So What Are They Fighting About in a Semi-Solid SF Setting Anyway?

Most space opera is pretty much the modern world dressed up in a space setting. You have farmers, even if they are harvesting moisture with vaporators. You have mines and miners, merchants, peddlers, pawnbrokers, doctors, politicians, bankers, clerics, soldiers of fortune, princes and princesses, either entitled royalty or their new money equivalents. You have countries, kingdoms and nations and thus you have trade routes, territories, and regions of influence.

The economics are so familiar that nobody actually gives them much thought, anymore than people give serious thought to explaining what food is, why bathrooms are necessary, and how those two things are linked. Explaining money, resources and scarcity is no more necessary than going into gravity or breathing.

But if all a space opera does is translate modern problems into a setting with spaceships and rayguns, is there really any point? A Song of Ice and Fire could be translated to a space opera easily enough. Star Wars could be recast as a fantasy. The choice of setting is little more than aesthetic. But sometimes there's a compelling reason to pick a genre. Lord of the Rings would feel different if the magic was just sufficiently advanced technology. Frankenstein's monster could have been a homunculus or golem but those would have been monsters of the occult, old and familiar. The Creature must be a product of modern science, a magic not stolen from the gods but of man's own devising. Gepetto making Pinocchio out of wood relegates it to fairy tale but Noonian Soong making Data out of a positronic brain and blinky doodads makes it science fiction, somehow more plausible.

I'd like to have conflicts that remain believable but require a scifi setting. Star-crossed lovers? That could be in Verona or LA. Two brothers struggling for control of the family business? That could be Memphis, either Egypt or Tennessee. But the lovers might not be of different classes or races but different species. A freeborn prince of the financial empire falls for a genetically-engineered pleasure slave? Different. The brothers are actually a series younger clones and their "father" pits them against one another to see who is the worthy successor? A little more interesting. 


So, what are the conflicts? 

Practical   

It comes down to something that makes sense. Nobody has to take a lot of time explaining it.


Economic. You want a new market to sell your products to, access to raw materials, or transit through a region to get there. Someone stands in your way. Or you don't feel you're getting a fair shake and you can't settle your differences in the marketplace. 


Territorial. They have land you want. Access to markets isn't enough, you want it all. 


Practical Politics. Who is in charge, who calls the shots? I subscribe to von Clausewitz's suggestion that war is politics by other means. "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," as Churchill said, but sometimes the only way to get what you want is to take it. This could lead to war between polities or civil strife within a polity. Power struggles often turn ugly. 

Doctrinal 

This is not going to be a necessary conflict, though the people involved may feel differently.

Religious. Something about what the other guy believes is so repellent they must be disabused of it by any means necessary. Could be an understandable moral failing like slavery or something silly like sexual practices.

Philosophical. Presented as more reasonable than a religious belief. Slavery can be presented as evil in light of reason but the same righteous reason can be applied to a conflict over eating toast butter-side-up or butter-side-down, something that is ultimately quite silly. And while one person argues capitalism vs. communism has the same weight as slavery, another will argue it's buttered toast. I would also call this impractical politics.

The practical stuff is all familiar. Hitler wanted another country for lebensraum, Space Hitler wants a planet. Same difference. Imperial Japan wanted access to oil and raw materials, Space Japan wants access to antimatter and magnetic monopoles. The United States sends Nixon to China to normalize relations and open markets, Space America sends Bat Durston to the Empire of Space Amazons. It's all familiar. Maybe Space Germany is flooding the market with cheap automation machinery that ruins the value of labor on your planet. That last one is called the luddite fallacy by economists who insist new jobs will always open up for the displaced. We're entering an era of structural unemployment where there simply aren't enough jobs and entire classes of people will be shut out of the economy. It's actually going to be a very immediate problem and not something for the realm of scifi.

I think that Doctrinal disputes will be the avenue for the most esoterically scifi of conflicts. We can see culture shocks and conflicts where ideas are seen as poisonous. What happens if biological immortality is discovered? What if brain backups and clones allow multiple copies of the same personality operating in a society? What happens if a post-scarcity society exists in the same geopolitical space as a scarcity society? We flip out over polygamy, homosexuality, incest, certain sex acts, cannibalism, etc. Blasphemy and apostasy are hot buttons for other contemporary cultures.

Could transhumanism cause the same level of disgust as transexualism does today? First and Last Men brought up the idea of creating successors to our own humanity and Brave New World had not just ubermenschen but untermenschen created to serve society. While it may be worrisome to imagine designing a superman, it feels as repugnant as foot-binding to cripple a human mind to make for a better service animal. Dune gave us a jihad against thinking machines. When what it means to be human becomes fluid and open to debate, some might decide to say "NO! It's not up for debate!" and tell us what the answer is. This sort of thing was postulated in the Night's Dawn Trilogy where those who embraced advanced biotechnology along with consciousness and memory transfer came to be known as Edenists and those who rejected it were Adamists. 

There's thinking that certain scifi technologies could be considered too dangerous such as causality-violation weapons, certain kinds of nanotech and bio-chem weapons. David Langford created the concept of an image that could hard-crash a human mind just by looking at it, something he called a basilisk. Other ideas that have been floated are perfected brainwashing techniques that could be every bit as effective as love potions from fairy tales. Simulation as Lotus Eater Machine and virtual reality =  the ultimate drug have come up before. Red Dwarf's take on the fatally addictive game Better Than Life is a personal favorite. It's easy to imagine a Women's Christian Temperance Union going after VR saloons.

So, this is not new, the idea of things that are taboo because they are too inherently dangerous, morally corrosive, or distasteful to be tolerated. But this is the future. Can we think of really good new ones? Or bring up old ones that have been forgotten?

Interstellar Travel in the Age of Hypersail

So I've gone into why classic space opera makes no sense. I've also given one example of how we could try to get around that, the Into the Void setting.

The Age of Hypersail is another special case that tries to work with a limited number of assumptions to provide for a properly operatic setting without insulting our intelligence. I want to have stealth in space. Humans must remain important, not easily replaced with machines. The individual commander's initiative can shape the course of events. There are no push-button ships or push-button wars. This isn't going to be hard SF but semi-solid. Ships need to radiate heat, orient themselves with gyros and reaction control systems, burn rockets to move in realspace, don't have shields or artificial gravity, and, except where duly noted, operate according to the laws of physics. But the special case assumptions are clearly not hard SF. That's fine. I just need everything to be self-consistent and avoid obvious plot holes like having a genie in a lamp and not wishing for more wishes.

My notes on the concept of hypersail are a work in progress and by no means complete. But they're sufficiently progressed to invite discussion. I have them shared via Google Docs. Assuming permissions are correct, anyone should be able to view it without the need to sign in. 

Click here to enter the Age of Hypersail. As always, discussion is welcome. 

