It might not be, honestly, Greens are not very charitable and interfacing with a totally different financial system might be complicated.

Yeah, looks like it'd be pretty annoying and complicated. Interdimensional charity will have to wait until the bureaucrats work things out. Fund Green youth organizations if you want though!

Those exist! And already have fallback funds. They can put a notice about that in the localization's metadata.

A working group has been put together to assemble 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. Hopefully Green will have people able to digitize them.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which everyone has a physical 'soul' which records their memories, instincts, and parts of their personality. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a recently dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since these souls decay shortly after a person's death, it is customary for them to be eaten, that a part of the deceased may live on. Furthermore, this is transitive, and individuals can contain memories or traces of people from hundreds or thousands of years ago, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (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 intuitions. He is able to mostly think clearly, but often does so in weird, sideways paths. 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. He soon realizes that a great surge of monsters has penetrated civilization's defensive lines and is now heading inwards, towards populated areas. He sets off for the nearby 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 through his insight and valor. 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 quickly. 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. (There is never any doubt that the Union will be put back together.) 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 is rather straightforward structurally, but contemplative. There is a strange sense that so much has changed, and so much time has passed, yet the world and its people are the same as they ever were.

*'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.

The soul-eating novel is a straightforwardly fun story with a neat premise. It's a pretty ficcable setting, too.

The one about the primitive tribeswoman is the absolute darling of every amateur (and professional) anthropologist-type on Green; what an amazing look at a fascinatingly unique perspective!

...Greens like truth too but do not think the best way to learn to appreciate it is to read lies. It's interesting as a cultural curiosity but they are no way no how going to make it at all difficult to access the answer key and if that's important to the Hadar they should not send more of these. People who want to do the exercise as intended can just, like, not look at it, and they aren't going to aid and abet baiting people into doing the exercise as intended if they don't want to.

Cultural and economic consequences of an apocalyptic plague via detailed character study in several complementary cross-sections of a setting? Amazing. Anyone who can tolerate the low-plot eats it right up.

Green would like more fiction-that-isn't-trying-to-bait-you-into-doing-epistemic-exercises-against-your-will from Olam! They know how to spin up cool premises!

So, the thing about the answer sheets is that it's good for some people to have them, so they can act as a sanity check, but widely distributing them would be sacrilege. Which is why it's not done on Olam.

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. There is some explicit sexual content, almost entirely after they get married, but it's considered to be moreso pornography-that-makes-you-cry than pornography-that-makes-you-aroused. 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).

The fantasy epic is a big hit. The less speculative works are less so, though the one about the narcissist gets some attention for the psychological depth, and the kravambid one is popular among people who want to import alien sports - this one's an unusually interesting alien sport. The romance/coming of age doesn't make a big splash except among the not inconsiderable number of people who are trying to be completionists about alien fiction.

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 classic novel controversial in its day. It is set in a period when humanity’s alien benefactors had pulled back a little, out of fear of humanity wiping itself out with their technology. The protagonist is an aspiring politician, in a country whose government is considered too repressive to get to trade with the aliens directly, though of course a rising tide lifts all boats. He hopes to rise through the ranks, reform his government to fit the aliens’ standards, and bring new prosperity to his country. The novel flips between detailing his progress on the campaign trail and a relationship he is conducting with a woman through correspondence, falling in love with her without ever seeing her face. He finally meets his girlfriend and finds out that she is an infamous anti-government terrorist–one of the youngest of a group that carried out several brutal attacks during a failed rebellion a decade ago, and the only one to successfully escape execution and go into hiding.

He is horrified, but she cries and begs him to give her another chance; she deeply regrets what she did in the war and just wants to stay out of politics now, as reforming the government isn’t worth any more bloodshed. The protagonist grapples with divided loyalties as his campaign advances. He has to choose between his dream of a political career and his girlfriend. In the end, he wins the race, but he never gives his acceptance speech–he has fled the country with his girlfriend to build a new life in a new place. An epilogue, a decade later, shows the protagonist and his wife reading news of their old country, which has reformed enough to resume trade with the aliens; they are hopeful that someday they will be able to return and show their children their old home.

