end up compounding the political intrigue. Everyone is also wildly traumatized, which informs their actions. You can understand everyone's point of view and really desperately want them to be okay. In theory, the heroes are supposed to be killing monsters, but in practice they are too busy with their political intrigue and the monsters rampage around killing peasants. The primary plot is the protagonist and his best friends, all of whom were originally invested in revenge and under the impression that their clans were correct, gradually becoming more fed up with the revenge thing.

The climax is thirty thousand words of the world's most painful and awkward group therapy session, in which everyone is stuck in a room together because of one of the monsters they'd been ignoring and finally discuss their feelings and reveal their secrets. Most of the characters wind up fundamentally broken and are implied to never be okay again. The protagonist and his best friends decide that they are SO FED UP WITH THIS SHIT, kill the monster, and decide to wander the earth with their adopted child killing monsters and never talk to any of these people ever again.

Interestingly, no character in the story is depicted as being in a romantic relationship with or having sex with any other character. While there are a variety of close relationships, these relationships are all referred to in the story as "close friendships". All children were originally adopted from assorted peasant couples who died of monsters. One of the major plots of the story is a tonally bizarre series of humorous misunderstandings and miscommuncations between the protagonist and his two best friends, which often parallel and comment on the main plotline. An example of one such scene is when the protagonist thinks his best friend hates him when actually the best friend admires him greatly; the protagonist almost dies saving a girl from a monster, and the best friend is very angry and upset, and the protagonist concludes that it is because the best friend wanted the glory of saving the girl from the monster himself! Another example is when the protagonist's best friend got blackout drunk and sparred with him; reawakening the next morning to see the protagonist bloody and bruised, he concludes that he must have flown into a rage over some unknown insult and assaulted him, and runs away without a word, leaving the protagonist confused and rejected. Best friends are commonly physically affectionate with each other; they cuddle, hold hands, and spar, and when the protagonist resurrects one of his best friends from the dead there are a lot of tender scenes where he has to perform medical examinations on and provide emotional support to his best friend.

In spite of all the passionate desire for revenge, no one commits any act more heinous than straightforward murder in a painless fashion.

This work is... somewhat begrudgingly approved with a bunch of content warnings. It's very dark and harsh by the standards of Towertopian literature, and the elements focused around adoption of children are quite strange by Towertopian lights, as is the extreme secrecy and bad communication. The ending is considered tragic and negative even if there are some hopeful aspects, and while one might expect the work's portrayal of close friendship to be appealing, it seems like these people are really bad at being friends with one another!

(One typically does not have extended unreconciled serious misunderstandings and errors with friends at this level of intimacy in Towertopia -- one of the biggest marks of Towertopian intimate friendship is ease of communication, increased transparency, and the joy in efficient conversations and shared leaps of comprehension that result. In fact, in one Towertopian culture the word for "close friend" translates roughly to "one who needs no examples" -- in other words, the level of shared understanding where giving examples for conversational points is often a waste of time because your friend will already know what you're talking about without this level of detail!)

All that said, the core theme of the work -- the tragedy and futility of revenge -- is quite an appealing one for Towertopians, but ultimately while TILES approves the book it ends up not being particularly popular with Towertopian readers other than some of those who like very dark/tragic stories. The Teachingsphere is back on the board after having its previous accepted submission pulled from circulation, though, and maybe this will help lead to increased cultural understanding in the future? (Also, uh, maybe not.)

The fan translator of an otherwise unobjectionable historical fiction serial (told in epistolary format about the crew of a long-haul merchant vessel and their loved ones in various ports) has been dutifully if bemusedly assigning genders and editing relationships as the chapters come out.  This has now led to a situation where two "male" "committed friends" are deciding to have a baby, and they would like to know just what they're supposed to do with this?

One of the earliest stories of the nations of (what is now) the Global Alliance, written down before contact with their extraterrestrial benefactors. It is an epic poem in three parts. Part one follows a capricious river-goddess as she alternately provides for and torments the people of the villages along her banks. In one of her rages, she pulls a town metalworker down beneath the water and he nearly drowns; in the next, she is depicted as pregnant; in her next calm period, she gives the baby to the metalworker she had nearly drowned.

