These stories are about a gigantic family of people trying to recover from the traumas meted upon them by previous generations.

It is devised and told from the perspective of being an autistic, interesex, trans, plural system. A very, very large plural system.

The thing to remember is that the Sunspot is us. Fictionalized and made to look like a science fiction setting, with events that are really only metaphorically representative of our inworld development. But still us.

When we set out to write these stories, one of our hypotheses was that the lessons learned by the members of a system figuring out how to cooperate and dissociate less could maybe be applied to outworld groups of people. But we are learning, as we write this, that that is not really the case. There are parallels, but the details are what matters.

We’re not certain, but we think you can read this and see that for yourself.

Also, the only generational traumas we experience are those of mental illness, abuse, and unaccommodated autism that runs in our families. That cannot compare to the systemically enforced generational trauma our colonialist ancestors and peers continue to mete out upon others who don’t have our skin color.

So, really, what we’re writing about here is derived souly from what we’ve done to each other within our system, and how we’ve tried to get better. It has been a deeply cathartic and educational project for us. We hope it is helpful and not hurtful to anyone else. This is our warning, just in case you might need to skip it, or approach it with caution.

We’ve tried to write the setting in such a way that anyone could imagine themselves existing in it in the way that they need. But we know our privileges make us unaware of how to do that well for everyone.

We do also address the following topics because as an autistic, intersex, trans, plural system, they are relevant to us and people like us:

eugenics, suicide, a bombing, descriptions of severe physical dysphoria, dissociation, conflicting needs, possibly messy depictions of various disabilities, cultural amnesia, personal amnesia, social engineering, carceral “justice”, transhumanism, social stratification at birth, explorations of consciousness and self, accidental death, mourning, and the monster from under our bed writ large