(Cultural context notes at the end explain that execution is no longer practiced in the modern day, though euthanasia is offered if wanted to those whose crimes were so heinous they must be exiled to an island or imprisoned; while the aliens have relaxed their standards enough to trade with humans who do it, humans’ own moral standards have advanced to the point where any politician who proposed bringing back the death penalty would be voted out.)

The first story is a straightforwardly awesome fantasy epic. Greens set to work on adapting it in the traditional manner, putting their own monsters in the middle section. Maybe it will make a good musical.

Are the intraworld aliens... real? Is that a thing there? What's their deal?

The one set on Red Planet is remarkably ficcable in spite of or perhaps because of the tensions inherent in its worldbuilding, though the gender stuff doesn't come through that well in translation and is the subject of much lively discussion so it can be rendered in localized terms.

A long episodic series with an elaborate magic system involving meditation and rituals to build magic power within oneself. The main character is initially clueless but more and more details of how the made-up magic works are introduced over time, and the whole thing is remarkably coherent and sensible even with all the additional detail. His understanding of the underlying mechanics is crucial to most of his successes, except one time where he was saved by blind luck. The protagonist is persecuted and bullied at every turn, robbed in the streets, accused of crimes he didn't commit and propagandized against by a certain political group. (The book stresses that these are all things that are deeply wrong in the society depicted.) He is idealistic but desperate, and his idealism slowly erodes. Eventually, the protagonist takes a risk at a major milestone trying to get more power and dies. The series switches perspective to a prominent rival, who finds the protagonist's research materials and uses them for her own ends, and the rest centers on her at least saying to herself that she wants to change the world for the better... But never actually doing so because it doesn't feel safe. Only when she has a son does she realize she was living comfortably, benefiting from a corrupt system, and though it places them both at immense risk starts fighting back against injustice and corruption. It's ongoing as a serial, with periodic votes on major turning points. A vote on whether to accept a deal from a questionable ally is out. The author has heard of fallback funds and really likes the idea and is trying to implement it on Planet as well!

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS! Its framing device is pretty minimal, the book almost seems to be a textbook in disguise. Or at most, a collection of short stories about what particular vehicles mean to particular people, light and cheery and hopeful and excited. The various characters and their jobs or reasons for being on a train, boat, airplane, or rocketship are pretty clearly mostly set dressing in favor of rambling nerdy rants about how these various vehicles work and what tradeoffs are made in their design and the historical value of particular models and the lovingly researched process of engineering them (with historical context included in the scenes of old-timey engineers discussing things) and what a difference having excellent vehicles makes to individuals in a society and the various situations in which design mistakes happened and a long rant that somehow diverts into tax policy about how much more efficient trains are than cars and much lamenting on how rockets are way too expensive for everyone to get to ride on one. No need to pay him anything. TRAINS!! are their own reward.

A lot of Greens start the series but about half of them drop it when the perspective switches and only a few hang on much past that. What if they got invested, and voted, and then the thing they didn't vote for happened anyway?

The book about vehicles picks up a solid following among Green children aged four to nine. If the author doesn't want money, maybe they want this picture of a six year old boy who has taken the book to bed with him and fallen asleep on page 47.

Are the intraworld aliens... real? Is that a thing there? What's their deal?

