They came as conquerors. Like all primitive humans on the surrounding planets, these had gods they prayed to for protection and fortune. It seemed like a standard conquest and integration scenario, until the invaders found out the gods weren’t imaginary after all. Now the Empire has bitten off more than it can chew, and the rest of the galaxy is at risk! How do you beat a god?
Some Background:
A frequent sci-fi trope is that humans appear on the scene, one among many aliens with roughly the same technology. It’s based loosely on a World War 2 scenario, with Humans serving duty as Americans, Klingons as Germans, and so forth, depending on the setting. This makes for a very interesting story-telling device in a somewhat familiar environment. The best sci-fi games are essentially repainted Sid Meier’s Civilization games.
However, the most likely reality of the situation is that we’ll be alone for quite some time, surrounded by an ocean of alien bacteria at best, and ecking out a living in space stations around worlds habitable only because of massive terraforming efforts. Humans will have only themselves to fight, and we will remain fractured until such time as we find a common enemy to unite us.
While this is certainly exciting from a reality standpoint, it doesn’t make for lots of good drama. What we all crave is groups of intelligent beings fighting each other (or threatening to), developing new technologies, and not looking totally unrecognizable to us (which is another problem with reality; we won’t recognize anything from 100 years from now). We want to watch WW2 or the Cold War, but with spaceships and cool toys, and preferably aliens, but we don’t want it to be the other side of a Singularity.
How to achieve this?
Most of the "traditional" sci-fi just extrapolates the future, throwing in cool toys and trying to figure out how that would change things, but not anything really civilization-altering, at least not in wide use. Look at Into Darkness. Abrams introduced instantaneous transport between planets and even warping ships, as well as eliminating death. You don’t think that’s going to completely and irrevocably alter the Star Trek landscape? It’s going to turn into Stargate before they found out ships were cool.
I decided on a different route.
I read a few years ago that the world’s GDP was $40 trillion. And I wondered, what if we all suddenly started working together to get into space? This was before we had built telescopes capable of seeing planets; such was impossible even to conceive at the time.
What if we HAD TO abandon not just Earth, but the entire Solar system? And what if we had to do it BEFORE we knew for sure there were other planets to go to? Because nothing less than a total disaster is going to get us off our asses any time soon, and by then it will be too late. Whatever causes this has to be BIG and unavoidable, and it has to be something we see coming a couple decades in advance to give us a chance to do the necessary research to figure out how to accomplish such a gargantuan task. Telescopes? Don’t need them, we need genetics, cold sleep, robotics, engines, radiation protection, rapid terraforming, perfect recycling, materials harvesting and refining in hostile environments, and lots of other crap. Of course there are planets out there, we just can’t afford the 20 years it will take to develop optics that can see them. (Think about it; it still takes MONTHS or YEARS to verify the existence of a planet. The idea that we could see which planets are habitable from this far away is LUDICROUS!!)
Obviously, this will upset people, to say the least. There is a whole story about the evacuation of Earth itself, the riots that make even WW2 look like a playful disagreement. A couple of former friends assured me they would NOT help anyone else escape; there are lots of people like that.
Getting these ships into space and on their way in time is a story, but each ship has its own story too. Some don’t make it for one reason or another. Those which do are heading into the unknown, with no way to know what they will find until they get there, and with the strong possibility that they are the last surviving humans. They MUST find a way, no matter how bad that planet is. Many will fail. Most which succeed will have a very hard time of it. Some will find a way to move on to another star. Some will be traveling for hundreds of years.
But a lucky few will find purchase and, against the odds, survive and thrive and set up their communication laser and search for signs that others made it too.
Lots of stories in here. But this isn’t where we start. You can’t do gloom and doom as your first story. That’s background, until people fall in love with what you’ve done and demand it. But unlike many who create such future worlds, I’ve already built what came before and don’t have to extrapolate it. I don’t have to kludge it. It will flow naturally, not be jarring. The hard part is getting readers to understand just how bad it was, without dragging them into a pit of despair themselves.
No, the first stories start later than this, when some of those lucky few get themselves into space, in an effort to reach and help their neighbors. Or conquer them. Or pick their bones. Or rob them periodically. It’s more of a Caribbean pirates set-up now. Or dueling European kingdoms in the 1600’s.
Recontacting some of these worlds-hanging-on-the-edge brings perils and rewards, and is a rich environment for story-telling. The long night is over, the rebuilding can begin. And one of these stories is about a mission to a world where the Empire is trying to lift its neighbors out of barbarity. The Empire is not the only empire out there. The Empire wants to add worlds to itself, peacefully, forcefully, or whatever is most expedient. Locals can often be shown the benefits of membership, but sometimes must be shown the penalties of refusal; if the Empire cannot have them, they must not be allowed to fall into the hands of other empires.
Humans worship gods. Always have, always will. Some have assumed that gods are not real, but there’s no way to prove this. Very few stories deal at all with religion. Writers seem to assume that it will be just a passing fad, or that it will not really matter. Often this is because they are afraid of angering religious people, and this is not an unfounded fear. So they ignore it or downplay it.
Sci-fi stories have ALWAYS been vehicles for commentary on today. They allow us to draw parallels and minimize offense to people. There is no getting around this purpose. We are religious. We are selfish. We are illogical. We don’t understand ourselves. We are afraid, and attack what we fear. But we are also giving. We are loving. We want to grow and understand. We want someone to talk to. And most of all, we are us.
Aliens are cool, but only insofar as we humanize them. The standard approach to aliens (to keep them familiar to us) is to make them a stereotype of some human characteristic or group. Sum them up with two words. Klingons are aggressive warriors, Ferengi are greedy bastards, Romulans are spying warriors, Vulcans are stoic pacifists, etc. It’s like a game of Small World where you can’t shuffle the race and attribute cards. There aren’t many ALIEN aliens. Even Moties and Fithp and Outsiders had to be humanized a little so we could understand and empathize and communicate with them.
But in reality, intelligent aliens are unlikely to make an appearance in any form we can get handle on, and perhaps we won’t even recognize them at all! Do ants perceive us as anything they can communicate with?
My goal is to have a very plausible future history which isn’t unrecognizable to us, ripe for stories of all kinds, be they books, shows, games, or whatever. Something that captures the imagination and never lets go. Something that doesn’t rely on overused tropes for success. Something anyone can relate to. And I intend to tell this future history in a series of books or other media, starting with this one.