Not Like Us

People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” 

It’s probably the most common question authors hear. Most of the time, the answer is completely intangible. Ideas come from shared experience, from strange correlations, or even from Sir Terry Pratchett’s “inspirons” that sleet out of space into every mind, only taking root in those that are fertile.

In this case, however, I can actually point to a source.

I’ve long been bothered by the common sci-fi trope of “cohesive worlds,” future universes in which each world is a singularity of culture. Even the best of sci-fi indulges in this unlikely fantasy. The Dorsai are military mercenaries. Dune is a desert planet. (And so, not unsurprisingly, is its copy, Tatooine.) The rebels place their secret base on the ice world of Hoth. The Formic home planet is uniformly strange.

Our one real world isn’t like that. It has deserts and forests and ice and ocean. People form monarchies, democracies, socialist states, and anarchies. I can’t imagine any world, large enough to be a world, that would be consistent. As colonists spread out to fill a planet, human nature will make them diverge, splinter, try new things, return to old ways. The weirs on the southern continent of Pern developed their own laid-back culture. The Stillness had high technology in the equatorial region that oppressed the mid-latitudes. Those who move to other locations change and become …

… not like us.

Carry that thought to its conclusions, and the results can be disastrous.

Doc Honour
May 2022