(Without cultural context, readers may or may not put together that “pulling the metalworker under the water” was tasteful concealment of a rape scene.)

The second piece of the epic jumps ahead to when the metalworker’s baby has grown into a young girl. He has just passed away from smallpox and she is crying over his dead body. Desperate for any way to bring her father back, she consults with the town elders, who eventually reveal to her a route to the land of the dead. They warn her that the journey will be dangerous, but she presses on. The girl kills monsters on her journey to the underworld; annotations mention that different versions of the epic include different fantasy creatures here, and it is traditional for new adaptations to add their own. At the climax of the second part, she has to pick her real father out from two imposters, charismatic shapeshifting monsters who had escaped her on her journey. She figures out which one is her real father by asking trivia questions about metalworking; the monsters are stumped but her father answers correctly. She returns to the village in triumph.

The third part again skips ahead in time; the girl has grown into an adult woman, developed divine powers like her mother’s, started a family of her own, and made journeys up and down the river uniting the villages in an alliance. The alliance is building canals to control the floods and protect themselves from the river-goddess’s rage. Finding herself constrained, the river-goddess tries to assassinate her daughter; all three generations of the family–the metalworker, his daughter, and her children–make their stand against her together. The girl and the goddess have a battle of wills with hydrokinesis, her family backs her up with ordinary weapons, and ultimately they prevail in the fight over the goddess. The defeated goddess repents of her actions and signs a contract with the alliance, promising protection from other gods and monsters in exchange for the alliance’s correct ritual practice and sacrifice. An epilogue of sorts describes the growth of the alliance over the next few generations, with them accumulating wealth, building cities, and educating their children, all thanks to the actions of their heroes, who saved them from the whims of capricious nature.

TILES looks into this for some time. The implied rape in the first part of the poem is indeed evident, though the presence of such is not intrinsically objectionable if portrayed carefully (as it is here). The fantasy creatures displayed during the "journey to the underworld" are interestingly different from some of those familiar to Towertopian audiences, and the idea of thwarting the shapeshifters via trivia about one's occupation rather than by personal/family interactions is an especially interesting twist.

The ending is a bit unusual. Given that this "goddess" seems very dubiously good (and in fact might herself be a monster or demon), the alliance's eventual pact with her seems strange. That said, as a founding myth and metaphor for the victory of progress and civilization over the cruelties of nature, this seems passable, and indeed the ritual practices the alliance offers can be interpreted as the need to protect nature's bounty and avoid undue pollution etc. in order to best live in the natural world. The genre of "foreign historical epic and founding myth" speaks in this work's favor and TILES approves it.

The fan translator of an otherwise unobjectionable historical fiction serial (told in epistolary format about the crew of a long-haul merchant vessel and their loved ones in various ports) has been dutifully if bemusedly assigning genders and editing relationships as the chapters come out.  This has now led to a situation where two "male" "committed friends" are deciding to have a baby, and they would like to know just what they're supposed to do with this?

An interesting puzzle. It seems that edits to this work made earlier in the serial have led to objectionable situations later in the serial -- in this case, editing to make earlier relationships TILES-approved has led to the edited characters' later relationships not being TILES-approved. The earlier portions of these serials are indeed quite acceptable with the edits in place, but the later elements present quite an obstacle.

There's some internal debate as to whether these sorts of major amendments are even worth requesting, or if they should just reject these kind of works outright -- if such substantial modifications are needed is it really worth distributing this at all? On the other hand, there is often good to be found even in bad things, and insofar as they can be modified to contain the good but not the objectionable elements that seems quite positive. Further, some of the edited works that have already been distributed seem to have done well.

The pro-modification position ultimately wins; a TILES representative writes back that the best solution might simply be to excise this subplot altogether. Alternatively, the translators could return to whatever had happened earlier in the story to make them change the characters in question and redact that, if this later relationship would be more important to the plot than whatever went on earlier was implied to be.