Here’s a way to work that: humankind is a relative newcomer to the galactic scene, but those past aliens took lots of historical humans away to other planets. So you can put things in a near enough future that you still have a recognisable USA or whatever, but still have long-settled planets. Later seasons of Stargate SG-1 are probably a decent example of this.
I’ve read a suggestion – I suspect it was in Piper’s Space Viking – that this is a consequence of having no communication faster than starships (which take multiple weeks): the planetary boss has to be able to make most of his own decisions, because it’s not practical to ask for permission from above. The historical model for that kind of authority is an aristocracy.
I don’t believe I’ve seen a setting in which this was done. Iron Crown’s Space Master setting had something like this, with Tachyon Beam Dictors (vmFTL multi-lightyear comms systems) being very expensive, but you still basically found at least one in every inhabited system. Has anyone published a setting where only the rich planets get high-speed news?
Just as a note, I’m going to say that I don’t think Smith’s Lensmen count as an aristocracy in a meaningful sense. They’re not a hereditary caste; yes, there are families like the Kinnisons, but the first generation of Lensmen took in beat cops and engineers and suchlike, and there’s no indication that it was different for the generation that destroyed Eddore. They aren’t tied to specific landed estates; a Gray Lensman, in particular, can exert the power of life and death anywhere in Civilization, or commandeer resources, or do anything else he likes, restrained only by his own judgment and integrity. They don’t make up all of government; the Galactic Council is all Lensmen, but we see Kinnison interacting with planetary government officials who are clearly civilians and elected to office. The “natural superiority” of Lensmen is detected by their going through space academies, and also be their being evaluated by the Arisians at the end; but if anything, that’s more comparable to the Chinese mandarinate.
It seems to me that the desire to have an understandable culture for PCs to start from has analogs outside of SF. Tolkien dealt with this problem by having his heroes come from the Shire, which was essentially the England of his young boyhood, minus railroads and telegraphs—quite recognizable to his expected readers; he then sent them out to encounter less familiar cultures. For that matter, Horatio Hornblower is notoriously a man of the 20th century caught up in the Napoleonic Wars. It’s very common to have stand-ins for the reader/viewer/player. I did a little of it myself in Tapestry, by offering the nixies of Urbes Septemplex as possible PCs: people from an urban background supported by farming and trade, and with literacy and money (by weight rather than coined) and guilds.
On the other hand, I have run two Transhuman Space campaigns, and most of the players adapted fairly well to playing someone from a different culture and mindset. I didn’t see a deep sense of alienation, unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean by the word. My players’ PoV seemed to be, not “I’m playing someone like me who is growing progressively less balanced as they become adapted to strangeness,” but “I’m playing someone to whom AIs and parahumans and omnipresent information channels are commonplace, and who feels perfectly at home there.” We did have one player in the first campaign who chose to play a traditionalist Catholic conservative, but that was done consciously to set the character apart from the others, and in fact he played well off of characters who were more at home in 2100.
This leads to the question, “where are those aliens now?” If they are still on the scene, they are likely to be vastly more advanced than humanity, with corresponding effects on the setting. If they aren’t, how cleanly and thoroughly did they remove themselves from the picture? At least now we have the idea of a Singularity as an alternative to the War of the Ancients. Bonus points, though, if the Ancients left artifacts behind to be McGuffins.
Hence “almost”; Asimov’s Foundation also talked about the rise of aristocrats, I’m pretty sure.
I don’t buy it, though: why would such a system have to be hereditary? You could have a Confucian bureaucracy, with promotion based on merit, or a quasi-military system where the most senior qualified person has authority. Obviously, there still are advantages even in such systems to coming from an elite background, but the assumption of quality solely based on family is missing.
Traveller’s OTU, more or less, depending on how you think the IISS carries news beyond the xboat network. The “Mail and Incidentals” rule in Book 2 seems to support the idea that the courier network isn’t universal. I seem to recall FASA’s Battletech universe functioned like this as well, due to the shortage of FTL spacecraft.
It’s been a while since I read those stories, but my recollection is that no one who wasn’t a Lensman achieved anything of narrative significance; if they did, it certainly wasn’t more than once. This was justified by the Lensmen being literally better than everyone else, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not and did not pretend to be an egalitarian setting.
What I mean is that both games devote a fair amount of effort to helping players work out how to portray the unfamiliar Other, both in character creation and in play. In GURPS, this takes the form of Advantages and Disadvantages, especially mental and social. In World of Darkness, mechanisms like Frenzy and Rage serve this purpose.
Well, yes, but no. Frenzy and Rage and Humanity and the like are descended from Sanity in Call of Cthulhu; they’re the “you’re screwed” stat, where as you gain power you also become less human, less functional, and/or more monstrous. That’s fairly literally “alienation,” a process of becoming alien. But for the most part, GURPS traits don’t model “becoming” in that way. You start out with whatever set of unusual behavioral and emotional traits you choose, and you mostly just go on roleplaying them. And you probably aren’t going to choose to play an Other that’s outside your comfort zone.
