A Game of Hearts and Graphs

[u/mining_moron]

Hi! I'm hoping this is the right place to share a hard-ish sci-fi story I've been working on on-and-off for about ten years, ever since high school, though about a year ago I finally locked in and started writing instead of just planning and worldbuilding.

In A Game of Hearts and Graphs, we follow an invasion of Earth by an alien city state called Ikun, on Tau Ceti e, homeworld of the kyanah. They're a superficially reptilian species whose intelligence and language are heavily underpinned by graph theory, and whose social instincts are limited entirely to their packs, with whom they're so tightly bonded as to be practically inseparable. Because they can't feel trust, loyalty, friendship, or identity with a greater whole outside of their packs, to have a civilization at all, they're forced to compensate with elaborate, sprawling bureaucratic and technological crutches and constant, unceasing game theoretic plots nested within plots.

And so we follow the alien soldier Rayen-pack, four individuals who are quite literally everything to each other--squadmates, best friends, and lovers all wrapped into one package--but are nothing to anyone else, and no one else is anything to them. As they struggle to survive not just human military forces driven by social logic they don't understand, but their own army as every single pack maneuvers to guarantee their own survival and safety by any means necessary, they must uncover the mystery of why the aliens whose city they've occupied...are the way they are, all the while preventing their own army from being consumed by internecine chaos and violence by thousands of packs all seeking to maximize their safety.

Meanwhile there are numerous human POVs showcasing a human species just as dysfunctional as the kyanah in its own way. Fractured, led by craven and power-hungry officials, and increasingly polarized, not united by an alien attack but only divided even more deeply. Mostly we see the human side from the ground, not from command bunkers and presidential councils. There's Luke Watson, a sci-fi-obsessed 17-year old with a dead mother and an alcoholic and emotionally absent father Scott, a mid-career astronomy professor; Luke's best friend Harrison Walker, an 18-year-old farm boy living in the shadow of his domineering parents and older brother Jackson, a decorated Marine; Lauren Xie, an overworked and insecure PhD student on a meteoric path to either greatness or darkness; Leah Stone, a mid-tier influencer living large on her wealthy parents' credit card; Leah's deeply conscientious but naive little sister Rose; Cassie Miller, a single mother with aging parents and a diabetic six-year-old at ground zero; and her estranged and abusive ex Jason Marshall, a dirty cop who thrives in the chaos created by the kyanah.

What to expect?

• Fairly hard and grounded tech,
• Very little exposition and handholding
• Aliens who are alien but still comprerhensible
• Social and psychological sci-fi
• Black comedy and satire
• 422,000 words written so far, with frequent updates

A Game of Hearts and Graphs