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mindstalk made a post about the cliché of the inevitability of Empires in Space.
I remember an essay jointly authored by Niven and Pournelle, part of their explanation of the back story of their 1974 novel The Mote in God's Eye, in which they had an Empire of Man to play the role of an ecumenical state.
Another Niven story, like the previous novel set in Pournelle's CoDominium story-telling universe, reminded me of another cliché. This story features a pilot who was born on a world populated by Inuit, a glaciated world settled by Inuit coming from across Earth's Arctic regions, there to maintain their traditional lifestyles ...
Pardon?
When I take a look around my study, looking at novels and RPG supplements and the Internet, I find that white people--frequently Asians as well--inhabit all kinds of worlds, from glacier worlds doomed to forever present only half of their surface to a dim red dwarf star to Earth-like garden worlds orbiting beautiful bright stars just like the Sun to stranger asteroid warrens or habitats in close orbit of degenerate white dwarf stars, all worlds which contain at least a certain number of perils and drawbacks not found on Earth. Are we to believe that colonists drawn from the stocks of what we in Canada call the First Nations are going to insist on colonizing worlds exactly like that of their ancestral Earth homeland? Maybe Inuit colonists might love a pleasantly warm world to live on, one with warm winter breeze and fertile land and--if you really insist--plenty of marine pseudo-mammals to hunt.
This all fits into a larger pattern of seeing First Nations people are archetypes, as being incapable of being really modern or post-modern or whatever. The best-known example of this I can think of is Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager, a character in touch with his native roots a spiritual man from a peaceful world prone to using dream quests to find solutions to problems. Really.
Why can't there be other First Nations stereotypes in science fiction? Imagine cut-throat Yupik capitalists, or Quechua-speaking technologists, or Haida bioengineers, or Aborigine literary critics, or the Mapuche Star Empire. But no, the First Nations are defined substantially by the knowledge that they and their peoples can't truly be modern, are incapable of developing societies characterized by cities and Weberian bureaucratic structures and research-and-development facilities and mass media. They should be happy, some writers seem to presume, being the spiritual foils to the oh-so-tired civilization built on their homelands.
mindstalk made a post about the cliché of the inevitability of Empires in Space.The usual line is that with poor communications, a feudal structure is good for long-range government. This never felt right, but I was thinking about it in the past day. Really... what? Europe's feudal realms were in rather smaller areas than the Roman Republic at its pre-Imperial height. Roman used pro-consuls and pro-praetors, so there was local autocracy, but appointed by the Senate, not hereditary. And why couldn't a democratic/republican federation handle the needed decentralization?
I remember an essay jointly authored by Niven and Pournelle, part of their explanation of the back story of their 1974 novel The Mote in God's Eye, in which they had an Empire of Man to play the role of an ecumenical state.
Another Niven story, like the previous novel set in Pournelle's CoDominium story-telling universe, reminded me of another cliché. This story features a pilot who was born on a world populated by Inuit, a glaciated world settled by Inuit coming from across Earth's Arctic regions, there to maintain their traditional lifestyles ...
Pardon?
When I take a look around my study, looking at novels and RPG supplements and the Internet, I find that white people--frequently Asians as well--inhabit all kinds of worlds, from glacier worlds doomed to forever present only half of their surface to a dim red dwarf star to Earth-like garden worlds orbiting beautiful bright stars just like the Sun to stranger asteroid warrens or habitats in close orbit of degenerate white dwarf stars, all worlds which contain at least a certain number of perils and drawbacks not found on Earth. Are we to believe that colonists drawn from the stocks of what we in Canada call the First Nations are going to insist on colonizing worlds exactly like that of their ancestral Earth homeland? Maybe Inuit colonists might love a pleasantly warm world to live on, one with warm winter breeze and fertile land and--if you really insist--plenty of marine pseudo-mammals to hunt.
This all fits into a larger pattern of seeing First Nations people are archetypes, as being incapable of being really modern or post-modern or whatever. The best-known example of this I can think of is Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager, a character in touch with his native roots a spiritual man from a peaceful world prone to using dream quests to find solutions to problems. Really.
Why can't there be other First Nations stereotypes in science fiction? Imagine cut-throat Yupik capitalists, or Quechua-speaking technologists, or Haida bioengineers, or Aborigine literary critics, or the Mapuche Star Empire. But no, the First Nations are defined substantially by the knowledge that they and their peoples can't truly be modern, are incapable of developing societies characterized by cities and Weberian bureaucratic structures and research-and-development facilities and mass media. They should be happy, some writers seem to presume, being the spiritual foils to the oh-so-tired civilization built on their homelands.
