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Rethinking the Human Destiny Universe

Rethinking the Human Destiny Universe

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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.

Rethinking the Human Destiny

Rethinking the Human Destiny

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A big part of my creative process involves all the work that happens entirely in my head, usually while the “active” work is happening on a completely different project. Some of that has been happening over the past couple of months, while the bulk of my time was devoted to Architect of Worlds. The target has been my Human Destiny universe.

The Human Destiny is an extended meditation on what our future might look like in a universe that is very much not designed for human pre-eminence. Humans reach the stars, but only as clients of a far older, far larger, and far more powerful extraterrestrial society. Stories written so far in this setting seem to fall into two categories:

  • Stories set right around “the Conquest,” the time (currently set about twenty years from now) when the aliens arrive and very quickly reduce Earth to a client state. Published stories in this set include “Guanahani” and “Roanoke.”
  • Stories set about two hundred years after the Conquest, at a time when human beings are first being permitted to explore and settle worlds outside our own planetary system. Most of these center around the character of Aminata Ndoye, a young woman from what we now know as Senegal, who is one of the first humans to earn an officer’s position in the alien “interstellar service.” If and when I write a Human Destiny game sourcebook, it will probably be set in this era. Published stories in this set include “Pilgrimage” and In the House of War.

So far, the Human Destiny setting has been best described as “Star Trek meets David Brin’s Uplift novels.” The “Hegemony” that conquers Earth is non-human and rather paternalistic, but it’s also generally benign. Kind of like a Trek Federation that means well to its citizens but decidedly does not have a non-interference directive.

What I’ve been wrestling with is the technological assumptions of the setting.

To put the problem shortly: I think the technologies I’ve assumed so far have turned out to be at odds with the core themes of the setting, and I’m moving toward the decision to re-think that technological base from scratch. Which may mean rewriting a lot of the existing fiction, but may also give me good hooks for new stories in the future, so on that basis it may be a wash.

The executive summary is that I’ve been assuming a very Star Trek-like technological base. Magical normal-space and FTL drives, technical control of gravitational forces, the sort of tech that allows for cheap and easy space travel. Yet the themes I want to build into the setting are that the universe is vast, that intelligent beings on the human scale can easily get lost in it, that thriving on that stage requires a mindset that thinks into the distance in both space and time. Star Trek, for all its virtues, rarely offered that kind of perspective. It’s the Age of Sail in space, with exotic but fundamentally human cultures in every port. Jim Kirk needed to be cosmopolitan, but he rarely had to think far above the human level to succeed.

One oeuvre that I really appreciate, that I think hits some of the same themes I’m looking for, can be found in the late works of Poul Anderson. I’m thinking here of some of the novels he wrote in the last decade of his life, starting with The Boat of a Million Years, moving through his Harvest of Stars tetralogy, and ending with the magnificent Starfarers.

All these novels lean toward “hard” SF, mostly sticking to space travel that’s still tied to the rocket equation even if the engines are really advanced, avoiding FTL travel entirely. The stars are hard to reach in these stories, and it’s never clear that human beings are at all suited for life on that stage. Some humans decide not to try, huddling at home on Earth and rarely looking up. Others worry that humans are going to be eclipsed by other forms of life – mechanical or alien – that can thrive on the cosmic scale. Yet in these stories, some humans do manage to keep themselves relevant, finding ways to seek out free and worthwhile lives even out among the stars.

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s the undeniable influence that Anderson has had on my creative work all along, but those are very nearly the same themes I want to build into the Human Destiny. So the worldbuilding needs to match.

So I’ve been thinking about turning the “hard SF” dial up quite a bit, and working out what the implications might be for the setting as a whole. In particular, what will the vast, old, alien Hegemony look like if they don’t fly Star Trek-style starships? What will their conquest of Earth look like? How will Aminata Ndoye’s career be different, if she can’t fly a few hundred parsecs and back and still find her family and her home town more or less as she left them?

Lots to think about here, and I don’t pretend to have everything worked out yet, but once Architect of Worlds is out the door this may be where I’ll be spending some worldbuilding time.

A Prized Possession

A Prized Possession

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While doing some post-flood cleaning and packing in the basement today, I came across a neat item: the one and only exchange of correspondence I ever had with Poul Anderson.

I generally do not engage in fanac. I don’t go to many conventions and I don’t pester my favored authors with my presence. I can count on one hand the number of times a well-known creative has ever been prevailed upon to give me even a moment’s attention. This was an exception, and all the more valuable to me as such.

Back in the late 1990s, I had a contract to write GURPS Traveller: First In, the sourcebook for the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service. A big chunk of that book was going to consist of my update to the old Traveller Book 6 world-building rules – the first (but not the last) attempt I ever made to design plausible new world-building systems for a game.

A lot of my inspiration for world-building had always come from Poul Anderson. He was always famous as one of the SF authors who took the time to make his planetary environments exotic but also scientifically plausible. Read, well, just about any of his Technic History stories if you don’t believe me. I would honestly have put him on a par with Hal Clement in that field.

So when I got to write this book, I asked to do something unusual: I wanted to make a small dedication on the title page. GURPS books generally have never had dedications, but in this case I was allowed to make an exception, so long as Mr. Anderson was cool with it.

So I wrote him a concise, polite letter (yes, a letter, this was back in the 1990s after all) explaining the project and asking for his permission. In due course, back came the self-addressed, stamped envelope with his even more concise and gracious agreement. So the book got its dedication.

At the time, Mr. Anderson was getting along in years, and he passed away a year or so after the book came out. I’m told, however, that a GURPS Traveller fan out in California reached him with a copy of the book at one of his last convention appearances. He got a lengthy opportunity to see the dedication and leaf through the book. The phrase “like a kid in a candy store” was included in the after-action report that got back to me.

We never know just how we might manage to touch people with our work.