Star Trek Repaired

Had a conversation with a friend about how the new Trek film was almost a good movie. They had a competent cast with chemistry, very watchable. I didn't care for the special effects, had a bit of a design school splooge fest with wonky camera angles and lens flares everywhere. It's like when bands deliberately include feedback in their recordings: no, it doesn't make you sound raw, real and authentic, it makes it sound like you don't know what you're doing.

As a writing exercise I'd like to explore the possibility of doing the Star Trek movie in a way that doesn't suck.

Most story problems begin with the script. You have a bad script and can't recognize the fact (George Lucas), you have a bad script and are too proud to seek help in fixing it (George Lucas), or you have a bad script imposed on you from outside (The poor bastards saddled with making Battleship). Of course, there's also sociopathic script apathy that explains any Hollywood production that isn't a vanity project.

What's Wrong with the Star Trek Franchise? 

There are a number problems associated with it, the first part being that it's a franchise.

Don't break the franchise. McDonald's has product that sells dependably. It's not haute cuisine, it's not even home cooking comfort food. It's all cheap, mass-manufactured food-like substances indifferently prepared by unskilled, low-pay workers who only have jobs because they're cheaper than automation. People know what a Big Mac is. It's not impressive, it's not something to look forward to, but you can be dependably disappointed in a consistent way each and every time. You don't mess with success and Star Trek is a franchise. But it's also worth noting that there are gourmet burger restaurants popping up to compete with McDonald's and they're profitable. Franchise is a trap and a hard one to dig out of. No executive is going to want to be the one who killed the goose that crapped the golden turd and thus we are locked into a cycle of mediocrity.

But even if the quality in a franchise is quite high, success will breed stagnation. The executives won't understand how they caught lightning in a bottle and so will prevent evolution and renewal in the production. "Is this fresh and new? Good! Change nothing but keep it fresh and new." Taking risks is how you can ruin a franchise. But at the same time, keeping it static is how people lose interest.

Writing by Committee. Lacking any strong editorial direction, each Star Trek series is usually a mess of meandering themes, aborted arcs, and filler episodes that exist solely to round out the network's order for the season. Committee writing combined with franchise preservation means the results are going to be terrible.

Is there even any story left worth telling? The Batman question. They've been publishing Batman comics for how many decades now? He was based on the Shadow who was based on Zorro who was based on folk heroes and it's turtles all the way down.

Negative space wedgie stories. They're ruining everything. Time travel, time loops, mirror universes, space anomalies, problem that arise from techno-babble and are resolved through techno-babble which is pretty goddamn boring.

What's Wrong With the 2009 Movie?

Trying to do too much in too little time. We have an origin story with Kirk's dad in a fight he can't win, young Kirk being a punk, older Kirk getting into bar fights, then Starfleet Academy, then getting onto the Enterprise, the parachuting business on the drilling rig, exile on the ice moon, fistfighting with Romulans, etc. There simply isn't enough time.

A stupid plot to begin with. Time travel stories are difficult because you always end up asking "Well, why didn't they do this?" So Nero runs a mining ship and is trying to get help before his star goes nova. He's sent to the past instead, somehow. His wife isn't dead at this point, she simply hasn't been born. But if he and Spock can fix the star in an unobtrusive way as possible, the timeline might remain unaffected. He could fly his ship up near lightspeed to effectively halt time for himself and come back right about the time he should be leaving on his fateful journey. He's reunited with his wife, still a hero, all is good. But no, he's going to blow up stars instead because he's a terrible villain terribly written.

By the numbers story beats. Must have action set pieces regardless of whether they make sense in context. Must have fistfights on starships because hey, that's what Kirk does. Must have character conflicts that are artificially induced by hamfisted writers.

Poor characterization and motivations. Kirk is played like a guy who can get away with a lot of crap because he's charming, except he isn't. Spock has a Vulcan stick lodged up his butt and his demeanor is constipated rather than logical. And all the other characters remain affable yet ill-defined.

How to Fix It? New Background

It's the start of a retelling of the Trek. Blowing up Vulcan was a way of saying "This is a different take on Trek." Sunrise handles the Gundam metaseries in similar fashion. Some shows belong in the main timeline while others follow clearly alternative timelines. They all have giant robots of iconic design, the combatants are usually Zeon and Earth Federation, and lots of stuff blows up. But new fans aren't hamstrung by years of continuity. A new show can be viewed without having to have seen all the prior ones. Common themes will be explored, deconstructed, reconstructed, and turned sideways.

What are the primary themes of Star Trek? That humans can be better than we've been. We can bring about an end of war, poverty, and starvation, make a civilization worthy of being called such. We can break the cycle of history. It is about optimism. Now, just because we've got peace on Earth, that doesn't mean we'll find it elsewhere. These ideals will have to be defended with diplomacy and good intentions but backed up by force. Where does conflict come from, essential for good storytelling? At the borders, where the Federation comes into contact with other cultures, and internally, when Federation citizens reflect on the validity of their own beliefs and practices. When things go wrong, we will set them right. Optimism is the main ingredient.

Pre-Contact Earth. Earth has 21st century troubles, goes through a global crisis, big population drop. The close, personal encounter with oblivion slaps some sense into the survivors. The era of rebuilding is one of peace. Strong AI is never developed but expert systems can run vast swaths of the economy. Third Industrial Revolution automation means that few people are required to keep the lights on, food in the supermarkets and goods on the shelves. This means that people are free to devote their time to doing things they feel have meaning, labors of love. Volunteer work can be a full-time occupation. Heavy staffing in education, medicine, the arts and sciences, sports and entertainment; not many office jobs and endless TPS reports. Now certainly economists and technologists will debate how this could happen but it's part of the assumptions that go with the Trek setting. One of these big labors of love is space exploration and this is how we discover warp theory, invent the first warp drive and the Vulcans drop by to say hi.

Contact. Turns out that not only are we not alone, we've got family. Sufficiently-Advanced Aliens visited Earth in the past and seeded worlds around us with Earth-like life. (More on this later.) The Vulcans fill us in on local history.

Galactic History. The galaxy is in a period of peace following a big war. The Vulcans were the first race to develop warp drives. They did so after suppressing their emotions that had led them to repeated civil wars on their own world. They explored the galaxy and made contact with the emerging humanoid species. They mistakenly shared their technology without considering the consequences. A race of  dullard imperialists decided to build an interstellar empire. The Vulcans, not being warriors, found themselves at a loss for what to do.

Some of the Vulcans tapped into suppressed emotion to become effective warriors. This created a philosophical schism that resulted in the Romulans breaking off. While not enemies, Vulcans and Romulans do not see eye to eye. A series of sporadic wars would be fought as the Dullard Imperialists  would try to conquer a new planet and the Romulans wound mount a defense. Sometimes they would win, sometimes they would lose.

