Concept: a spacefaring fantasy setting where the traditional “ship’s artificial intelligence” role is filled by synthetic hearth-gods that interface with the ship’s systems via miniaturised clockwork shrines. The tropes of ship-as-community and crew-as-found-family that pervade post-2000 spacefaring SF have direct and measurable presence in the setting, as cultivating a stronger sense of family and community results in a stronger ship’s god.
(While this practice confers considerable benefits, it also imposes a practical upper limit on the size of a ship and crew; if the ship or crew is too large, rather than a synthetic hearth-god you get a synthetic city-father, which is generally considered undesirable for non-military applications on account of the fact that those critters are scary as hell.)
@sour-rocks replied:
what’s a city-father?
The tutelary spirit of a community as cultural infrastructure, as opposed to the individual personalised communities that comprise it. At the time of this posting, it’s a matter of considerable speculation exactly why synthetic city-fathers tend to be so predatory and conquest-minded. Popular theories include:
1. Naturally occurring city-fathers have the same propensities as their synthetic counterparts, and are either better at hiding them, or simply lack the necessary context to express them on account of being immobile and capable of only gradual expansion.
2. There exists some flaw in our understanding of the principles of apotheogenesis that can cause artificial deiforms to become deranged; synthetic hearth-gods are apparently unaffected either because the problem is emergent only above a certain threshold of complexity, or because routine contact with close-knit communities exerts a stabilising influence.
3. The mindset of synthetic city-fathers is an inevitable reflection of the mindset of the sort of people who have the resources to build large spacegoing vessels.