Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

[Shroom Man 777]

Man, I bet Zigonians run some of the largest inter-species orphanages around and kids from there end up growing into way more well adjusted people than they would in their home societies. Perhaps leading people to go ZOMG REPTILON CONSPIRACY at this.

[Ford Prefect]

Senator McNamara will pull off his face to reveal a lizard etc

[Arkitek]

Bonus points if the lizard's face could not actually be contained by a human head.

[Invictus]

It seems that the Zigonian equivalent of law enforcement are highly effective at both the armed subdual of troublemakers and the counseling/rehabilitation of potential "bad eggs". Awesome lizard kung fu is presumably just their thing, while the social counselor thing comes from being experts among a species which is already very good at empathy and holistic thinking.

The average Zigonian may in fact not be as good at social engineering - they can spot subtle deviations in the social fabric more easily, but being sensitive also means that they're more suggestible to potentially negative influences: toxic memes, contact with the Zigonian equivalent of con-men and sociopaths and so on. By the time a Zigonian community notices something it may already have unknowingly shifted to accommodate the harm, and in this case it is just as likely for potential troublemakers to be nipped in the bud as to ruin everybody's cool.

And so we've got these specialist Zigonians who work to remove such influences. I'm sure they have techniques to cultivate a sort of inner objectivity that prevents them from empathizing too easily with criminals and subversives, but still maintain an overall picture of their communities so they can analyze social connections in detail and not miss anything. An easy way to do this however is just to have them live somewhat apart from other Zigonians, and the seclusion also lets them train more easily in such methods. These semi-isolated institutions can also serve the purpose of rehabilitation by dint of providing a social environment that can be more easily controlled.

So what I'm saying is that it would be cool if Prefects were warrior monks.

That said, I think we should be careful not to make the Zigonians appear too utopian. Their socialization techniques work well for Zigonians themselves, but I bet it took centuries of exchanging notes with human civilization and trial-and-error to establish their successful inter-species orphanages.

[Ford Prefect]

To counterbalance how chill they are, it might be worth expanding a little on the suggestibility stuff which you mentioned. One wonders if first contact wasn't really a whole bunch of USS assholes sort of fleecing Zigonian society and implanting this idea that it would be best if the carnivals of Zigon just sort of flew the stars and stripes, if you follow my meaning.

[Siege]

I'm not entirely sure about that myself. It just seems kind of... obvious? Like, that's what you'd expect humans to do. And for it to work out is just... I dunno. I suppose that we're at a juncture in time where it's common to see humanity as a non-beneficial influence on the cosmos, but I think I would prefer it if the aliens were their own dynamic that humans really didn't influence all that much one way or the other.

[Invictus]

My idea about Zigonian suggestibility applies only in the context of intra-species communication, between people with the same subtle physiological cues and shared cultural markers. I don't think it's very likely that humans can hack the system that easily, especially on first contact. It does depend on how much Zigonians value novelty though - the impression I'm getting from the general lackadaisicality of the species is that its polities are generally comfortable with hanging around with each other and might be (relatively) slow to get used to any ideas introduced from the outside. The white-heat cyber-cultural cycle that the USS has would give them an advantage to adaptation, though I'm not sure if it was quite as white-heat back in the days of first contact with Zigon.

By the current date of the setting though, the two species have probably profoundly influenced each other as meta-civilizations. The culture, philosophy, technology and social whatsits long adopted by the USS probably stretch far beyond action cinema, while the stuff the Zigonians have learned from he humans are also probably pretty profound. This is the nature of the free exchange of ideas and all that, which can be pretty beneficial when both parties have already developed peaceful and universalist ideas of rights and working quarantine procedures.

The polities of greater Zigon may still seem inscrutable to the average USS citizen, but they're probably missing the fact that the Zigonians most on-board with humanity are the ones who have already joined the USS as a substantial minority - with the vaporous nature of Zigonian society, there would be no particular taboo in simply upping and joining the polities that strike your fancy, be they Zigonian or alien.

Also this strikes me as a good place to play with yet another trope: the one where humanity's advantage is its "adaptability" compared to the average, technology-advanced-but-static-and-conservative sniffy envious aliens; and then circumstances are such that it proceeds to use such advantage to come from behind and beat said sniffy aliens with their own technology-sticks, demonstrating that Humanity (Fuck Yeah!) is an irrepressible force and woe betide whoever gets in their way.