The  Dullard Imperialists made a fateful error when they enlisted a newly discovered race as mercenary warriors, the Klingons. Klingons were at a steam age tech level and warred constantly. They were intelligent and quick-learning and adapted to starships and disruptors easily enough. They eventually became too powerful and slipped beyond the control of the Dullard Imperialists. The dullard empire was reduced to remnants and the Klingons took the best parts for themselves. Imperial retreat means many subject worlds with intelligent species are free for the moment.

The Klingons have grown in number and are looking to expand their territory. It appears the peace might come to an end.

Aliens. Every bumpy-headed alien that gets played by a human actor will be a result of this. Humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, all descending from common ancestors, thought the genes were tinkered with by Sufficiently-Advanced Aliens. There will be aliens that are from modified Earth stock that can't be handled with makeup and would be handled with practical and CG effects. They can still be humanoid but clearly inhuman. There will also be alien-aliens, but they will be handled by CGI and puppetry and very, very alien. Worlds for them may have been seeded as well. The humanoid aliens, being human in so many ways, will come into conflict for understandable reasons.

Something vaguely similar to this idea was broached in the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "the Chase" but the writers never mentioned it again. Who are the Sufficiently-Advanced Aliens? We don't know. They've left no artifacts behind and we can only infer they exist because there's no other plausible explanation.

The Federation. The humans propose uniting civilized planets into a federation to promote peace and the common interest. This is a Big Idea that the Vulcans never thought of. Earth and Vulcan are the first member planets. The Romulans remain French to the notion and refuse to join. Naturally, the independent worlds are sick of war, sick of empires and don't want any trouble.

Starfleet. Explorers, humanitarians, police, military, evangelists for the Federation. They have a broad mandate.

Conflicting Viewpoints. Earth is effectively a paradise. What sort of thing drives young men and women to leave heaven to journey out into a scary galaxy on a mission of mercy? Are they saints or lunatics? And not everyone they evangelize to takes to the message. Why are people compelled to leave the Earth to setup colonies on new worlds, embrace hardship and uncertainty, risk their very lives when there's no threat of persecution back home? Some people simply aren't capable of handling paradise. Without something constructive to do, they go stir-crazy.

How to Fix It? New Story

We need a ship, a crew, and a mission.

The best stories about wooden ships and iron men centered around the frigates. They would operate alone, far from friendly ports, patrolling for pirates, escorting merchantmen, and scouting for enemy fleets in times of war. The name for this kind of independent operation was cruiser. 

However, the Federation also needs ships to show the flag, to symbolize the organization's ideals and be a prestige piece. Dedicated warships exist within the fleet but, being optimized for combat, are not good for much else. The majority of the war fleet is kept in port and is only activated for annual training exercises and emergencies.

The Enterprise. A symbol of the Federation, civilization, and security. She is fast, sufficiently armed to kill what she can catch and run from bigger threats. She has long legs and can operate independently for months. She is armed with heavy phaser banks and photon torpedo batteries give her a powerful punch. She carries a squadron of heavy shuttles that are more powerful and capable than the ones typically portrayed in the shows.

Kirk. He was on a fast-track for command before the disaster. Due to politics, he's given command of the Enterprise at 35, the youngest human captain in Starfleet history. He's the only hero in the [Insert Name] Debacle. He's promoted and given command. Some people think it's too political. He has a reputation for winning but it's not clear whether he's good or lucky. Some detractors feel he's cocky and takes too many risks.

Spock. The first human-Vulcan hybrid. Joins Starfleet because he would rather see the universe himself than learn about it back home.

McCoy. Toured the frontier as a young man, wrote a very successful travelogue. Settled down to civilian life practicing medicine and became utterly bored. Wants to see space again.

Rest of Crew. Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, all assigned per usual crew selection and rotation. It doesn't take Fate going through gymnastic contortions to get everyone together.

Story Starts 

How Kirk gets command. We know Kirk is the the only hero of a debacle. (I'm undecided about the particulars, this is only an example.) He's the XO of a Federation ship visiting a recently-contacted and highly-developed world considering joining the Federation. Diplomatic blunders by the captain make it appear he's taking a side in an internal dispute and the other side makes a sneak attack against the ship. It is severely damaged. The ship is in a decaying orbit and will make an uncontrolled reentry. He evacuates the crew and shapes the reentry trajectory so it will impact in an unpopulated ocean basin. With the transporters shot, he has to make it out in a shuttlepod.

This is all backstory and would not be in the film itself. However, turning it into a 20 minute short feature would be excellent promotion material. Release it to Youtube a few months before the main feature to whet the appetite.

First Act

The Crisis. The Enterprise is conducting a shakedown cruise when a crisis erupts on Beaumonde, a colony world claimed by both the Federation and the Klingon Empire. There's a local population of Klingons left over from the disruption of the war against the Dullard Imperialists generations ago. They'd reverted back to a steam age economy when the Federation encountered the world. Since they'd apparently been forgotten by the Empire, they were more than happy to share the planet with the new colonists in exchange for access to higher technology. Things were going fine until a faction within the Empire decided that allowing Klingons to play nice with the Federation was a bad idea.

Through the briefing we discover that the Klingons are not a monolithic and united government but a coalition of clans who are normally at cross-purposes whose alliances and goals will shift with the political tide. This means that one leader cannot speak for all and even things agreed to by most Klingons are not binding for those who do not. This means that the bulk of the Klingon fleet can mobilize for a suitable cause and likewise melt away due to a change in the wind back home.

This particular colony has been claimed by the leader of a smaller clan who is trying to burnish his credibility. He is a charismatic upstart, hungry and dangerous. He presents the argument that Klingons are being brainwashed and subverted by the Federation and it is his duty as a great leader and defender of his people to save them from the filthy humans and their soft ways.

Up to this point there has been no bloodshed. Klingon ships have been harrassing commerce around  Beaumonde and it seems like invasion is only a matter of time.

The First Encounter. A war of nerves bluff between the Enterprise and a Klingon warbird. Our first sense of what the crew is capable of and Kirk's mettle.

The Diplomatic Meeting. Planetside, face-to-face meeting between all parties. Kirk, the charismatic Klingon leader, delegates of the local government. We get the local flavor of what's been going on.

There is a member of the Klingon High Council present as an observer. She finds Kirk intriguing.

Second Act 

Conflicts on planet, things are going to crap.

Spock had demonstrated the Vulcan neck pinch on the ship earlier. Chekov tries using it in a fight. Doesn't work on a Klingon so he knees him in the nards instead. "Vulcan crotch pinch."

Kirk Bangs Alien Babe. Kirk believes he's seduced the Klingon councilor over a dinner and cocktails. She clarifies a few misunderstandings about the empire.

Funny fact about Klingons: the majority of the scientists and engineers and workers are women -- they are the people who keep society working. What we discover is that the Klingons fell into civil war after defeating the Dullard Imperialists, turning their advanced weapons against each other. The whole idea of conquering a Klingon Empire was suggested by the women as a suitably glorious endeavor for proud Klingon warriors. It actually served as a way of getting the most violent and stupid of the males out of their hair so they could put things back together. Proper Klingon worlds are actually very peaceful and civilized since the warriors are usually off conquering things, fighting amongst themselves or endlessly training.

