Hang on a moment. I didn’t know that C had even read my text.
She hasn’t. I was citing her reaction purely as a measure of reaction to the sound of the title—that is, as an indicator of how someone might react who found your source material on a shelf, or on a Web page, or on a prospectus, without previous familiarity.
I think of that kind of story as a heterotopia. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite could be examples.
Does that offer an apt title? Hippolyta Hangbe and the Thousand Heterotopias?
The term “planetary romance” raises some interesting questions.
Northrop Frye offers a classification of prose fiction into four types, which he calls the novel, romance, anatomy, and confession. His theoretical account of the categories doesn’t seem to me to hold up, but a different treatment of the same four categories makes some sense:
The novel is a narrative in which the primary interest is personal and emotional, and the emotions are shown within the characters and in their relationships;
The romance is a narrative in which the primary interest is personal and emotional, and the emotions are projected outward into an imagined world;
The confession is a narrative in which the primary interest is intellectual and abstract, and the ideas are shown within a character’s mind and development;
The anatomy, or Menippean satire, is a narrative in which the primary interest is intellectual and abstract, and the idea are projected outward into an imagined world.
It seems to me that the kind of story you’re looking it is not so much a “romance,” though it borrows its form from a type of romance, as an “anatomy,” in that its invented worlds are meant less to create emotional responses than to create puzzles and invite the characters to solve them. I don’t suppose “planetary anatomy” would mean much to most people, but perhaps there’s some other way to describe the concept.
I also think that your campaigns may have some elements of the picaresque, and not only in their somewhat serial or episodic form (which is common to RPGs). The main characters seem to be something of rogues, interacting with societies whose ideas they don’t (or don’t entirely) believe in and trying to outwit them; they may be “rogues on the side of good” but they’re still trying to pull off capers and to triumph by their wits.
Or have I quite misunderstood what you’re writing about?
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To me “planetary romance” means John Carter of Mars and allied trades, which clearly isn’t what’s wanted.
Jack Vance’s Gaean Reach stories have been mentioned, though I haven’t read any of them. I think I’d suggest that Everett B. Cole’s “Fighting Philosophers” stories (mostly collected as The Philosophical Corps) could be regarded as at least genre-adjacent: a bunch of off-world agents go to a relatively primitive planet to catch off-world criminals who are hiding there, but don’t want the locals to know they’re off-worlders.
On the other hand, this shows up my apprehension that an accurate signifier for the setting might be descriptive but not distinctive. “Flat Black” has the disadvantage of not meaning anything, but it does stand out from the “Thousand Suns”, “Ashen Stars”, “Fading Suns” and other indistinguishably classical SF-styled titles.
Let us storm some more brains.
- The Eichberger Mandate
- The Spaceman’s Aegis
- The Thousand-World Raj
- ℣
I’ve done both, sometimes with the same adventure.
Yes. Even when the PCs have been official detectives with lawful authority a great deal of the interest has been in circumventing the difficulties and exploiting the opportunity that colonial peculiarities presented. Picaresque novels depict the adventures of a roguish, but appealing hero, of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Even when they are not rogues in any meaningful way the PCs in Flat Black adventures live by their wits in corrupt societies, and they are “outsiders by nature” (usually literal foreigners). On the other hand, Flat Black is seldom satirical.
- Human Space ?
The Breadth or The Flat Breadth?
Doesn’t sound like a space game.
Susceptible to misreadings and misinterpretations.
Just baffling for most people. Also, not clear how to say it.
Not very punchy.
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The Accidental Empire – on the basis that that’s not what Eichberger set out to become.
Something to do with waves or periodicity to emphasise the settlement, collapse, and rediscovery.
The Organised Gallimaufry to point up the diversity of worlds and the minimal lip-service they pay to common codes.
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Some sort of [ flock | swarm | host ] of [ worlds | stars ]?
The [ brood | progeny ] of Old Earth?
I’d like to evoke seeds sown broadcast as in Mark 4:3–8, but that is a sadly unfamiliar act now. Gems of life scattered in a dark void. scattered, sown, broadcast, disseminated, propagated, strewn
Strewn Worlds? The reach strewn with worlds?
The Eighth Sphere? (In medieval astronomy that was the sphere of the fixed stars, outside the sphere of Saturn but inside that of the Empyrean.)
Via Galactica?
An allusion to Elbereth sowing the stars before the start of the First Age would probably be too recondite.
The Human Clade?
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What about “throng”? Is “throng” a good word?
Throng of Human Worlds?
The Throng of Worlds Called “Home”?
What about “pack”, “horde”, or “mob”.
Would you ask C on my behalf what she thinks of “The Orphan Stars” and “The Empire of Orphan Stars”?
She says that she likes them both, but if she had to choose, she’d pick “The Empire of Orphan Stars.”
Confederacy of Interstellar Disarray? (Apologies for glancing at John Kennedy O’Toole on the bookshelf immediately after reading this.)
For what it’s worth from only knowing about the setting from your posts I do like empire of orphan stars.
Perhaps “An Empire of Orphan Stars” rather than the. Since there are waves of expansion and this is a successor to previous structures of organization.
Or, trying to get the focus back onto the colonies rather than the Empire, The Spangled Void. I’m afraid though, that to too many readers “spangled” is inextricably linked withthe US flag.
And Some Fell Among Thorns resonates for me, but I was brought up on the AV and still like its poetry, and I don’t suppose many of your potential players were.