A colony that breaks even though food and water are plentiful — building on Calhoun's Universe 25, I experiment with social collapse, and with what voice, knowledge, culture, and story carry within it, in a minimal colony of rats.
Collapse is never written in; I watch whether it appears on its own from ordinary failures in daily life. That the upper limit is set by social "seats" rather than resources, that the first thing lost in collapse is knowledge rather than numbers, that records and ritual protect culture from the rupture between generations — I write these up one article at a time.
Each part is collected under Writing.