The High Council finds the charismatic leader to be troublesome. He's pushing for a war that the rest of the empire does not yet feel prepared for but cannot say so openly. Politics, you know. Kirk asks if this means war will be coming at a later date. She says that such concerns are for later as well -- better to stop the war you can stop today.

The solution is for the charismatic leader to make a misstep that is dishonorable. This will neuter his political support. She advises Kirk that if the charismatic leader goes to war, he should invoke an honor duel. While normally this is only reserved for ritual combat rules between Klingons, he may feel compelled to extend it to an outsider since the whole alleged point of this conquest is showing that proper empire honor is better than the soft stuff promoted by the Federation. It thus becomes a demonstration to the Klingon locals and the warriors back home.

The subject of where he spent the night and with whom should be the source of a good comedic exchange: McCoy showing incredulity at Kirk's sexual prowess, Spock offering a raised eyebrow in agreement.

Betrayal?! After this, we see the same councilor meeting with the charismatic leader and spinning an entirely different story! She says that the High Council is too timid and needs to be shown the way of the warrior by a Klingon with fire in his belly. He is unsure he can defeat the Enterprise and she gives him a data crystal that will be the key to victory.

Third Act

Big fight between the leader and the Enterprise. Federation has reinforced the Enterprise with three more starships and are staring down against the charismatic leader's fleet.

Pew! Pew! 'Splosions! Rocket's red glare, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, the smell of napalm in the morning, it's an all-out, gratuitous space battle.

The Enterprise gets the advantage and the charismatic leader has to use his trump card. Turns out the data crystal has Kirk's prefix code to turn off the Enterprise's shields, or so the councilor claimed. Surprise! There's no such thing because only an idiot would leave a backdoor open on a starship that could allow a remote exploit of control systems. But by trying such a trick when he's fighting under honor rules, the leader just crapped all over his reputation. It might have gone unnoticed in the heat of battle but the councilor was monitoring the entire exchange and uncloaks in her own warship immediately after he sends it.

I'm undecided as to whether she blows his ship out of the sky or sends him home in disgrace. I like the idea of leaving him alive so that we can see how his approach changes with this defeat. If he's really a smart guy he might gain some wisdom from this and become a more dangerous foe.

Resolution 

Scotty has a laugh about the idea of a prefix code on a starship and lets slip a few curses about backdoors and remote exploits.

Kirk has a conversation with the councilor via comscreen where we clear up who seduced whom. The councilor makes it clear whose bedpost gets the notch carved in it. You can tell these two are going to have a history together.

Final Thoughts

I've kept the character elements above a little thin. What do the secondary characters do to make us love them? What are the comedy bits, the little failures and victories? That's all important but it's flesh added to the bones of the plot. Without a skeleton to hang from, even the loveliest flesh is just a puddle of skin suffocating under its own weight.

Feel free to discuss!

Morsel

This is a short story I wrote a while back. I'm not very happy with most of the urban fantasy coming out these days. I think the writers have some talent but the demand by publishers to stretch everything out into a continuing series means that the storylines get stretched thin. I wanted to write something short and sweet.

Morsel 

  "I'm going to be making my Run the next full moon," I told Sam Cuddy, my best friend.

  "Really?" he said, voice rising with interest. "Cool!"

  We lay in the soft grass beneath the big oak tree in Feeney Park. School was out and the yellow rays of a late summer afternoon filtered through the leaves. The brim of my hat was low against the sun but I could feel its warmth across my face.

  Sam rolled over on his side to look at me, eyes wide and bright. "Tell me about it, Jess." I'd gone over this with him before, telling him as much as I knew, but I think he suspected I was holding out on him. He kept asking, hoping that I might let slip more than I'd meant to. I didn't mind playing his game.

  "You already know the sign," I chided him. "I had my first menses. My kind always have it on a full moon and the following moon is when I will have my Run." Sam made a face at that, more out of habit than true disgust. He'd gotten used to my frankness over the two years we've known each other. People -- the regular, everyday folk -- they have all sorts of cultural mores and taboos about the body and bodily functions. My kind may look like people but we are quite open about the things they are not, much to their embarrassment. I remembered his discomfort at the thought of skinnydipping at the lake last summer. I'd had no idea it was possible to blush from head to toe but Sam had shown me it was.

  "What's it like?" he asked.

  "Ask me in a month, silly," I laughed. "I haven't gone yet."

  "But you have an older sister, one who has. Surely you've talked."

  I tilted my hat down to block the sun as it found my eyes again. "Talked, yes. But this isn't really anything someone can explain to you, now is it? I've told you about what's already happening, do you understand it?"

  "Yeah, Jess," Sam said. "Your body's been changing."

  "When we first met, my sense of smell was no better than yours. Now..." I took a deep breath in through my nose, breathing out slowly. "It's like removing blinders. I smell grass, damp earth, the decay of fallen leaves. People who were in the park this morning, their dogs. Raccoons who were here the night before." I turned my head towards him, looking him in the eye. "I smell you." He made a comic show of lifting an arm and sniffing with feigned concern. "No, not like that," I laughed. "People can only notice each other if there's a perfume or a stench. I can smell so much more now, the subtle and the fleeting." I smiled at him. "You smell nice, fresh. I like it."

  He grinned back at me. "Good. I'd hate to scare you off now that we're good friends." He reached over to take my hand and I interlaced my fingers with his. I felt good, so relaxed.

  "So they're going to take you out to Talwyn Run," he prompted.

  Talwyn Run had belonged to our kind for generations, a vast tract of woodland and meadow, untouched but for people seeking communion with nature, people and my kind.  "Yes. I've only been there as a child, and following the same rules as people: never at night and never during the three days surrounding the full moon. This will be my first moon, my first Run. I will become a woman of my kind."

  Sam sighed wistfully. "Eli, you know him from Geometry? He was told he was a man after he was Bar Mitzvahed but he didn't look any different to me, still couldn't do the things his parents wouldn't let him do before he was mitzvahed. But when your folks tell you you've become a woman, you'll know it because you can turn into a wolf!"

  I smiled at his enthusiasm. I think Sam was looking forward to this even more than I was, without any of the trepidation. "Yes, there's certainly that."

  "I'd love to be there, to see it," he said wistfully. 

  I glared at him. "Sam Cuddy, I've already told you this. No, you can't. Our Were runs are kept away from people for a reason. It keeps everyone safe and happy." 

  "Safe but not happy," he said. 

  I punched his arm gently. "I promise to tell you all about it the next day." 

  He sighed. "I guess that'll just have to do." 

