My Human Destiny universe has a fairly long history, for a setting that’s only had a few stories published in it.
Back around 2005-2006, I was working with James Cambias to write a new edition of the Space sourcebook for the Steve Jackson Games GURPS roleplaying game. One of the original plans for that book was for us to write three short treatments for space settings, as extended worked examples. One of those treatments was to be set after a more-or-less-benevolent alien empire had conquered Earth and integrated humanity into their civilization as a (very junior) partner.
In the end, the book was so over-stuffed with other material that those three setting treatments never got written. The only visible remnant of that specific setting is in the vignette that Jim wrote for Chapter 7 in the published book. Yet the idea stuck with me.
Over time, I developed the idea for the Khedai Hegemony setting, or what I more generically call the Human Destiny universe. The idea remains the same: about a generation from now, at the point where we humans seem about to wreck our home-world and end civilization for good, an alien interstellar empire suddenly arrives and conquers Earth.
The Hegemony turns out to be a highly competent overlord, reasonable and benevolent, and majestically impartial in how it treats all humans. Humans are not enslaved, nor are the resources of Earth or the Sol system plundered. If anything, most humans come to enjoy a standard of living and even a degree of personal freedom unprecedented in our history. The only thing of which we are deprived is our right to choose our own collective destiny. Like it or not, we are now bound to a vast interstellar culture that has its own governance and its own purposes . . . and what that means for us in the long term is not at all clear, because the Hegemony steadfastly refuses to reveal its motives, the reasons for why it rules us the way it does.
I have to admit, this universe tends to get more attention from me at times when we humans seem to be having a lot of trouble getting our act together. I did a lot of worldbuilding in this setting in 2014-2018, and that was also when I wrote most of the finished fiction that’s so far been set there. I also wrote a lot of setting material for the beginnings of a “bible” and possible RPG sourcebook. Then, for several years I spent most of my time on Architect of Worlds, and development of Human Destiny slowed.
Of course, human folly seems to be on the march again of late, so my Muse has been focusing on this universe again. My taste in interstellar-fiction settings has changed a bit, though, and so I’m considering making some significant changes to this universe before I publish more material for it.
This blog post should serve as a tentative summary of how “new Human Destiny” (2025 and onward) is likely to be different from “old Human Destiny” (the setting as I developed it in the 2014-2018 timeframe).
Structure of Interstellar Societies
My original concept for the Khedai Hegemony, the interstellar empire that integrates humanity into its rule, was that it would occupy a rough sphere about 500 light-years across, with Sol at its rimward edge. The khedai themselves, the dominant species of the hegemony, would occupy thousands of worlds of their own, and would have roughly 15-20 client civilizations at any one time. Beyond the borders of the Hegemony would be two or three rival cultures, and a great deal of howling wilderness. An unwritten implication was that humans were very fortunate that the Hegemony was in a position to notice our existence before we drove ourselves into extinction.
For a variety of reasons, I’ve decided to move to a model for interstellar cultures in which the Galaxy is fairly well-known, if not fully explored at any given time.
The purpose of interstellar civilizations like the Hegemony is to “rescue” new cultures from a Gaian bottleneck – the fact that young high-technology civilizations almost invariably drive themselves into extinction, by failing to manage their own ecosphere properly, before reaching a stable plateau. Why existing interstellar civilizations bother doing this is an enigma that is not explained to young client cultures like humanity.
In any case, interstellar civilization in the Galaxy is very old – billions of years old – and very little of the Galaxy can be considered uncharted wilderness. A typical star system will be left “fallow” for many millions of years at a time, unvisited but loosely monitored from afar. A new techno-culture like 21st-century humanity won’t appear without being noticed, triggering an intervention from the closest patron civilization. Instead of having a compact sphere of control, the Hegemony is in charge of a substantial stretch of the Orion Spur.
I’m also leaning toward making the khedai themselves a bit more enigmatic. Instead of occupying thousands of their own worlds, they’re more or less nomadic, only a few of them living in any given star system at a time. They’re the ultimate decision-makers for their Hegemony, but the work of exploring and possibly colonizing the stars is left for the younger client civilizations.
Interstellar Travel
One major change is that I’ve decided to drop the notion that starships can manage FTL travel on their own. The old setting had something like the Alcubierre warp drive, but over time I’m finding that less attractive as a model.
Instead, I’m leaning toward a bimodal distribution for interstellar travel.
