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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.