***

  The four of us knelt by the fireside, watching the sunset across the lake. Me, my mother, my aunt, and the priestess. All of us wore thin robes of white but mine was adorned with dark red stripes at the sleeves, the mark of the supplicant. The priestess' instruments sat on a white linen to the north of the fire. To the west a pentagram lay inscribed in fresh-turned earth, cold censures at the points. My position was at the east of the fire, the other three behind me. Our attention turned to the west as the sun touched the horizon. We kept our silence in meditation as the circle of fire seemed to quench itself in the still, dark water. Soon it was gone, a scintillation of bright rays streaking up behind the world, fading to twilight and ushering in the night. I could feel my stomach roiling in a not quite unpleasant anticipation. This was not just nerves but my body anticipating the coming transformation. I sipped the moon tea, drugged with special medicines that helped to still the body and ease what was to come. My limbs felt light and ethereal and within my mind a mix of dreamlike disembodiment and keen alertness. 

  As instructed, I turned to face the priestess now, her face grave but her eyes carrying a measure of mirth. "Who comes before me?" she asked. 

  "Jessica Hunter, a daughter of the pack," I responded. 

  "By what right do you claim admittance?" 

  "By the blood of my father, Jacob Hunter. By the blood of my mother, Sarah Hunter. Their blood is my blood and my blood belongs to the pack." 

  "Upon whose name do you call, upon whose name do you swear?" 

  "By the Fanged Goddess, consort of the Horned God, the eternal huntress, whose name is written by starlight and spoken in wonder beneath the guiding moon. Wise mother, blessed wife, great she-wolf, bringer of changes." 

  "Do you claim this birthright for yourself?" 

  "I do." 

  "Then let the test begin." 

  Moonrise was not far off. I stood and stepped into the fire. My feet found the stepping stones, unnatural things that were immune to the heat, feeling as cool as flagstones at night. The flames were low and heat radiated over my legs. I stepped out on the other side, having passed through fire. I knelt inside the pentagram. 

  The priestess took a brand and thrust it into the fire. It sputtered to flaming life. She muttered under her breath in an ancient tongue, touching the brand to the censures on the points. They let out a sweet and pleasing smoke that hung in graceful ropes in the still night air. 

  "Behold your daughter, Luna!" the priestess called out as the moon broke over the horizon. I did not need her warning, I could feel the moonlight on my skin burning hotter than the fire. I could feel my blood welling up inside, the pain muted by the steaming draught I'd consumed, the agony of transformation fuzzy and diffuse compared to the pleasure. My limbs tingled, then I felt bolts of electricity from the crown of my head down to the tips of my fingers and toes. I began to shudder as I felt my body becoming unglued, undone. 

I crouched to the ground, then fell onto my side, clutching at myself. The pain was alive inside of me, clawing against my skin from the inside. I could feel my fingers pulling in on themselves as my limbs stretched and bent. I tasted my own blood as my growing fangs nipped my lips. This pain was nearly unbearable with the moon tea; I could not imagine how it would be without it. I understood now how one could be driven to madness by the transformation. And then I lost everything to blackness. After that, I was no longer myself. 

The world is emptiness and I am a point of nothingness inside of it. And then I can smell. A riot of odors. But stronger than the rest, overpowering, something familiar. Warm. Comforting. My mother! Now I can feel her, her muzzle pressing warm against the fur at my neck. I can hear her breathing. I open my eyes to a new world. Everything is cast in sharp shades of gray, slight color hinting around the flames of the fire. Seeing it, suddenly woodsmoke is brought to the forefront of my perception. I can smell the sap bubbling. Now I notice more familiar smells, people-like, and then animal traces I can not yet identify. 

Senses still overwhelming me, I shakily get to my feet. No. Not feet. Paws. Four of them. I flex my toes and felt my claws dig into the dirt. This felt nothing like getting on my hands and knees. My body feels nothing like itself. I lick my nose automatically and became aware of my muzzle, powerful jaws with sharp teeth meant for killing. My tail sweeps back and forth. Yes, a tail! I turn in place, testing the movement of my limbs, gaining a feel of myself. An alien shape looms before my eyes and I start when I realized I saw human as Other. But when I lock eyes with her I knew her for wolfkin. 

I lope around the fire as I grow used to my skin. It fells new and ancient, powerful and deadly. It fells right. In dreams past I could remember my rational mind often felt like a passenger, riding along on the inside of me but only passively observing my actions as I danced to the anti-logic of sleep. I feel like that now, my rational mind detached and observing while animal instinct settled itself at the reins. I look up at the moon and howled. I am wolf! In the distance other wolves answered. My pack! 

We run through the woods, racing down narrow animal trails, across clearings, through streams. I fell my lungs burn but knew they were equal to the challenge. I was only just beginning to learn the limits of my wolf form. 

A new scent hits me like a physical blow. I come to an awkward halt, almost tumbling over myself. I put my nose to the ground and breath deeply. Something familiar but not me, not family, not pack. But what? All other thoughts are pushed from my mind, nothing but this. I felt an excitement like I'd never known. I must follow. I ignore my mother behind me as I dash forward with every bit of speed I can summon forth. I ran before. Now I fly. I barely register my mother's howl behind me. Let her follow. 

Memories from my human self flash into my awareness. The first time I met Sam. At school, two years ago. Walking up to my table in the lunchroom and using and opening line he must have heard in some silly movie. I laugh, telling him how awful it was but inviting him to sit anyway. His lips quirk in that grin that can only be Sam's and he admits it was bad. Sam, that mix of boldness and shyness. 

Even through the fur my muzzle stings as I burst through tangled scrub, something with needles tearing at me ineffectually. 

Shoes in hand, we splashed through the stream in the woods near town. Nothing to talk about, a friendly silence, companionable. Balancing on slimy rocks, eyes searching for anything of interest in the shimmering water. I remembered my exact thought at that moment, how strange it was to feel so content simply being in the presence of another. 

I leap over a fallen tree, the bark shed away from the trunk to reveal wood ghostly white in the moonlight. I clear it effortlessly. 

Sam furious. Last night his older sister had come home from her date crying, a nasty bruise blooming on her cheek. His father said things would be taken care of and he'd meant it. Sam was unsure how to comfort her and his instinct was for revenge. That was worthy. But it would be taken care of without his help. He hated himself for this impotence, seeing only the boy he was. I saw differently. I glimpsed the man he could become. 

The sound of the other wolves has grown distant. I am outracing them. My legs burn, my lungs are on fire, and still I run. 

