Racing the Darkness - Comments, Questions, and Engagement

[Trenacker]

I ended up using the Chincha War for Peru's reconquest. Mostly because it's fun and obscure.

A lot of the conflicts I've presented are cyclical. Another internal conflict in Quebec, leading to seccession. Two wars in Biafra, again leading to secession. India and China get into it again in 2017, too.

I've been working very, very slowly on a map. Had to begin with the real world, then shave off landmass due to global warming. Still doing that. Final step is adding all the new artificial islands.

[MysticWind]

Élodie is actually my adaptation of the leader of the Civilization: Beyond Earth sponsor Franco-Iberia. Firaxis intro lore.

[nweismuller]

The detail about quality of boots and masks being a focus for the Confederation of the Land, as presented by MysticWind, is for a simple reason.  On Chiron, a bad pressure mask will kill you, and a good set of boots is a vital asset to somebody who's going to be spending a large amount of their time doing outdoor hiking in the rough.  Both of these are vital survival assets and will be precious to such survivors.  By contrast, if clothing gets worn and threadbare and is relatively simple, that's much less of an immediate drawback.  These two possessions where simple necessity demands attention to quality then means they're likely to be focused on for further attention and decoration- especially the mask, which is absolutely vital to a Chironian outdoorsman.

[Buster's Uncle]

What would a datalinks node on Chiron look like?

[Trenacker]

Do you mean the machinery or the "website" itself?

[Buster's Uncle]

I was vaguely thinking about the design of a forum, yeah.




-Creating the new letters was a job, I tell you...

[Trenacker]

Like a 1998 Geocities website, of course.

[Buster's Uncle]

I had one of those about that year.

[Trenacker]

I think webrings would be a major feature of Chironian networks, helping Librarians group pages by subject matter.

With so many proprietary operating systems with their own history of successful national adoption, the Planetary Networks probably resemble distributed nodes than seamless information superhighways.

[Trenacker]

Quite apart from the amusing reference to the QAnon Shaman in reply #368—a reminder that works of fiction inevitably bear the unhappy, sometimes ludicrous, scars of reality—I appreciated the irony of the Human Tribe passing on their trauma.

I also love how the Peacekeepers can’t help but make a condescending nuisance of themselves. That criticism lies very near the heart, I think, of the conservative American critique of “pointy-headed intellectualism.” (I say that analytically, not approvingly.) Dole Yudikon/Carnaveron and the Struan’s Charterists raise similar objections to the government promulgated by Pravin Lal, pointing out that it takes quite a bit of hubris to write prescriptions for the lives of others under the banner of a supposed “greater good.” The mother of my best friend growing up was born the same year that Lebanon achieved independence from France. She remarked that the country’s material development had almost certainly been harmed by the split, but that the psychological benefits of self-determination were valuable beyond measure to the Lebanese themselves.

I find Zakharov’s reaction to the Landsmen interesting because I have coded him in this fiction as a recluse. (A not-unusual outcome for any character afflicted by delusions of intellectual superiority, which in this case have a certain kind of truth value.) Both Zakharov and Pahlavi have elements in their backgrounds to suggest that they would not be accepting of folkways. Pahlavi’s Service Record includes mention that, as an officer of the ARC, she directed its forces to administer immunizations against the will of refugees in federal care. She has spent most of this story bottled up in the high mountains, and her faction as a whole gained a pronounced indifference to the fates of “mere” humans, whereas the Peacekeepers take the more evangelical approach to public health matters, but it wouldn’t be out-of-keeping with Pahlavi’s backstory to take her in that other direction.

[MysticWind]

I also love how the Peacekeepers can’t help but make a condescending nuisance of themselves. That criticism lies very near the heart, I think, of the conservative American critique of “pointy-headed intellectualism.” (I say that analytically, not approvingly.)

The Confederation of the Land's tribalist neo-primitivism is both sincere and a societal-level LARP, and ultimately it results in a familiar colonialist-native dynamic, at least when there's sharp disparities in development and tech levels between others and them. So it's pretty natural for U.N. agencies to appear as ignorantly benevolent do-gooders when confronted with the atavistic Landsmen.