I agree that Lensman is not an egalitarian setting, but “egalitarian” and “aristocratic” are not exhaustive. In the first place, you can have inequality that is not structured in an aristocratic way; for example, the Chinese mandarinate that both you and I cite was not aristocratic, though it was certainly elitist. But in the second place, you can have a system that is neither egalitarian nor elitist: one where there are no governmental, legal, or other coercive measures either to put people all on the same level or to put some above others. In fact, you can have systems where there is no single dimension on which people are measured, but a wide range of different dimensions. Smith was portraying at least the first type of nonaristocratic setup; not so much the second, though he showed Kinnison having tremendous respect for Sir Austin Cardynge, who was never going to wear a Lens, but who figured out the working of the hyperspatial tube, and on the other hand for Pieter VanBuskirk, who was incapable of higher mathematics but was an amazing hand-to-hand combatant.
The point I was trying to make was that a Traveller-like game setting doesn’t need to devote any resources to Otherness, because it implicitly assumes that characters are comprehensible and playable without coaching. This parallels the source literature, where exposition covers the strange customs of the natives without considering whether the customs Our Heroes take for granted would ever be strange to the reader or not.
I’ll have to concede the point on Lensmen, as I don’t remember the stories clearly enough. What, though, of the other examples?
I can’t comment on Laumer or Tubb, having read too little of either. And if you mean George Lucas, it seems to me that though he has at least one aristocrat, a princess, he does nothing that looks like serious portrayal of a social milieu, and his active (male) heroes are as common as dirt: a farmboy, a smuggler, an old hermit living in a cave, a city manager (wealthy, no doubt, but not titled or noble). For the others, though, I didn’t bring them up because you’re perfectly right about the societies they portray often being aristocratic.
I’m going to say, though, that however badly Americans may misunderstand the details of aristocratic societies, it at least used to be commonplace for us to have read the Arthurian stories, The Three Musketeers, and British stories with titled people from Lord Peter Wimsey to the Earl of Emsworth. So Americans really aren’t going to think of aristocracy as a radically alien milieu.
In the Larry Niven collection N Space there an essay by Niven and Jerry Pournelle titled “Building the Mote in God’s Eye”, in which they set out among other things their reasons for designing a setting that was ruled by a monarchy and hereditary aristocracy with an established church. They cite C. Northcote Parkinson‘s The Evolution of Political Thought as a decisive influence.
The Evolution of Political Thought is an excellent book; I have been trying for years to get @whswhs to read it. Now out of copyright, it is available free on the Net.
Parkinson points out in his text that any form of government is a solution (or attempted solution) to a problem in governance that is posed by technology, geography, ethnic diversity etc., and that any form of government that does not solve the problem of governing its territory must change into something else or it will cease to be the government of that territory. He also documents the importance not only of form of government but also of the justification of that form: according to Parkinson a monarchy that founds its claim to legitimacy on divine right faces a very different range of likely fates than one that founds its claim to legitimacy on expedience.
I really do recommend it as worthwhile to read the Parkinson and then consider the problem of governance facing one Traveller-like setting given the astrography and transport & communications technology one has chosen for it.
Homeworlds for non-exotic PCs
When I first ran a campaign in my Traveller-like setting Flat Black the world was nascent, inchoate, vague in many details. I simply let players play whatever characters they wanted. An invitation to generate a homeworld (using the ForeSight star system and planet generator if one wanted) was married to an implicit permission not to bother. Of the five initial characters one was an Imperial, one had a very remarkably planet generated to be his homeworld, and the others’ origins were simply never mentioned. It wasn’t very puristical, but it seemed to work.
Now I feel obliged to describe a few worlds in Flat Black to be homeworlds for easy-to-play characters. This may make them less than perfectly suitable for settings for Vancean planetary-romance adventures. I have some reservations, but think I ought to abandon my “all worlds are hell-holes in one way or another” aesthetic axiom.
Actually, you’ve been trying to get me to reread it, though it’s been so long that my memories are faded. I certainly agree that it’s a worthwhile book. I started rereading a version of it that you sent me, and got sidetracked, partly because the page layout issues made it occasionally tough going. The version you link in this post looks to be visually much superior, and I’m in the process of acquiring it now.
Of course, there are at least three different problems in governance:
How does the government solve the problem of ensuring its own survival and perhaps prosperity and growth?
How does the government solve the problem of providing services to the people who set it up?
How does the government solve the problem of serving all the people it governs?