In a theater, Sam sitting beside me. Is he in love with me? I know he is infatuated. Am I in love with him? I know I can't stop thinking about him. But the pact rules are strict. Relations within the pack are permissible at any time but it is forbidden to look outside of the pack. Weres and people can't, shouldn't mix like that. I keep my feelings to myself. I like Sam. It's safer this way.   
And now I've tracked that scent trail to the very end. He is there in a clearing filled with human things. "Picnic area," my rational mind offers helpfully. My animal side does not care. I know he is male from his scent and now I can see it with my eyes. Not a man, a boy. I growl and fell warmth travel from my insides down my limbs. I shiver with a mounting desire. He turns and sees me. There is fear in his eyes. He sucks in a giant lungful of air to scream. I close the distance and am upon him. He falls with my jaws at his throat, fangs cutting off his scream before it's even half over. Blood floods into my mouth, all warm salt and copper, and I feel a satisfaction I can only describe as sexual. I tear away the shirt covering his belly and rip it open. My first kill. I want to feed. 

I hear a wolf behind me and I whirled. My mother. Competition! I will not share. This meat is mine! I growl and bristle at her. She will not have him! She makes no move to approach but began howling, a howl filled with an emotion that did not seem animal. I stand between her and my meat, continuing to snarl my warning. She might be calling others to help drive me off. I would not have it! 

Two man shapes enter the clearing. They are pack. Would they try to steal my kill? I growl at them as well, just to be sure. They do not growl back. They do not approach. One raises a long object to his shoulder and I felt a sting at my neck at the same time I heard a puff of air. I spin around, craning to try and bite at whatever it was, not caring that my jaws could not possibly reach. The strength flees from my body and I collapse. I am losing consciousness. I fall facing my kill. I can see his face, by chance turned towards me and staring with dead, sightless eyes. A flash of recognition strickes me. Sam! And then nothing. 

I awoke laying down on something soft. I looked up and saw stars. I did not know where I was.  I did not know what I was. I raised my arm, foreleg? I wasn't sure. It was trapped beneath a blanket. I was naked. My limb escaped. I brought it before my eyes. No fur. A hand. I was human again. Why should this be surprising? The full moon! My ceremony was coming soon! But no, fragments of memory tumbled by. It had already taken place along with something else. Sam. What about Sam? Oh, God! 

I tried to sit up, reaching out for support. My hands found cool metal. I was in the back of a pickup. Gray limned the horizon. Dawn was coming. How long was I unconscious? I saw my mother sitting in the bed with me. She was human again, face pale now, looking sick. She reached out for me and squeezed my shoulder. She looked like she was going to cry. She called for my father. I looked in that direction. There were picnic tables. Someone had set up lights. They were focused on a blue tarp. Beneath that blue tarp was a shape, a people shape. Sam! 

My father left that group of men. He walked towards us. His face was fury carved from ancient heartwood. I remember nothing but fragments. Father would see that this mess was cleaned up. This was your boyfriend, Jessica? How could we know? This is why we told you it was so important not to date outside of the pack, the sexual instinct becoming confused with the killing instinct. Any human inside a run would risk his life but one who had won a she-wolf's heart would certainly die. I thought I'd been so careful. It wasn't about how he felt about me, it was about how I felt about him. This was too much for me. I slipped back into unconsciousness. 

***

Father was good to his word. The problem went away. Sam disappeared. His parents could not believe he ran away. He certainly didn't run off with me. I was still here, wasn't I? Did I know where he might have gone? No, of course not. 

I sat beneath the big oak tree in Feeney Park. Our tree. I'd never thought of it that way before. Fall was coming. He liked the fall, Sam. He liked me. He wanted to see my Run. He wanted to see my glory. He never saw the danger. I felt empty inside, dead. Months have passed and time has no power against my memories; every detail remains sharp as razors. His smile. His laugh. His smell; he smelled so good. The excitement of finding his trail. How it felt to tear the life from him. The animalistic joy. And that animal is me. He's gone now, gone forever. And every time I close my eyes, I can still taste him.

I think I've caught most of the typos. The only part I'm not sure on is the tense change after her transformation. It's meant to show how different her perception is in her animal form. If it doesn't work I can always put it back to past tense.

Cowboys and Kalashnikovs

A scenario exploring Peak Oil America and the post-industrial Wild West. This is not a prediction, just speculation.

We are the survivors of the prodigal age
Our forefathers wasted everything 

Soft men for soft times
Preoccupied with diversion 
All consuming trivialities
The riches of the greatest civilization ever known 
squandered, pissed away, forever lost 


We live in the squalid ruins of opulence
Men of a lean and hungry age
Too impoverished for any more self-delusion 
No expectation of a better future, only hope for survival 
No more soft men, only the hardened and the broken
Awoken from the American dream, screaming

I'm borrowing a few ideas that have come up on the Kunstlercast, namely the idea of what America might look like in an expensive energy future. The assumptions are that there will be no ready replacement for cheap fossil fuels and that the old economics and ways of life obsoleted in the 20th century will make a revival. However, there is a crisis of capital and political will. The existing infrastructure can't even be maintained, let alone rebuilding all that was dismantled. The full Kunstler scenario plays out in his World Made by Hand novels which puts everyone squarely back in the 19th century with hardly any advanced technology remaining relevant. That's a bit more radical than I'm imagining.

The setting is a hundred years from now. The American empire is dead and gone. It's been a steeper decline than even the British endured. America's political dysfunction didn't help matters. While there's still nominally a Union, the tax base has shrunken so much that federal authority is greatly diminished. Suburbia without cars is unsustainable and there has been a steep decline in population as well as a consolidation into teeming cities. There are computers and office buildings and electric vehicles in the urban areas but get thin on the ground in the boonies. Economies have become increasingly local with long-distance trade limited to the rails and waterways. The steam engine has made a comeback for trains and riverboats, coal remaining the only cheap fossil fuel left. Biodiesel is popular for some small engine applications and the feedstock is agricultural waste. Animal power in many places is cheaper and more reliable than machines. Bicycles crowd the streets. Personal electronic geegaws like satellite world phones are cheap enough that every family has one but a private car is an impossible extravagance. There's no single dominant alternative energy solution but cheap power is done for. Energy is expensive and as precious as water in the desert.

Out west the ranchers have large herds of cattle, just like back in the day. The ranching economy provides a basis for a modest standard of living. The only other growth industry is in the dismantling of the abandoned cities for valuable scrap. China has weathered the downturn magnificently. Chinese windjammers carry much of what remains of global trade and completely dominate the Pacific route between North America and Asia. In a reverse of the Century of Humiliation which marked foreign imperial dominance of China, now the Chinese are able to call the shots on the Pacific side of a diminished America. Washington might not like it but they have nothing left to bargain with. They can't even maintain the tritium initiators for the nuclear arsenal, not that the solid fuel motors of the ICBM's are in any condition to fire.

You have ranchers trying to make a living, homesteaders trying to do the same. You have the cattle drives and cattle towns, Chinese traders and their mercenary escorts, fortune-seekers, gamblers, bandits and common folk, all trying to earn a living. Overworked lawmen struggle to keep the peace. Bullets are plentiful and life is cheap.

The image the title of this post brings to mind should be plain enough: a western gunfighter with an automatic weapon. Seems a little incongruous? Perhaps.  But if you skip ahead to the three minute mark you can see the Chinese army making a cavalry charge in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.