Okay, so let's say that humans do get used to Zigonians faster that the Zigonians get used to humans. Zigonians being Zigonians though, they're not really a danger to humans (unless somehow a Zigonian War *did* happen) and the humans are probably preoccupied with the Bragulans, Karlacks and so on who do want to grind their bones to make their bread. So contact between these two species are largely peaceful and remain largely peaceful, and when the humans incorporate enough Zigonian tech and social ideas into their own societies to make a significant advancement, the Zigonians just go "hey cool" and the two species do a Great Galactic Brofist.

Something about SOTSS also makes me want to quote extensively from Side Meier's Alpha Centauri:

As distances vanish and the people can flow freely from place to place, society will cross a psychological specific heat boundary and enter a new state. No longer a solid or liquid, we have become as a vapor and will expand to fill all available space. And like a gas, we shall not be easily contained.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Maybe this idea of other cultures trying to subvert the Zigonians using their own openness could be linked in with this tragic history idea Shroom had, in that in the past this actually happened and it triggered the Zigonian wars, but that these days they have a different system, where they're at once more open but maybe also have the Prefects and some other groups watching to try to make sure nothing like that happens again,

[Invictus]

Hmm. In what I could remember of the original SOTS timeline, humans and Zigonians made first contact, had the war and then settled down more amicably afterwards. But since we're taking the present of SOTSS forward into the 30th century or so, there's more room to fit things between between first contact and current state of things between the USS and Zigon.

The first contact leading up to the culture-changing war could still have happened with humans, except it was centuries ago and the USS had yet to exist at that point. Puzzlement abounded when the USS found the Zigonians to be complete chillfolk compared to the description of them in historical records.

EDIT: tl;dr some bunch of pre-USS humans messes with the Zigonians and fights the Human-Zigonian War instead. Since our star player the USS is not involved the humans didn't necessarily have to win it, but it ended up wreaking profound changes on the Ziggies anyway.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe the war was mostly Zigonians, but the humans had a lot of influence post-war in the reconstructions?

Cause if human or other-alien subversion caused the Ziggie war or was involved in it, won't that mean the Ziggies might be crossed at whoever's influence led to the war and other uncool stuff?

[speaker-to-trolls]

^Actually, my thoughts were pretty much that, while humans would tend to feel pissed off at whoever it was, the Zigonians ended up taking a different approach. My thought is that Zigonian culture back then was a bit more insular than it is today, maybe a bit more, perhaps 'missionary' is the word, kind of determined to keep its own refined type of coolness and, unlike the more genuinely chilled out Zigonians of today, prone to reactionary responses if it thought that way of life was being threatened. Their current culture, as you suggested earlier, is kind of something that's been adopted as a lesson from that war, that they can let other cultures in, they just have to make sure they maintain their own essential good nature through means other than getting all up in arms about it.

I'm not suggesting it should be humans who were the enemy, necessarily, it could have been between two radically different groups of Zigonians, or some other race.

I think that whatever happened, the Zigonians would probably regard it in the same kind of way WW1 is viewed in Europe (or at least Britain, I can't actually speak for French or Germans, but I doubt they look back on it proudly), i.e. no-one came out of it well, and it was really a shameful episode for all involved.

[Shroom Man 777]

Hmm... maybe, to use the overall theme of "coolness" as... an overall theme, this whole war started off as an internal Zigonian thing* between say homeworld Zigonians who were all pretentiously insularly "cool", like dickishly so, and colonial Zigonians who were more openly cool and laid back-cool and who probably wanted to do their own thing.

The original Zigonian War was between when a powerful Zigonian faction attacked humanity, and another underdog Zigonian faction allied with humanity to defeat that aggressive power.

Maybe this war only involved humans peripherally, in supporting the colonial Ziggies in a low-key fashion as opposed to original SOTS which was Humanity Fuck Yeah and shit. Anyway, the inter-Ziggie war could've ended up with the devastation of lush old Zigon, resulting in an exodus and the cultural realignment and the whole change of the entire Zigonian people's zeitgeist and such, in a totally reconciliatory way wherein they recognized their past errors and decided "never again" and deemed war and conflict the ultimate uncool thing ever.

There could be Zigonians who haven't gotten over this, isolated themselves and go all sulky and broody, and become diametrically opposed to the new Zigonians we see today. But these would be a small bunch of guys. Maybe these can follow the "evil space lizard alien warrior" archetype.



Anyway, like how I don't want SOTS to focus on Earth anymore, like how humanity today has no focus at all on which cave the first humans lived in (if you use sci-fi concept of Earth in the future being the center of all space human power, you'd think homo erectus was spawned on the primordial grounds that later saw the construction of the Pentagon or the White House or something, when in real life... nobody gives a crap about that first cave).