Any two of those can be at odds with each other. And that’s not even dealing with situations where different aspects of one of those goals are at odds with each other. For example, for either 2 or 3, the people served by the government might want it to deal fairly with all of them, and make sure it doesn’t abuse them in the name of “serving the people,” but there might also be emergency situations where if it does not take action at once and sort things out later, things will get much worse rapidly. (In fact, one of the vital functions of governments seems to be dealing with emergencies, and those that don’t do so are likely to fail to achieve objective 1.)
When X-boats were introduced there was the network, true, but I don’t remember anything being done with the idea. (The opportunities for con tricks alone would seem substantial.)
That has FTL radios, but they’re operated by the “neutral” (honest) tech-priesthood ComStar. Once ComStar starts being an overt player, the tech gets out.
The three stories that make it up were clearly (to my reading) written as stand-alones and then bodged into that universe; then after Smith’s death they were collected as a new Lensman book. (But then we get into the story of the “real” seventh Lensman book, which Smith never wrote because he knew that the logical place to which his story had gone would be unpublishable.)
I’m reminded of comments on Dungeon Fantasy: we know there is a Frozen North, because barbarian heroes come from there, but that’s basically all we know about it. And this is by design.
Yeah, but all the Lensman “novels” except First Lensman are amalgams of several novellas, and Triplanetary was also bodged into the Lensman setting only at re-publication.
I got away with it at first, but don’t think I will any more.
Amidala is a Queen, which makes the farmboy hidden royalty. Ranking members of the Imperial hierarchy are addressed as “my Lord.” Darth Vader is referred to and addressed as “Lord Vader.” Tarkin is a “Grand Moff” as well as a Governor, and let’s not forget Emperor Palpatine.
The setting is aristocratic, as much as anything. It’s just that the aristocrats are, for the most part, the villains.
Yes and no. Permit me to doubt that most Americans, even the ones that play our games, have any sense of how an aristocracy really works in practice, especially for non-nobles. It’s some kind of romantic ideal of aristocracy that is meant, rather than the real thing. I suspect that the fascination stems from the Rule of Cool (titles as plot tokens and rewards) and the player’s complete confidence in being D’Artagnan rather than Planchet.
Certainly, but that’s also exactly what is going on in SW. The aristocratic titles are being used for coolness, but there is nothing like a serious model of how an aristocratic society works there. Your phrase “as much as anything” is quite accurate. In terms of how even the Empire works they have as much substance as calling them the Duke of Bilgewater and the Dauphin.
I could go through and analyze the various titles you mention (apart from Amidala, of whom I know nothing, never having seen episodes I-III), but really this was a side point for me: I don’t consider SW to be an example of portraying an SFnal society as aristocratic because I don’t think it makes a serious attempt to portray a society. At most it’s a marginal case. In contrast, I think Anderson, Panshin, Piper, and Pournelle all had explicit mental pictures of aristocracies and their work offers much better examples for your thesis. For that matter, you could also have named Herbert or Williams.
I think that has as much to do with the different media: not much scope for developing background, even in a multi-movie franchise. The films also focus on upheaval and civil war, rather than a functioning society. The trappings of aristocracy are there, however, and indicate (to me, at least) that we are meant to think of it that way.
There is also a reliance on fairy tale tropes to condense the story: of course a “princess” is an important person, worthy of obedience or rescuing without further justification (though trust the rogue to hang a lampshade on that one). It might be instructive to consider whether one could translate Star Wars to a setting without hereditary elites and still tell the tale effectively.
I was concentrating on authors who have been pointed out as influencing Traveller. So far as I know, neither Herbert nor Williams has been mentioned in that context (though I would find it interesting to see such a cite).
Your standards seem inconsistent. You could have that, surely, in a story where “the fascination stems from the Rule of Cool (titles as plot tokens and rewards).”
We have the title “Emperor.” But that wasn’t originally an aristocrat title; it meant “the boss,” and was used in a culture where claiming the aristocratic title of “king” was a death sentence. It’s been used for rulers of China, but China did not have a hereditary landed aristocracy; it was run by a civil service. “Emperor” can mean pretty much anything.
We have the title “Grand Moff.” That has the form, not of an aristocratic status, but of an administrative rank in some exotic centralized state.
We have a lord—but he’s a “dark lord of the Sith.” That doesn’t sound like a hereditary landed estate; it sounds like something mystical to do with his being a Jedi.
And we have a queen and a princess.
I have to say it all just seems like a hodgepodge, made up by someone to whom those titles were exotic sounding, but who really hadn’t though how they related to each other. And the government of the Empire doesn’t seem to be feudal in any way; it has a Boss who gives orders, and an relic senate will no more real power, and an administrative hierarchy under the Boss, and what amount to military legates with absolute power in their assigned domains. It can just as well be summed up as a despotism, I think.
I may have missed the “hereditary elites” through avoiding episodes I-III, but I can tell you than in episodes IV-VII, Leia never struck me as having the manner of someone from a hereditary elite, or as exercising any sort of aristocratic privilege.