To recap the assumptions going into this scenario:

Q: Why does everything revert back to mostly 19th century technology?
A: Cheap energy is gone.

Q: Why haven't alternative energy sources allowed us to maintain the standard of living to which we've become accustomed?
A: Because the fundamental assumption of this setting is that none of the alternate energy solutions can fully replace the cheap energy, fossil fuel economy.

Q: So what about the wind, solar, biogas and small-scale hydro you mention in the background?
A: The experts say it won't scale to the extent needed for things to continue as normal. Whether they're right or wrong, I don't know. This is the assumption. Solar power isn't going to air condition the 5,000 square-foot McMansion.

Q: I'm pretty sure that things could play out a bit better with those technologies if only...
A: And that's where failure of the political process comes in. How can people end up starving to death when there's produce rotting in the fields? Politics. At any point in this scenario you can say "It doesn't have to be this way, if only..." just remember it's all politics and a good deal of stupidity.

Q: I don't agree with your assumptions.
A: I'm not evangelizing. This is a scenario, it's not prophecy. That's why they're called assumptions, not certainties.

Q: What happened to coal?
A: It never went away. But I think that most coal use will be industrial. We won't see a national power grid energized to make sure people get their air conditioning, microwave burritos and television.

Q: So the whole world isn't de-industrialized?
A: No, but China will no longer be making all the plastic crap to fill Wal-Mart's shelves with. If America doesn't make anything, what do we have to trade with? Nobody has a use for money that can't buy anything. Petroleum is no longer the basis of a global economy, nobody wants our petro-dollars. Globalization is dead and gone.

Q: How are you measuring pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial?
A: Per-capita energy usage. It's a big parabola; in the West the peak in the 1970's.

Q: So you would call this a scaling back of dreams?
A: Exactly. At our height we were able to go to the moon. We could be confident that our children would have a higher standard of living than ourselves and we saw how ours was better than our parents. The march of progress is over. Just hanging on to what we've got would be nice. Cutting our losses is the reality. Running as fast as we can just to stay in place and seeing ourselves start to slide back, that's the nightmare.

Q: So where does the high-tech stuff that does exist come from?
A: From the remaining manufacturing centers. The product lifecycle will be a lot longer. The advantage to consumer electronics is that they have a high value to weight ratio, not unlike precious metals, gemstones and spices. They'll form the basis of the new spice trade as it were.

Q: But consumer stuff is so cheap, you just throw it away when it breaks and buy another one.
A: That age is over and anything made cheaply enough that it can't be fixed when it breaks will no longer be bought. Planned obsolescence is unacceptable at this point.

Q: Is there an Internet?
A: Good question. I'm not sure how long existing infrastructure will last with buried fiber. Power and phone lines require maintenance and would likely become expensive to maintain. I think that the Internet could go dark in the hinterlands with only the main cities connected. But there are some ideas like AMPRNet (AMateur Packet Radio Network). It's low-bandwidth so you could be back to the days of trickling in large transfers over a period of weeks with sneakernets used to move large caches of data. The Chinese could very well be operating a satellite-based network for their own purposes but it would not be public access for the masses. And if satellite launches prove too expensive, there's always the potential for solar-powered, unmanned aircraft operating as telecommunication relays.

This is the first pass at the concept. I'll elaborate more in subsequent posts.

Into the Void

So, in my past post I explain how it's completely impossible to create realistic space opera in the Star Wars vein. No starfighters, no alien worlds, not happening. Here's Charlie Stross' dead mackrel of truth to smack you in the face once more in case you forgot: space colonization is very, very unlikely. Here's where I try to take it all back. I freely admit this is pleading a special case with a lot of assumptions. Why am I making these assumptions? Because otherwise we wouldn't have a story.

So, what do I want for my space opera?

1. Interplanetary-scale warfare 
2. Interplanetary empires and really alien cultures that are still just humans 
3. Space combat that feels a bit more like Star Wars that can be enjoyed without feeling like your brains need scooped out and replaced with guacamole 
4. Keep the tech close enough to the modern day in a plausible fashion so we don't have anachronistic schizo-tech. 
5. Put a plausible decelerando barrier in place (cultural, technical) so that a relatively stable and static tech level for long periods of time doesn't strain credulity. 
6. An economy and human motivations that still make sense, at least to me. 

I'm going to resolve all of that with two departures from reality, maintaining everything else as we know it. But those two assumptions could be two parts of one fundamental assumption...

Assumption 1: Rifts 

Suppose there exist rifts that can be breached by vessels using field generators. They are randomly distributed around planetary bodies but only the ones in the air are easy to access. You pop through them and are in an empty void. It's like space in that it's pretty empty and usually dark, no gravity, no air but there aren't stars or anything else like that, it's pretty empty. However, there are clumps of matter to be found that are rich in a great variety of mcguffinites. What's more, if you venture out far enough you might find another rift and find yourself on an entirely new world. 

Now the difficult part with the rifts is that you have to be in the air to get to the good ones. Trying to go through on the ground is cumbersome, especially on the return since you could smack right into the dirt. You need wiggle room. So the first vessels to pass through a rift into a void are airplanes. But you can't just slap a field generator on a bog-standard plane and send it through. No, it has to also double as a proper spaceship; pressurized cabin, proper life support, thrusters, reaction control system, radiators, etc. It can fap about in the void and upon return must be ready to hit a wall of air and restart the air-breathing engines before whacking the ground.

Assumption 2: Antigravity

So, once you're out in the void, you find mcguffinite. What does it let you do? Ah, lots of things. The big assumption here is an atomic power source and some kind of refined handwavium that, combined with ridiculous amounts of power, gives you antigravity. 

Now you can build massive, hulking ships that can hang there in the air all impressive-like and also move through the void. 

Nuclear reactors are just barely affordable for superpowers and only for special circumstances. They need to be quite a bit cheaper for our ships. Aside from that, the tech can feel pretty 20th century.

Navigating the Void

The void ships fly across planets to reach new rifts. They will need engines to use in atmo. They'll also need reaction engines for propulsion in void. Once in the void the ship aligns on the beacon for the next rift, fires up the engines and gets up to cruising speed. Because the ships have limited delta-v, the top velocity won't be ridiculous. Nobody is in orbit, speeds are slow. There's no grace to them, nothing to inspire poetry and fancy. The ships look like ugly, blunt instruments and move ponderously. They would be completely useless in conventional space but are capable enough in the void. 

Ships will need to kill velocity before making the next transition because they are slamming into atmosphere and some rifts are pretty close to sea level. 

Ship design is worth a whole post of its own. I have a host of assumptions but no certainty of whether or not I'm on the right track.

Your simplest void will be the rift you emerged from and the target you're heading for some distance away. Short runs might take a few days to traverse. A useful world could be a month out and necessitate a trip through the void to one world and then travel to the next rift and another run through the void to reach the destination.

