Vignettes of the Star Empire: Tales of the Associated Worlds

In another universe, in a galaxy strangely similar to our own, there's a bubble of space a couple of thousand light-years across - somewhat distorted by bumping into the edges of the galactic disk to acme and nadir - filled with millions of stars, bound together by an ever-expanding spiderweb of manufactured wormholes, and bright with the EM babble of civilized life.These are the Associated Worlds, sprawling myriad species, polities, philosophies, corporations, clades, and cultures. From the hypercivilized Powers at their heart to the brawling colonies of the Periphery and Beyond, trillions of lives are lived, each with its own story to be told.This is a collection of over 44,000 words of nanofiction and metafiction - excerpts from works taken from inside the fictional realm - from the Associated Worlds SF universe; little morsels of a world and culture unlike our own.