Humanity's trade partners are very real! They are many-tentacled, amphibious creatures who live in space stations throughout the Solar System, and make occasional visits to outposts on the Blue Planet to patronize artists, pay governments to set aside nature preserves (and put off Red Planet terraforming plans, which are already decades if not centuries out), bring humans aboard their stations to work for short terms (as lawyers, or sex workers, or [people who do tasks prohibited by alien religious ceremonial law, such as building and operating certain types of weaponry]), or sell raw materials and their technological secrets. They claim to be the losing faction of a conflict among their species, who originated on a very faraway planet and whose name (in their language, which has also been adopted as humanity's international lingua franca) means "those who manipulate their environment". The winning faction, which had placed a lower value on "wild, untouched nature" and had fewer religious prohibitions on technologies, had transformed their star system and several nearby ones into megastructures; the losing faction had given up much of their technological knowledge and fled to the far reaches of the universe to live in space stations around untouched planets and stars. There, they found the only other life they have known: humanity, who they have (cautiously and hesitantly, with many bumps along the road) uplifted into an industrial civilization. There is only so much of the aliens' story that can be confirmed with the Global Alliance's current technology, but it has the ring of truth.

Gosh. It's not fiction but Green would like some pop histories of that anyway.

The nations of the Global Alliance are happy to provide! One particularly popular one is a rare collaboration between a human writer and an alien one (writing, it seems, is a mostly human activity; verbal skills are one of humans' main areas of comparative advantage in the combined Solar System economy), trying to cover the full story of the influence trade has had on each of their populations. Other collaborations between human and alien writers attempt to cover what the aliens remember of their own history from before fleeing their home systems and reaching the Solar System (these discuss similarities and differences between the humans of the Global Alliance and their alien trade partners: religion is commonplace in both species, and overwhelmingly focused on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy! the aliens are much better at coordinating within themselves, and lack humans' instinctive horror of destroying art or suppressing knowledge!).

There are also some books in the dump going into more detail about specific time periods in human history–here's what it was like when the outposts were first built and contact established (with early grasping attempts to render the aliens' language in a form easy for humans to speak and write), here's what it was like in the early days of rapid technological advance with the aliens' help (pros: mass education and universal literacy! cons: everyone trying to colonize everyone else and nearly wiping each other out in wars!), here's what it was like when humans invented nukes and the alien representatives sat our leaders down and told them "ok seriously you guys have to figure out how to stop killing each other before you go extinct, for real, come up with a solution now or we're leaving" and the Global Alliance was born to guarantee the Three Freedoms (speech, trade, and movement) that have brought peace ever since.

(It seems an important element of the Three Freedoms in bringing peace is not just assuring people that their own governments won't oppress them but assuring people that other countries' governments aren't oppressing their people, so no, you definitely don't need to launch a war to liberate the poor oppressed X people, honestly, they choose their way of life even if it seems super weird to you.)

That's really cool! Green loves pop history and this is exotic pop history; it goes like hotcakes. If the aliens are so good at coordinating why do they have the factionalization situation? Is there a good way to be sure that they aren't suppressing any knowledge, if that's the sort of thing they might do? That is a cool thing for a global alliance to guarantee, was it very difficult to get there without doing a lot of very intrusive checking on one another to have sufficiently verified everything?

The aliens' factionalization situation was pretty mild, by the standards of humans before the Global Alliance! There were only two sides, when it became clear which one was going to lose that side took the loss rather than fighting to the last soldier, they worked out a fairly acceptable compromise between the two sides (the more powerful faction got to remodel their star systems, and the other faction got reassurance that they would be slow about spreading out from there and leave plenty of undisturbed universe for them to explore). As more information flows in about the situation of the broader multiverse, people begin to suspect that "better at coordinating than the humans of the Global Alliance" is, perhaps, a low bar.

The aliens openly admit that their ancestors destroyed records of how to make certain technologies so it would be easier to hold to their religious obligations as they set off on their journeys, and generally think this was a good thing, though they accept that when humans' knowledge of science advances far enough they might reinvent them, and at that point they will just have to exercise willpower to avoid them. As for whether the aliens are actively suppressing any knowledge despite their agreements with humans to not do that, or how well each nation is sticking to its obligations to uphold the Three Freedoms...these are hard questions for any Alliance resident, but the rise of the Internet has gone a long way to reassure people on these points.