The Magrathean Planetary Catalogue (Nouveau Riche Edition)
Your intake assessment suggests you are a customer with, shall we say, very specific desires. Be glad you’ve come to Magrathea—we are positively oozing to accommodate you. Let’s begin with a tour of the showroom.
Over here is the diamond-encrusted planet. Nothing grows here. Nothing lives. Have fun and bring your offspring!
If diamond-encrusted planets aren’t within your budget (it happens; don’t be ashamed), try our cut-glass planet. It sparkles gorgeously and can even sustain several forms of silicon-based life (which may be slaughtered and made into paste jewelry for fancy dress).
If you’re in the mood for something a bit less modest, behold: our largest planet. It’s just huge—bigger than a gas giant, but solid and rocky, with a balancing center of pure mercury. This model features a chrome ring that rotates independently of the planet, lit with purple and blue chase lights. We etch flames and racing stripes all over it and put a fat gold ziggurat at each pole. It’s somewhat gaudy, yes, but perfect for young alphas who wish to impress friends and attract multiple mates from the median social classes.
For the inspired practical joker, we thought it would be a gas to engineer a hyperbolic degenerate conical planet. The flat bottom surface is barren and cold, but the curvilinear face teems with life. Once the inhabitants evolve language and storytelling, they can only invent extravagant mythologies to explain the shape of their world. Primitive cultures on this model will imagine gods and monsters dwell around the rim of the cone’s base. The jokes on them! When they become advanced enough to travel to their planetary rim, they’ll discover that instead of being inhabited by gods, it’s populated by a race of foul-farting bats that survive entirely through a cycle of monophagous autocannibalism and autofellatial self-fertilization. It’s cute.
If you’re not much for narrative arcs that end in a single joke, how about an endless sea? This slick little whip has no landmasses. It’s one great ocean populated by several intelligent races of fish and mammal, all living in symbiotic bliss. Joyous abundance and utopian noncompetition are the norm, and those who violate the peaceful ideal aren’t even executed, just deported. Popular with children, trustafarians, and repentant war profiteers.
Where do the deportees go, you may be thinking. If utopias aren’t your thing (why would they be?), we suggest our prison planet for the more hands-on, despotic terraformer. It’s hot but dim with a sparse selection of native food sources. Noncooperative lifeforms may be sent here for isolation, reeducation, or plain, old-fashioned punishment. It’s your planet, friend. You make the laws.
Here’s a planetary model on which all trees are made of meat, and all walking, swimming, and flying life forms are vegetal. Galactic citizens on restricted diets rate it highly.
Enjoy retirement in style with this sporty number. Here we have a hot, dry world composed especially for the elderly. It hosts few life forms other than gargantuan dung beetles, each of which perpetually excretes a savory powder that gets most sentient species high as ever-loving fuck.
How about a planet engineered so painstakingly that all multicellular life exists in binary sexes, but all higher lifeforms are viably homosexual. Indeed, they are noticeably dimorphic and homogamous, but the dominant sapients remain incapable of self fertilization. And holy smokes, do they fuck. Genetically a single species, they've split into two wildly disparate cultures, even referring to one another as separate “races,” in the galactic vernacular. The result? Brutal, protracted wars between the sexes. Perfect for teaching the younglings what to expect at university.
This planet grows hair rather than plant life. Instead of trees or grasses, it grows dark hair, light hair, ginger hair, silver hair, thick hair, thin hair, coarse hair, curly hair, straight hair, and even features factories for growing synthetic hair. There are no bodies of water; instead, the whole of the ground is covered by a pimply, porous scalp. It’s a giant, faceless skull, rotating and respirating via subterranean lungs, populated by several races of blind, faceless lice. Easy to colonize and maintain, it’s a perfect starter planet.
If none of the previous inspire you, we have an even more exquisite model we keep at the ready. This one is as rare as sapience, reserved for our most discerning clientele. We only ever make one at a time, so be assured, you’ll be hard-pressed to find another one in your quadrant.
And it can be yours: a planet on which everything—every grain of sand, every rock and flower and drop of rain, every growing toadstool and floating seed and creeping glacier, every swimming fish and swooping bird, every darting insect and spreading fungus—
Hums. Constantly. Will it be a chorus or a cacophony? That’s up to you. It's rare I meet a customer who can afford an entire planet while simultaneously hunting for a bargain, but you know what they say—“if you have to ask, you aren't telepathic.” But if we must, here's the last clearance model in stock:
A rare failure of evolution, this wet rock developed a single, dominant sapient species who, to quote one of their own philosophers, “went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” They jailed him.
They have no psychic abilities, they haven't figured out teleportation or FTL travel, and they only recently invented an internet. They make wars over turf, they brutalize their own offspring, and they've been on the verge of environmental collapse for a hundred orbits. Just between us? They deserve a Singularity, but they're too stupid to pull it off on their own. Wouldn't you rather have the prison planet, or even the hummer? No? Seriously?
Well then. Shall we record biometrics and notarize some documents, or do you need more time? Just remember that the showroom closes soon for the bank holiday, and we won’t reopen for one-thousand galactic standard years.
© 2024 Evan J. Peterson
About the Author
Evan J. Peterson's latest book is Better Living Through Alchemy (Broken Eye Books). As a game writer, he's also written Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performer RPG, and The Road to Innsmouth: Arkham Horror. His writing has appeared in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Queers Destroy Horror, Nightmare Magazine, and Best Gay Stories. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.