Just a quick note, since it’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything here. Been rather distracted by finally picking up the video game Shadow of War, which is iffy from the standpoint of a Tolkien scholar but quite entertaining from a gameplay perspective.

I was about ready to wrap up my modeling of galactic history and drill down to the structure of the Khedai Hegemony (the interstellar polity that conquers and rules Earth in my Human Destiny setting). Then I had a sudden realization that caused me to re-think a lot of the chain of reasoning. To wit: stars move.

Okay, yes, that isn’t a great revelation. We all know that stars have proper motion in the sky; over long periods of time the configuration of stars around Sol (for example) will change dramatically. What I realized is that the time-scale on which this is significant is well within the periods of time I was working with for the Human Destiny setting. Interstellar civilizations can’t be treated as nice, compact, spherical volumes of space – not if they last long enough that their colony worlds are going to scatter across dozens or even hundreds of light-years.

So I’ve made a few tweaks to the chain of logic, and in the process have improved it somewhat. I can now model different interstellar civilizations based on the strategy they select as to which new cultures they choose to “uplift” into the galactic community. I also now have a solid chain of reasoning that indicates why any given interstellar culture might have neighbors, to serve as enemies or at least competitors. I believe I’m now in a position to publish my revised model here, and work on a larger-scale map of the entire Hegemony that I can use as reference when writing stories. Look for that over the next few days, so long as I can tear myself away from mowing through hordes of Sauron’s orcs.