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Rethinking the Human Destiny Universe

January 2, 2025 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

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.

2024 in Review

December 30, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

2024 had its ups and downs, and the completion of a big project left me kind of unfocused for several months. I’d have to say it was a decent year, though.

Past as Prologue

The biggest item, of course, was the final completion and publication of Architect of Worlds, now out as a 192-page softback and PDF from Ad Astra Games. Sales have been pretty decent, resulting in probably the most profitable year for my creative life since I quit working for Steve Jackson Games about 2006.

With Architect done, I kind of flitted from one project to another for the second half of the year, making some progress on several items but never quite settling on one.

Then the US federal elections took place in November, and bang my Muse had me focusing almost entirely on the Human Destiny universe. Which was probably predictable: that universe involves a benevolent alien empire coming to conquer Earth to save us from the weight of human folly, so every time a lot of human folly happens in the world I start thinking about it again.

Meanwhile, I started a transition away from using Amazon KDP and Patreon to get my work in front of an audience, largely because Amazon has been utterly useless in that regard and Patreon has made some policy changes that don’t fit my “business” model. Instead, I’ve set up a Ko-fi page and shop and will be moving almost all of my finished work to that venue. That’s where I’ll also be releasing draft and partial material, some of it free for all subscribers, some restricted to the higher tiers.

Meanwhile, the entire calendar year had me working on the single largest curriculum-development project of my entire career, first working with a senior official, more recently independently. This is a project that will probably occupy the rest of my tenure as a civil servant, however long that may be. I’m also continuing to work toward a second undergraduate degree and (possibly) a master’s from the Open University in the UK. I’m not feeling quite as stressed as I was in late 2023, but I certainly have no difficulty filling up my days.

The Year’s Blog Traffic

The top ten posts for 2024 turned out to be:

Looks like the most popular posts from the past year were a mix of status updates, posts about SF mapping and worldbuilding, and items related to Architect of Worlds. Which makes sense.

Looking Forward

So – objectives for the new year? I’m probably going to be focusing on Human Destiny projects for the time being, including publishing regular updates to the RPG book and (once again) trying to get some new fiction written.

In particular, I intend to publish early-draft material for the putative Atlas of the Human Protectorate, in the form of short writeups for individual worlds or star systems. The first of these, a description of the sigma Draconis star system, has already been posted to my Ko-fi shop and is free for Silver- and Gold-tier subscribers.

I also have in mind to assemble the first of several “supplements” for Architect of Worlds, laying out improvements and additions to the existing material. Look for that sometime this spring, maybe – it depends on how much I decide to include, and how long it takes to write and edit. These may or may not be released through Ad Astra Games.

In any case, new items will be appearing at my Ko-fi page and shop, some free for subscribers only, some with a modest price tag attached (but subscribers at the Silver and Gold levels will get discounts on those).

As for my social media presence, occasional long-form posts and status updates about my creative work will continue to appear here, while daily slice-of-life items and short updates will appear at my BlueSky profile. I’m also investigating Mastodon, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet. I fully expect my Facebook account will be moribund for now, and may be shut down entirely if Meta implements some of the changes they appear to be planning.

A lot depends on how things in my non-creative life go – that is, my family commitments, my day job (subject to the whims of the new US administration), and my university courses. I’m trying not to make big commitments for the coming year, and will be taking things one day at a time.

Thanks for sticking with me, regardless!

Echoes

July 1, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

While I continue rooting through my basement, boxing up the last scraps of small items I don’t want to discard, I’m coming across some interesting items.

Back in the 1995-2005 timeframe, I kept many handwritten notes in small notebooks. At the time a lot of my creative thinking happened at the office, or in other places where I didn’t have access to my computer or the Internet, so handwritten notes were very useful. Apparently I still have all of those notebooks, salted away on low shelves or in boxes that haven’t been opened in many years; very few of these got water-damaged in the recent disaster. So, for example, just today I found:

