Fellow Tetrapod: speculative evolution, office politics, and cooking

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

The Convention of Sophonts brings together species from countless alternate earths. Worlds-spanning deals are brokered, inter-species wars are averted, and humans...do their best. At the United Nations Embassy, the only person who knows how to deal with non-humans is the cook, Koen.

When some of the Embassy staff, driven by their own agendas, attempt to teach a powerful nonhuman diplomat a lesson in empathy, Koen finds himself pulled into a potentially messy scandal. Now, it's not just the job of a cook, but the mission of a decent human being to save the day, or at least dinner.

Fellow Tetrapod is a low-stakes sci-fi comedy with speculative evolution, and inter-species politics, where cooking becomes an act of diplomacy, and curiosity bridges the gap between species.

Complete at 150K words! I hope you enjoy it.

Check out the Fellow Tetrapodgalleryandplaylistorjoin my discordcommunity.

Cover art bySimon Roy. Illustrations byTim Morris. Edited by Georgi Shopov.

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2022
Author: DanielMBensen

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.5/ 5.0
Followers: 122
Views: 255,655

Reviews

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Community Reviews(4)

DaredardRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Had a slight difficulty starting this, because it is different from what I expected. but at chapter 19 I'm hooked.
Great univers building, the main characters and the very diverse aliens are really believable, and I've often found myself laughing at the awkward situations.
Also, I'm french, and a novel about a good cook cannot be bad.
My comment is apparently too short, so I'll add I did not find grammatical errors, the story reads itself, and I like the system of end of page notes.
LittleOneRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
First contact is kind of a mess.
It goes okay! No one winds up shooting at anyone. Our economy isn't destroyed by a botched uplift operation. There aren't aliens staying on earth for the crazies to worship and/or murder.
But, there's a collective rush to present a united front that's riddled with cracks we can see, even if the aliens can't. A committee made of people who hate each other chooses the first delegation, which is predicatably composed of people who don't work well together and are better at political scraps with other humans than at communicating with weirdo aliens that lack internal skeletons and social grooming instincts.
The aliens are very alien, humans are supremely unimportant in the busy exchange of the Convention of Sophonts, the translation software is alarmingly bad sometimes, and there isn't a single xenophile on our entire embassy staff.
This is the situation, nine years later, when a novelty-loving cook is hired on with no expectation that he will have any impact on the political circumstances of humanity. And finally, finally, things begin to get better.
This is a story about the value of curiosity. About how empathy isn't just for the people you're empathetic towards. About how difficult it is to take the first step towards mutual understanding, and how rewarding.
I urge you to read this story, and to consider what, in your life, might be worth applying curiosity to.
prissiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This is by far the best story I have come across on RR. Running an embassy among aliens as a junior species has a Stanislav Lem feeling, At first I was a little afraid of this becoming just a "see next alien dance by" show. But while this happens, there is plenty of character development oh the humans. Not to forget about the humour which is not like Dauglas Adams but more subtle. There are some references to more or less current events like Brexit, but very few so that this story could indeed become a classic.
The style is a high point, which made me think of Lem or Strugatzki. I am sure the author is well versed in science, but he is also a gifted writer. The only thing are the footnotes which are not so practical on RR. Even though, they add a lot of atmosphere, especially the fully academic citations including doi (which is not really something to read while reading this story).
The choices of words and the grammar is also a nice departure, straining my academic passive vocabulary a lot. (Ok, but I am at the physical science end of the campus.) Again on par with some SF classics.
There are plenty of individual characters, human and otherwise. All are clearly individuals (well, apart from the hive mind members of course) while the human fulfill (or deliberately do not) stereotypes. And the aliens are the most alien aliens I have encountered in literature for a long long time. So alien, that character is a hard word to apply to quite a few of them.
Overall, this is a page-turner and I am happy to have come across it.
TsunoRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
The motivations and characterization of the non-humans are more comprehensible than that of the humans.
The non-humans are wildly divergent to popular depictions. Research was put into this.
While I give credit for effort, some things are lacking explanation: who made the translators, what is the mandate of the Pitiful Species Fund, and why this crew was chosen for the job. Most of all, why can't they just resign and go home?
The 'romance' is more obvious and flat out fated, crude, than a Disney production.