Rifts can be detected by sensors but EM propagation within the voids are spotty. This means it's a time-consuming and expensive business to go prospecting for routes. With no beacons or fixed points of reference, ships have to rely on inertial sensors which invariably become less accurate the longer they've gone without a position update.

There's always the potential for new rifts to be out there in the void and routes can loop back on themselves. In other words, the same void can be reached from different worlds while other voids require a longer sequence of travel to reach. Therefore there is always uncertainty about whether there's a shorter way to get anywhere and finding those routes is as much luck as art.

Commercially-useful routes minimize travel time and any shorter route between important worlds is of immense value. Indirect routes to important worlds can have a significant military advantage but also carry risk. If it takes a month to travel the direct route and six months to go the indirect route, making a sneak attack through the enemy's back door could leave you vulnerable to him making a frontal assault on your front door, especially if you stripped your defenses to mount your attack. 

What are the Planets Like?  

Everything you can imagine. Rocky, airless worlds like Mercury, rocky, smothered worlds like Venus, gas giants like Jupiter where a passing ship has nothing but roiling clouds and crushing pressure beneath them, and living worlds full of mystery and wonder. Some worlds contain nothing but ruins, others have primitive tribes, others have technological civilizations somewhat behind the great empires. 

Now if you take something like Star Trek or the original Battlestar Galactica, you get the ridiculous assumption that alien worlds can evolve to be exactly like some point in our own history. Star Trek had the planet of 20's mobsters and the planet of 30's Nazis and Galactica had the planet of vaguely Nazi humans as well as a Wild West planet and doubtless would have had many other incredibly stupid ideas if they'd gotten another season. And this isn't even getting into the bit about most aliens looking like humans with bumpy foreheads who speak English perfectly. 

So, how do we avoid this problem? We don't. We hit it head-on. Yes, a lot of these habitable planets are a lot like Earth, all the way down to having similar flora and fauna. And the ruins, some of them are of human civilizations we've never heard of, some of them look like ones we know, some of them even echo our own down to disturbing detail. Some ruins are fresh as if the people disappeared yesterday and others appear abandoned for thousands of years. It's like finding a microchip in a Sumerian burial site. What does this mean? It's hinting at the fundamental assumption which I won't go into just yet.

Economics and Empire Building

So, there are all these worlds out there and some worlds have the ability to project military power across the void. There's resources to be had, lands to exploit, people to enslave, and rival powers to be concerned with. What does this sound like? Empire. That's right. There can be peaceful trade between these empires or there can be war. That's the foundation of any good space opera.

Each expansionist power will want to protect knowledge of where its own homeworld is. The way to get there -- that is, the series of rifts and worlds that must be traversed -- is a supreme state secret.

The motivations and economics are all squarely comprehensible. We avoid head-thunkers like in Scalzi's Old Man's War universe. As an aside: his characters are sympathetic, believable, compelling. The conflict is suitably frightening. But the rationale of space colonization in his setting don't hold up at all. We're in a knock-down, drag-down fight to the death against alien powers and we're going to hold planets by ... putting farmers down on them? Just doing normal farmer stuff? This is in a setting where we're transplanting human minds into genetically-engineered super-soldiers. Still not sure why we're fighting with them on the ground instead of using combat bots since there's crazy-smart AI and spaceships and everything. It feels too schizo-tech, like having a coal-fired starship.

So, you have trade between civilizations across the void. You have mining activities in the void itself. Empires will view populated and developed worlds vital to defense from foreign invaders. A mixture of greed for new wealth and fear of the unknown will spur the imperial expansion.

Technology and the Decelerando 

Something that never made any sense in the Star Wars universe is that they've got 25,000 years of interstellar travel and the ships are essentially the same. No advances, seriously? Except they then have exactly that depicted in the Expanded Universe material, new military technology hitting the market all the time. How do you reconcile the two? You can't.

One explanation for a technology plateau is here's either a finite limit to how much technology can improve and thus there is a slowing of the rate of progress. The decelerando is covered quite well at Rocketpunk. Another explanation is a cultural mindset against progress. We have the example of China abandoning the treasure ships used to explore the world. There's also the other small matter of never developing gunpowder to the extent that the West did. Confucian scholars are traditionally blamed for this, rejecting new and disruptive technologies in favor of tradition. We can also consider the Tokugawa shoguns banning firearms in Japan and keeping out the foreign devils. It's important to note that China ended up invaded by strong western powers and Japan had its ports forcibly opened by Commodore Perry.

The new wrinkle in this setting will be the example set by the dead worlds surveyed by exploration fleets. There are many ruins. Some planets have survivors far below the highwater mark represented by those ruins, from steam-age technology all the way down to under-gatherers. Some worlds are right at that highwater mark, roughly on par with the technology of the empires, the only difference is that they haven't yet discovered how to enter the void on their own. But no civilization is much further advanced than that. It's like looking at at a piece of rock with the K-T Boundary and realizing that the signs point to an extraterrestrial impact. Civilizations don't get much older than this and the presence of certain technology ties it all together. I'm dubbing these "terminal technologies" for now. It's seldom clear what caused the end but something is killing off these civilizations and it's never clear what exactly did it. Some ruins have obviously gone through a nuclear war, some appear simply abandoned. Some ruins are littered with the dead as if they dropped where they stood.

The Fundamental Assumption 

"Someone else set up the chessboard and we're just the players on it." It's an idea I'd had a good while back for another story, Kyrn. The singularity happens, we don't know what happened during it but baseline humans are scattered among a few thousand worlds that are happily compatible to our way of living. I hadn't worked out all the details but I needn't have bothered: Stross did it before me with Singularity Sky. He did another variation of it with Missile Gap. Planetary surfaces far bigger than Earth are not new to science fiction. We have Dyson spheres and ringworlds and Alderson disks. There's been a long tradition of having alternate history worlds existing alongside us in a mutliverse: the Nazis won WWII in this timeline, the American Revolution failed in this one.  Missile Gap takes the idea of these alternate timeline "Earths" and sticks those worlds on an Alderson disk with the clear implication it was done by a vastly godlike intelligence for ends we cannot fathom. Anyone looking at a map would see our Earth and then lots of sea, brand new continents, then eventually other, familiar Earths, cities in ruins from ancient nuclear wars.

That's the clear implication staring everyone in the face in the Void setting. People will question why this is so, what the purpose is, what goals could be served, but there will never be answers. And I think that's a pretty terrifying thing. There's one kind of terror in losing your belief in a personal and loving God since the light of science only illuminates the absence and needlessness of the divine in a materialist universe. There's another kind of terror in seeing exactly the kind of evidence that that eliminates the possibilities of both a loving god and a godless cosmos. Not that anyone can even clearly articulate what "god" means in this context.

That's enough for this update. The next one will cover what warfare would actually look like in this setting. 

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