I’m also not sure about the influence of Lucas on Traveller. The original game, at least, came out in 1977, almost contemporaneously with SW. Yet the Social Status stat was already there, and the hints of aristocratic titles. It looks like an obvious tie-in, but the chronology doesn’t fit, at least for initial influence.
Not initial, no. From what I’ve read, it was more a matter of being pleased that Star Wars (or a reasonable facsimile) could be easily portrayed in the rules as they already existed.
There is no official “Appendix N” for Traveller. Instead, we have comments in a handful of interviews, and the list of iconic Heroes and Villains from Supplements 1 and 4. Star Wars gets two (Luke and Darth), more than any other single source. Even if it wasn’t an original influence, GDW apparently considered it important subject matter.
I don’t understand your objection. Rule of Cool is, to borrow Brett’s analogy, a Doyleist argument. It operates on the mind of the reader. I was questioning whether one could (re-)tell the Star Wars story without reference to “princesses” or “Dark Lords” – an essentially Watsonian issue, as it succeeds or fails on internal logic.
“Listen. I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but from now on, you do as I tell you. Okay?”
Leia’s dialogue throughout A New Hope fairly reeks of privilege: remember, she’s sixteen years old. She appears to be personally acquainted with both Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin; even if not, she knows who they are and yet has no problem challenging and taunting them to their faces. She gives “the commander of the Rebel Forces” (per the script) a pep talk when she arrives on Yavin. That she gets better over the course of the sequels is a matter of character development.
Bail Organa, the leader of Alderaan and a mainstay of the Rebellion, sends his 16-year old daughter – who happens to be an Imperial Senator and a credentialed Ambassador despite her age – to recruit his former subordinate to the cause from his self-imposed exile. She, in turn, drafts Obi-Wan to complete the new mission that fell into her lap when she fails:
“General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father’s request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I’m afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” (emphasis mine)
It’s all personal, tangled up in individual connections among the powerful, many of whom are bound to one another by blood or affine (e.g., master-student) relationships. Even in the more recent films, Jyn Erso gets involved because she’s the daughter of the Death Star’s designer, not for her own sake.
Moreover, the most powerful figures on both sides are defined by their inherited superpowers – the Force – and willingness to use them to advance “damn-fool idealistic crusades” that take no notice of anyone else’s priorities (more obviously so in the prequels than the original trilogy, granted).
Well, I can’t discuss the prequels, having no intention of ever seeing them.
I don’t see any indication of Luke’s or Leia’s being sixteen at the start of episode IV. I’ve seen it a number of times, and I don’t their either one’s age came up in the script. Of course they’re both young, but Luke is frustrated because his friends have gone off to become soldiers and he’s stuck on the farm; that looks to me more like very late teens.
You have a point about Leia’s assumption of personal authority.
I would point out that I didn’t originally offer to discuss SW; my original point was simply about Smith. And my original summary statement on Lucas, when you asked my views of other works, was “he does nothing that looks like serious portrayal of a social milieu.” I’m not presenting that as a fault; of Asimov’s three forms of sf, the gadget story, the adventure story, and the social analysis story, SW is the second, not the third. Conceivably that may be inherent in the medium (film isn’t a good medium for doing gadget sf, either!); but my primary point was that we simply don’t know enough of the details about how the Galactic Empire works to base a gamable social model on them—we don’t get Heinlein-style “this is how this world works” from it. (Contrast, for example, a scene in Panshin where Villiers is in a gunfight with some criminals, and he gets the drop on one of them, who says, “Terms,” whereupon Villiers stops paying attention to him, and goes after other adversaries. Panshin’s narrative voice explains that it was perfectly safe for him to do so, because if the first criminal had then attacked Villiers, for the rest of his life, people would have said, “He said, ‘Terms,’ and then he di’n’t quit. Don’t have nothing to do with him,” and a man doesn’t want to have that sort of reputatioin—nicely understated, but a brilliant analysis for a certain kind of social incentive. Heinlein never liked Panshin, I believe, but clearly Panshin had learned some things from Heinlein.)
I’m pretty sure that I could render the plot of SW IV in terms making no use of aristocratic titles, but I don’t know if I could do so without being politically tendentious, as I would want to set it in the contemporary USA.
I have seen the early movie with Queen Amidala and never intend to see it again. But I seem to recall one of the nonsense bits in it was that Amidala had been elected to queen! Wikipedia says: “She is introduced as the recently elected 14-year-old queen of Naboo”.
Realistic social systems (aristocratic or otherwise) seem entirely absent from the SW universe!
That’s there to convince the merchandising department that it’s worth making girl-targeted toys for this film. If you think of SW episodes 1-3 as designed primarily for merchandising, they make more sense.