An extensive set of notes titled “Life after Steve Jackson Games,” in which I started planning an independent creative career. Most of that plan doesn’t seem to have survived contact with reality, but a few of its features do seem to have been implemented.
Huge piles of notes from when I was helping to develop setting material for GURPS Traveller, including the Interstellar Wars setting. More piles of notes that eventually went into Transhuman Space.
My own version of the Aldebaran Sector for Traveller, along with a contract (never completed) to write a GURPS Traveller sourcebook titled Grand Frontiers.
Notes and hardcopy of the rules for the Game of Empire system I developed for realm-level play in Traveller. This is the game that I refereed for a bunch of GURPS Traveller fans about 2000, developing a ton of background information (including months’ worth of Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society news items) for the Solomani Rim.
Notes for a new generic RPG system. Apparently I was already thinking in terms of developing my own rules mechanics so as to publish game material without running into licensing issues. Probably never going to be developed now, but still interesting.
Notes for a realm-management game set in Bronze Age Greece. I think this did get deployed in a GURPS campaign I was running back in the day, although one of my players reacted so badly to the system in its first session that the campaign disbanded almost immediately afterward.
Extensive notes for at least three genre settings. One these eventually gave rise to my first complete original novel (the unpublishable one). Another looks very much like an early version of my Human Destiny space opera setting. A third was a fantasy setting I had forgotten about entirely and might now think about revisiting.
Extensive musings on philosophy and theology. I’m almost afraid to re-read these in detail. I’m a cheerful solitary regarding such matters, so it doesn’t concern me that my ideas aren’t in lockstep with any extant school of thought. Still, I suspect the me of 2023 might find the me of circa 2000 kind of hard to take.

Quite the treasure trove. Hard to say whether any of it will ever see the light of day again – it’s not as if I don’t have enough creative work to do already – but it’s still interesting reading. All of it’s going in boxes to be preserved.

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

March 15, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

One of the more interesting phases of my creative career was my involvement with the Traveller tabletop roleplaying game. Between 1999 and 2005, I wrote, co-authored, or edited at least seven books for the GURPS Traveller product line. In fact, for much of that time, I was effectively the backup Line Editor, assisting Loren K. Wiseman in that capacity, and even taking over entirely for a few months at one point. It was a neat experience; I kind of miss it even today.

In 2000, I was writing the Solomani Rim sector book for GURPS Traveller. I was also helping Loren to produce an online edition of Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS), the venerable Traveller fan magazine. One thing I did in that period was to help Loren wrangle Traveller News Service (TNS) entries, little scraps of “current events” from the Third Imperium setting that were meant to maintain the game’s meta-plot and suggest interesting adventures.

There was a side project I undertook, relevant to all of that activity: a set of rules with the working title of Game of Empire. This was a set of Traveller meta-rules, designed to allow “movers and shakers” roleplaying across a region of space. Instead of playing ordinary Imperial citizens, players could take on the role of very senior nobles, megacorporate executives, planetary political leaders, rebel-faction commanders, and so on. The actions and decisions they carried out would affect whole worlds. There was some resemblance to other Traveller products such as Pocket Empires or Dynasties, although the scale and emphasis were a bit different.

As part of the project, I wrote up a scenario, titled The Alderamin Scramble. The premise was that an Imperial duke’s title had fallen vacant in the Solomani Rim sector, and a number of notables were in a position to compete for an appointment to that seat. There were a lot of other events in the scenario – at least two local wars, a visit from Empress Iolanthe to the Rim, and so on.

I recruited 20 players from the JTAS message boards, and we spent several months “playtesting” the ruleset and the Alderamin Scramble scenario. It was a lot of fun – and along the way, we generated dozens of potential TNS items. I think most of the TNS entries from the in-game years 1119 through 1122 came out of that one game.

I often thought about building Game of Empire into something that could be published. I did write a second edition of the ruleset, based on our experience with the playtest, and thought about running more games with that. Unfortunately, with one thing and another, further development never happened before GURPS Traveller started dying on the vine a few years later.

In fact, I somehow misplaced my copy of the game’s files at some point. Fortunately, in 2017, I happened to be talking with Keith Alan Johnson when he mentioned he had a complete copy of both versions of the rules, the Alderamin Scramble scenario, and a bunch of his notes from the playtest. He was generous enough to bundle the whole package up and send it to me.

At the time, I still didn’t have any place to publish the game, but that may be changing. There’s an “open source” version of Traveller in existence now (a game called Cepheus Engine) and several independent publishers have released material through that venue. I’m already exploring ways to release other game material, as for example through DriveThruRPG. So a few days ago I got the notion of reviving this old project.

Yesterday I made a post on the Traveller Facebook group, describing the project and its history, and asking whether the audience would be interested. The response was a pretty resounding yes – so this certainly looks like something that would be worth moving to the front burner. I already have a lot on my plate for the rest of this month, but I may be spending odd moments looking at the old material and letting my subconscious mull over ways to improve and add to it.

New Creative Directions

December 5, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.

The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.

Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.

World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.

The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.

Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.

Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.

Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.

Bios: Origins (Second Edition) is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.

As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.

I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.

The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.

Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.

So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.

All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.

Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .

Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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