A very few star systems in the Galaxy – fully civilized systems, with high population densities and full technological development – will be linked by a network of artificial wormholes. Sol will be linked into this network, as of slightly before the conquest of Earth. The network provides “shortcuts,” allowing ships to sidestep dozens or hundreds of light-years of normal space at a time. Travel times are short, and there’s no time-dilation effect. Human adventurers might be able to visit the great worlds of the Hegemony and return home again, all without getting too far out of synch with the home-world clock.
However, building a wormhole bridge into the network is horrendously expensive, even by the Hegemony’s standards. It requires enormous “fixed” facilities that can only be built and supported in a well-established star system.
Exploring and colonizing new worlds has to be done using a near-light-speed drive that allows starships to maintain normal-space velocities just below those of a photon. Traveling aboard these ships, your subjective clock may only register a few days or weeks between stars, but you’ll slip out of synch with the home-world clock. Fly to Alpha Centauri for a three-or-four-month mission, and it will feel to you like just a few months away, but when you get back to Earth you’ll find that nine years have passed. For a science-fictional reference, consider Poul Anderson’s novel Starfarers.
The effect this gives me is that those humans who go on exploration or colonization ventures are going to end up isolated from home-world society over time. Going to the stars will mean a significant sacrifice, and most humans won’t be motivated to do it. It fits some of the themes I’m after.
Incidentally, I’m thinking that travel through normal space will be taken care of by an effective reactionless drive, of which the near-light-speed star drive is an ultimate development. No rockets! On the other hand, I’m seriously considering forbidding any kind of “artificial gravity” inside a ship or station. The reactionless drive affects the entire ship as a unit, so even when it’s accelerating through space the crew and passengers are effectively in free fall. Unless the ship has a spin habitat, of course.
What About Those Wormholes?
Recently I was thinking about those “star bridges” based on wormholes, when I realized that a very similar technology could solve another problem I was having with this setting: the assumption that conquered Earth would be under almost constant and universal surveillance by the Hegemony.
The idea here is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past,” or the more recent novel The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. In the novel in particular, microscopic wormholes become an effective surveillance method. Anyone can watch any point in the world at any given time, and privacy becomes a thing of the past. The wormhole technology can also be used to view locations very distant from Earth, and (due to an equivalence between distance in space and in time) it becomes a past-viewer as well. The novel examines the implications of both a loss of privacy and complete access to the historical past.
Great! So let’s assume that the Hegemony has access to similar technology, and applies it in several different ways:
- As an “ansible” communicator, tying starships and colony worlds into a real-time communications network. The colony on Alpha Centauri may be four-plus years away by travel time, but messages can still be pushed back and forth with minimal delay. The bandwidth limits on this remain to be determined. One limitation is that a starship in flight can’t maintain its wormhole connection back to home base, but has to re-establish a connection once it reaches its destination. Another limitation is that these “ansible” connections require a substantial facility at each end – so we have no hand-held devices reaching directly across light-years.
- As a remote viewer, which doesn’t require a facility at both ends, but in this case information only flows one way (from the remote point to the viewer). The required facilities are pretty massive and require a ton of computational power, so one person (or one starship) can’t carry the necessary equipment. Even a colony world can’t manage it. On the other hand, a high-population world like Earth can use remote viewing to place everyone on the planet under constant surveillance. The same facilities can monitor locations in deep space out to a few hundred light-years, and can also delve a few centuries into the local past. This is used to carry out low-level monitoring of nearby “fallow” star systems, and to do historical research.
- Given a truly enormous investment in energy and computational power, a wormhole connecting two remote points in space can be forced open wide enough to permit the passage of spaceships, and then wedged permanently open. These are the star-bridges mentioned earlier.
Rewriting Existing Stories
I think the changes I’ve outlined above actually support the themes I want for the setting a little better than the “old” assumptions did. There are still a bunch of details to be worked out, probably in my next revision of the setting bible over the next few months.
I can see a few places where some of the existing fiction in this setting will need to be reworked. I think the novelette “Pilgrimage” needs only some minor adjustments, but the novella “In the House of War” will need a substantive rewrite.
More broadly, I’ve been working out a “future history” of human exploration of the interstellar neighborhood, along with a detailed “career profile” for my protagonist Aminata Ndoye, based on the new assumptions. That should help guide a rewrite of the existing stories, as I pull them down from Amazon KDP and republish them to my Ko-fi shop. It will also give me a framework on which to hang more stories.
More to come over the next few months. I foresee Human Destiny being the main focus of my effort for at least the first half of 2025.
