A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

8 thoughts on “A Bit of Insight

  1. I’ll immediately suggest that interhuman conflict will occur on the social level there. Some humans undoubtably will feel the aliens are better rulers than humans were, given how much better and more peaceful life is.

    Also, I will point out that if the aliens want human psychology to change from violent, xenophobic, short-sighted, and unsustainable, they will have to drastically change us on a genetic level. These new humans would be so different from most old humans that they might as well be aliens themselves. And that would generate a great deal of social unrest.

    Lastly, when humans are stressed out or pushed beyond their comfortable world, the pressure has to let out somewhere. Even in terribly repressive places like North Korea, people do something to let out the stress. Omnipresent surveillance would limit what kinds of things humans do to let off stress, but these aliens don’t sound like they would care much about nonviolent dissent. It’s not like humans can threaten their regime.

    Also, these aliens sound like a pretty benevolent flavor of the patrons in David Brin’s Uplift series. That’s why I thought of genetic engineering.

  2. A question: are the aliens teaching humans to use any of their own super-technology, or is all of that being withheld until we grow up. If they can create an angelnet they’re potentially post-singularity compared to us, but still some of their tech might be safe in human hands… as long as scientists who study it for new applications are supervised.

  3. Also, if the aliens can enforce strict laws they can potentially make humans engage in new rituals and routines daily. The Uplift Series has some interesting ideas about patron species using psychosocial engineering, by imposing ritual behaviors, to control and direct the psychological evolution of their client species.

  4. Wish I could edit posts here. :p

    Anyway, if humans don’t have to work, they have tons of time to spend dissenting, producing anti-alien art and literature, arguing with each other about politics and the aliens and religion, following aliens around studying/pestering/protesting/worshipping them (circle one), studying alien art, trying to sabotage/subvert/hide from the angelnet, exploring the Solar System, trying to escape the Solar System, trying to use art/literature/archaeological research/applied science/theology/philosophy to prove to the aliens humans are grown up now and they should leave, etc.

    1. Aha, that idea got your attention :-).

      Let’s see if I can respond to some of your comments – although I suspect when I start writing my new setting bible that will cover a lot of it.

      “Angelnet” – that’s a bit of vocabulary I don’t think I’ve heard before, although the context is clear. Something out of the Orion’s Arm universe, isn’t it? Yeah, the idea is that the aliens like to set up that kind of infrastructure in their “urban reserves” for humans: big city-habitats where humans are clustered together and kept safe, and they can live without having to work for it. (Some humans do work, either self-employed or working for some group or collective, but meaningful work is usually thought of as a privilege rather than a necessity of survival.)

      Yes, some of the resemblances between this setting and David Brin’s Uplift universe are quite deliberate. The main difference is that new sentient species evolve all the time, but almost none of them survive to become interstellar societies on their own. Tool-using intelligence seems to be a mixed blessing – most species tend to get just smart enough to ruin themselves in the long run. So the aliens commit a lot of their civilization’s effort into finding, “rescuing,” and mentoring new cultures.

      I don’t conceive of the aliens imposing any cultural ideas of their own on humans. They’re more about giving humans the opportunity to set up societies and cultures of their own – and applying some selective pressure to encourage the cultures that have traits of which they approve. There’s a term – “ethnos” – which describes this kind of freely chosen society with its own strong cultural values. The aliens are trying to encourage the formation of ethnoi that exhibit the behaviors and values they know empirically are necessary for galactic citizenship.

  5. Definitely an interesting concept you have. I didn’t realize “angelnet” was specific to Orion’s Arm. Theirs are on at least a planetary scale, though, due to bonkers post-multi-singularity tech.

    One question to answer is what motivates the aliens (and other species) to do this? Humans may never figure it out during the series, but there must be a reason. Do they get status similar to patron status in Uplift? Are the species who make it to the interstellar scale just inherently benevolent? Do they have some goal to use humanity for something to their benefit? Do they want to be worshipped (or some comparable but alien concept)?

    1. Yes, the mystery of why the aliens do what they do is a big piece of the setting – my protagonist Aminata is going to spend most of her life trying to figure that out.

      At the risk of self-promoting a bit, I’d be interested in hearing what you think of “Pilgrimage,” the one novelette I’ve published so far in this setting. It’s available from Amazon for under $1 – you can find it from my Publications page. Although I think I may end up rewriting that story a bit . . .

      1. I would certainly consider it, when I’m next in a mood for scifi stories. But I don’t buy on Amazon anymore. Have you considered publishing on other platforms as well? Such as DriveThruFiction? There’s a lot of speculative fiction there, especially game-related.

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