Similarly, I think the specifics of Zigonian history could be fuzzy and they retell it probably only in song or something. Possibly to avoid blame-game and grudge-carrying. In a sort of willful historical revisionism, so that all of their species can share in the mourning and be united in reconciliation.

Perhaps those "evil" Zigonians would be the only ones who remember the true account of how that war went out. Or not, maybe their own history-song was perverted for their own gains.


I think the Prefects of Zigonia, not just the individual wizened old assbeaters but like the corps of guys tasked with keeping the peace and protecting the worlds from asshole alien attacks, because as chill as they are Zigonians would still need a self-defense force and we can't flanderize them into an entire race of ravers, would have some kind of martial credo akin to bushido or those oriental warrior philosophies.

I don't mean it in a bullshit way. But I think, taking into account the synesthesia of Zigonians, that while their perceptive mosaic allows them to appreciate things in all sorts of ways unorthodox to humans, thus allowing them to communicate and behave and live in the way they do, if all these senses of theirs are concentrated and refined into the pursuit of perfection - not in the asshole eugenicist kind of way - but in the refinement and mastery of the self kind of way, this could result in some very frighteningly proficient Zigonian warriors. Their ways of war would be heaped in all kinds of symbolism and poetry and reptilian haiku, so they can at once both recognize the value of life and peace and happiness yet reconcile the necessity of bloodshed at certain dire times. Perhaps due to the added responsibility of having to fight and kill, if need be, this requires them to take up some sort of monkish pseudo-religious contemplative way of life. This doesn't mean they won't be chill, but instead of partying they'll be more like ruminating on the petals of the lillies and the gion shoja temple bells and the like.

I think in terms of lifestyle, maybe this "concentration and betterment of the self" thing could also apply to various Zigonian... well, the human equivalent would be profession or job, but due to the different way Zigonians perceive things, they would do these tasks in a much more holistic and broad life-encompassing dedicated manner.

Which is why, when Zigonians party, while we just see guys dancing around and raving, their activities actually also encompass all sorts of greater meanings like how tribal dances are supposed to represent this and that and such.

It's an extension of, I guess, how sympathetic Zigonians are. How they feel what they perceive, and how they perceive what they feel, in both themselves, in those around them, and in the greater community.

Live hard, party hard!



I don't know, what do you guys think about this?

[Shroom Man 777]

Furthermore, the martial Zigonian would be odd in that after a fight or a battle, he or she would probably pray or commune or bask or ruminate or contemplate or something, on how the act of ending lives is negative despite its necessity, and how one must cope with this and live on and such, and how the act of violence should never be relished, and so on.

Could do wonders in lessening PTSD. And... it's a very human thing, the whole dealing with death, that is often forgotten by people. I guess this is why I love the lizards. For the sentimentality, the empathy and sympathy. They're such nice people.

[Siege]

Maybe the war was between oldfashioned ziggies and a predecessor of the technos who'd enhanced themselves with cybernetics to the point where ziggie "cold reading" not just failed but produced war-starting results. In the subsequent war the technos lost their cool and ended up ironbombing the ancestral ziggie star or something outrageous like that.

[Shroom Man 777]

Hmmm... I was thinking though that the war would've been an introspective thing, hence the primarily ziggies-on-ziggies. I think if the atrocities were done by another party, it would not have resulted in a "we did this to ourselves, let us never make the same mistakes again" thing, but would've resulted in something quite different and perhaps even opposite (them polarizing against the alien threat and going all xenophobic or something). Think of it as a Zigonian version of Old Familiars' origins.


Vic suggested to me some time ago of sentient Bragulan overtanks operating on uploaded Bragulan consciousnesses. He conjured the image of a little Bragulan cub-girl waving her father goodbye as he deploys for war, and her father is actually a giant battle tank the size of buildings rolling out into the sunset. Initially I was skeptical since it would work much better if the Bragulan battle tank was crewed by a bunch of press-ganged Brags under the absolute command of a tyrannical mustached commander-Brag barking orders, and all of them working in synchronity so that they're pretty much a single organism operating one-mindedly through absolute totalitarianism and ideological purity and martial rage.

But the image of an uploaded Bragulan in a tank rolling out while being waved at by his daughter is just too great.

So, like, while regular Bragulan overtanks are crewed by press-ganged shmucks manually handloading giant shells into the atomic cannons, the elite units of the Emerald Guard tank divisions could have much more advanced weapons systems - up to and including Vic's uploaded-consciousness overtanks.

