The Blossoming of Big Tree - Outside of a Dog

eBook, 63 pages

English language

Published July 1, 2026 by Ododo Press.

ISBN:: 9798233951169

An old woman has to coordinate the defense of her country after a colonizer invades. She is autistic and struggles to fit in because her village has a very tight sense of community, and so, to avoid being seen as anti-social, she accepts to chair the committee for national defense for it is easier for her to interact with other people over work. The job is simple, requiring her to coordinate responses to the climate crisis, until the colonizer attacks them to capture the technology that makes this country a solarpunk utopia. It is a loose union of hundreds of thousands of self-sufficient villages, and they have no army, no weapons, so how will she coordinate their defense? Will the invasion lead to a disintegration of their utopia, or will they find a way to defeat the colonizer?

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed The Blossoming of Big Tree by Dilman Dila

The Blossoming of the Big Tree

4 stars

This was a fun and quick novella. The protagonist is an older autistic woman. She's only a community leader so that she can interact with other people through the structure of work (and not small talk).

It's fun to have previously read the short story Red_Bati from the Dominion collection, which has some similar explorations about the difference between spirits and code. It feels like this story is building on that one.

What I like the most here is the worldbuilding of a solarpunk federation of self-sufficient villages that have thrown off capitalism. I enjoyed the arguing and organizing, and the digression into how to handle broken social norms in a distributed yet highly connected world.

I don't think there's any answers for our world, as this is a science fiction story: the federation is predicated on magical 3d printing technology and the solution to the story's …

This was a fun and quick novella. The protagonist is an older autistic woman. She's only a community leader so that she can interact with other people through the structure of work (and not small talk).

It's fun to have previously read the short story Red_Bati from the Dominion collection, which has some similar explorations about the difference between spirits and code. It feels like this story is building on that one.

What I like the most here is the worldbuilding of a solarpunk federation of self-sufficient villages that have thrown off capitalism. I enjoyed the arguing and organizing, and the digression into how to handle broken social norms in a distributed yet highly connected world.

I don't think there's any answers for our world, as this is a science fiction story: the federation is predicated on magical 3d printing technology and the solution to the story's plot feels equally fantastic. All the same, it's refreshing to see the exploration of this kind of hopeful future.