Light-Year Canon is a browser life game that drops you into a random birth somewhere in the next 500 years of human expansion, lets you make choices until you die, then hands your path to whoever comes after you. It grew out of a hard science fiction project that a group of Chinese writers, scientists and artists has been building since around 2012, and its creator says they made the game with Claude after readers called the original material too dry.
Key takeaways
- Light-Year Canon (光年卡农) went public on 19 October 2026 at iron-bamboo.interimm.org, announced on the developer forum V2EX.
- You live one life, die, and a descendant, friend or stranger picks up the thread. Those overlapping lives are the “canon” in the name.
- The setting runs about 500 years and hinges on a Krasnikov tube, a real but speculative spacetime shortcut first described in 1995.
- It sits on top of InterImm, an open-source sci-fi universe with a Mars clock, a Mars map and 58 public GitHub repositories.
What is Light-Year Canon, and how do you play it?
The pitch comes from the original V2EX post by the user emptymalei. You are born at random into a future timeline. You live through events from that world’s history, you make choices, and then you die.
The game doesn’t end there. Your children, your friends or someone else entirely carry on along the route you opened, live their own lives and die in turn.
Think of a musical canon, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”: the same tune starts again a few bars later, so the voices overlap. In this game the overlapping voices are human lives, staggered across light-years and centuries. That is where the name comes from.
The game’s site is simply titled Iron Bamboo (铁竹), after a ship in the story. More on that below.
What is the story behind the 500-year timeline?
According to the creator, the history unfolds in four stages:
- Home system. Humans develop the solar system.
- A signal. Astronomers find a signal that beats against the rhythm of a pulsar, a spinning dead star that flashes with clock-like regularity. Two civilisations can now talk, but neither can fly the distance.
- Small parcels. A Krasnikov tube opens, so small objects can be swapped.
- People. The tubes carry passengers and the network expands. Living elsewhere becomes normal.
The Iron Bamboo is a maintenance ship that keeps one of those tubes running. You can see the same universe in more detail in InterImm’s interstellar repository, updated on 19 October 2026. It places first contact in 2219, with a signal from the planet Ross 128 b, about 10.98 light-years away, pulsing in step with the pulsar J1909−3744. A reply takes 21.96 years to make the round trip.
Is a Krasnikov tube real physics?
Yes, as maths. No, as engineering. Physicist Sergei Krasnikov proposed the idea in 1995. It’s a solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity, the theory that treats gravity as curved spacetime.
Here is the trick. Your first trip to a distant star happens the slow way, close to the speed of light. As you go, you reshape spacetime along your path and leave a tube behind you. Inside that tube, the return journey can bring you home an arbitrarily short time after you left, as measured on Earth. Locally, nothing ever beats light. The shortcut lives in the geometry, as the Wikipedia summary explains.
The catch is “exotic matter,” meaning stuff with negative energy density. Nobody has ever made it in bulk. In 1997 Allen Everett and Thomas Roman of Tufts University calculated that the tube would need thin layers of negative energy. They also showed that two tubes pointing in opposite directions could form a time machine. Krasnikov replied in 2002 that quantum limits do not rule such shortcuts out.
Here’s how it compares with the other famous faster-than-light ideas:
| Idea | First proposed | How it shortens the trip | Needs exotic matter? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traversable wormhole | Morris and Thorne, 1988 | A tunnel linking two distant regions | Yes |
| Alcubierre warp drive | Miguel Alcubierre, 1994 | A bubble that squeezes space ahead and stretches it behind | Yes |
| Krasnikov tube | Sergei Krasnikov, 1995 | A tube laid on a slow first trip makes later trips fast | Yes |
My take: the Krasnikov tube is a smarter pick for a life game than a warp drive. Somebody has to make the long, slow first trip, and somebody has to maintain the tube afterwards. That means generations of people working on one project, which is exactly what the game is about.
Who is behind Light-Year Canon?
The game belongs to the Interplanetary Immigration Center (星际移民中心), or InterImm. It’s a fictional agency founded in 2062, with its headquarters in Isidis on Mars. Its own footer says the center is fictional but the science is real. It has been publishing in the open since 2014.
The project is huge for a hobby. Its GitHub organisation lists 58 public repositories. They include a working Mars clock and calendar, an interactive Mars map built on real elevation data, an interplanetary logistics calculator and a fictional history book with 202 stars.
The creator has a PhD in theoretical physics and now works on AI applications and research. The team mixes science and art backgrounds. Their rule is hard sci-fi built on equations you can actually solve. Even so, the creator admits that some far-future details are assumptions and may not hold up.
Why build a game with Claude at all?
The honest answer is reader feedback. Friends on Douban, a Chinese book and film community, said the worldbuilding was dull and suggested a game would work better. So the creator built one with Anthropic’s Claude.
That fits a wider pattern. Small teams with a lot of lore and no game studio now use AI coding assistants to turn decade-old notes into something people can play. A life game suits that well. Each life is short, and the rich timeline does the heavy lifting.
What happens next
When it was posted, the V2EX thread had no replies, so Light-Year Canon is at the very start of its life. Expect changes as players find holes in the physics or the pacing. InterImm takes contributions on its open topics, such as the Mars calendar and space elevators, so a physics-minded player may get to shape the game directly.
The bigger question is whether a game can do what years of articles could not, and get people to care about a carefully argued future. We’ll find out.
FAQ
Where can I play Light-Year Canon?
It runs in the browser at iron-bamboo.interimm.org. You don’t need to install anything.
Is the Krasnikov tube in the game scientifically possible?
It’s a valid solution to general relativity, published in 1995. Building one would need large amounts of negative-energy exotic matter, which no one knows how to make.
Why is it called a canon?
Players’ lives start and end at staggered times and pick up each other’s paths, like voices entering one after another in a musical canon.
Next step: open the game, play one life, and see who inherits your route. Then come back and tell us how far your bloodline got.
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