I find Zakharov’s reaction to the Landsmen interesting because I have coded him in this fiction as a recluse.

The Silenus Plateau is likened to Antarctica because it becomes an unlikely collaboration point between multiple factions. That's probably owing both to its physical remoteness to the respective core territories, thus allowing frontier policies that might not be in line with attitudes at home. I didn't intentionally start with this concept but it sort of emerged in the story. Hence the Human Tribe, Peacekeepers, Morganites, and I suppose the University as well all have idiosyncratic and opportunist local leadership open to mutual cooperation to exploit the region's resources. Remember that on the frontier, Zakharov isn't really in control, the specific outposts' researchers run the show. As is the case at Biotic Survey.

She has spent most of this story bottled up in the high mountains, and her faction as a whole gained a pronounced indifference to the fates of “mere” humans, whereas the Peacekeepers take the more evangelical approach to public health matters, but it wouldn’t be out-of-keeping with Pahlavi’s backstory to take her in that other direction.

Maybe a simple reference grid of faction relations would be helpful for this setting when it comes to understanding the factions' general attitudes towards one another, or even whether they are in contact with one another.

Again, the setting of New Amnesty is intentional for fostering unique relationships local to the frontier, which might not be applicable in the metropoles.

[Trenacker]

I also love how the Peacekeepers can’t help but make a condescending nuisance of themselves. That criticism lies very near the heart, I think, of the conservative American critique of “pointy-headed intellectualism.” (I say that analytically, not approvingly.)

The Confederation of the Land's tribalist neo-primitivism is both sincere and a societal-level LARP, and ultimately it results in a familiar colonialist-native dynamic, at least when there's sharp disparities in development and tech levels between others and them. So it's pretty natural for U.N. agencies to appear as ignorantly benevolent do-gooders when confronted with the atavistic Landsmen.

I find Zakharov’s reaction to the Landsmen interesting because I have coded him in this fiction as a recluse.

The Silenus Plateau is likened to Antarctica because it becomes an unlikely collaboration point between multiple factions. That's probably owing both to its physical remoteness to the respective core territories, thus allowing frontier policies that might not be in line with attitudes at home. I didn't intentionally start with this concept but it sort of emerged in the story. Hence the Human Tribe, Peacekeepers, Morganites, and I suppose the University as well all have idiosyncratic and opportunist local leadership open to mutual cooperation to exploit the region's resources. Remember that on the frontier, Zakharov isn't really in control, the specific outposts' researchers run the show. As is the case at Biotic Survey.

She has spent most of this story bottled up in the high mountains, and her faction as a whole gained a pronounced indifference to the fates of “mere” humans, whereas the Peacekeepers take the more evangelical approach to public health matters, but it wouldn’t be out-of-keeping with Pahlavi’s backstory to take her in that other direction.

Maybe a simple reference grid of faction relations would be helpful for this setting when it comes to understanding the factions' general attitudes towards one another, or even whether they are in contact with one another.

Again, the setting of New Amnesty is intentional for fostering unique relationships local to the frontier, which might not be applicable in the metropoles.

What we chiefly need is a map, but I can cook up a quick matrix this evening.

Re: Zakharov, it's established that his control is theoretical at the margins. I just think he'd become agitated if he learned that there were factions out there injecting themselves with potentially harmful chemicals and calling it progress. But would he care enough to do anything about it? Probably not in this iteration of the story.

[Trenacker]

Okay.

I put together a first cut at the faction relations matrix on the GoogleDoc. "Faction Relations" tab.

Probably I'm overlooking some items in the lore already, so if you spot an inconsistency, let me know.

As a point of interest, most factions hate both the Spartans and the Tribals even if they've never met them on-Planet.

[Buster's Uncle]

Lamarckianism, the transmission of physical traits from parent to child.

-Incomplete; you surely meant "the transmission of changed physical traits from parent to child." - or something better-phrased on those lines.

[Buster's Uncle]

"the transmission of physical adaptions from parent to child."?