Think about it. A great Bragulan tank commander is given a personal honor by Byzon for his great victories in stamping on countless millions of human faces, forever. He is promoted to the prestigious ranks of the Emerald Guard and given a new command. By being physically annihilated by a burst of delta radiation, and his entire being, every molecule of his anatomy, flash imprinted into a giant magnetic (bragnetic?) tape cassette memory drive for a Bragulan supercomputer, complete with vacuum tubes, in the heart of a nucleonic-powered super overtank armed to the teeth with an entire thermonuclear arsenal.

The crew of that tank commander's previous command, who served him excellently, could be similarly "honored" and flash imprinted into other tapes and plugged into that supertank's subsystems, slaved under the commander's central-control consciousness.

BRAGULANS

[Invictus]

It's not like killing Earth didn't make Old Familiars end up being Great Power Conflicts in Space anyway.

It's also not that unreasonable for the Zigonians to take their "we did this to ourselves, let us never make the same mistakes again" lesson from facts which were a lot more complicated. We are talking about a great big interstellar war here that embroiled a whole spacefaring species and probably drew many others into the conflict.

[Shroom Man 777]

Yeah. But the important part is that the biggest blow, the worst wound, the most painful memory, has to be done by their own hand. Or claw, whatever.

Also, yeah. For humans in OF, Earthkilling made them even hate each other even more. Or, well, at least that great and horrible event failed to resonate with the people who were so wrapped up with their petty differences, so after a while, business as usual continued and they went on killing and screwing each other over. Whereas for the Zigonians, it can be a defining moment in that they did learn a lesson and change for the better to b a peaceful people against all sufering, rather than not-change and keep on doing what they did before that, or change for the worse and become vengeance-obsessed hateraiders.

Conversely, and also-interestingly, what if the Zigonians changed their ways after the shame and trauma of an interstellar war wherein they destroyed a homeworld... but it was someone else's homeworld, a people who they nearly wiped out?

(What if it was humanity's homeworld too? )

(What if they wiped out each other's homeworld?)

(I don't think this can work though, as the other guys probably won't have any epiphany and will instead be consumed by hate or vengeance or something)

[Siege]

If they did it themselves then I'd pitch it as a conflict between Zigon and its colonies, presumably the fledgling Tooramal Republic. The much larger Zigon tries to get its colonies back under central control, Tooramal fights back, maybe with human or alien allies, but they're still about to lose... And then someone pitches a V-weapon option to the Republic leadership. They say "fuck it, if we don't win then neither will they" and so the Ziggies end up blowing the crap out of their own solar system.

Could be that the Technos supplied some experimental weapon that they were just itching to test, thus establishing them as massive dicks who don't care about mass suffering as long as they get to see their whizbang toys in action.

[Ford Prefect]

Conversely, and also-interestingly, what if the Zigonians changed their ways after the shame and trauma of an interstellar war wherein they destroyed a homeworld... but it was someone else's homeworld, a people who they nearly wiped out?

I like that as an idea, but as with my earlier suggestion it's a little obvious. However, I think Siege's civil war concept is actually really interesting, as you could pitch the smaller party (Tooramal) as wanting to fully separate from the Zigonian carnival, and wanting to live ideals outside of the max chillax of Zigon. But Zigonians are all about community and so that sort of schism is probably untenable in Zigonian philosophy, so it was important to bring the separatists back into the fold, which eventually lead Zigon down a path to war.

[Shroom Man 777]

Yes, that works nicely.

[Magister Militum]

Vic suggested to me some time ago of sentient Bragulan overtanks operating on uploaded Bragulan consciousnesses. He conjured the image of a little Bragulan cub-girl waving her father goodbye as he deploys for war, and her father is actually a giant battle tank the size of buildings rolling out into the sunset. Initially I was skeptical since it would work much better if the Bragulan battle tank was crewed by a bunch of press-ganged Brags under the absolute command of a tyrannical mustached commander-Brag barking orders, and all of them working in synchronity so that they're pretty much a single organism operating one-mindedly through absolute totalitarianism and ideological purity and martial rage.

But the image of an uploaded Bragulan in a tank rolling out while being waved at by his daughter is just too great.

So, like, while regular Bragulan overtanks are crewed by press-ganged shmucks manually handloading giant shells into the atomic cannons, the elite units of the Emerald Guard tank divisions could have much more advanced weapons systems - up to and including Vic's uploaded-consciousness overtanks.

Think about it. A great Bragulan tank commander is given a personal honor by Byzon for his great victories in stamping on countless millions of human faces, forever. He is promoted to the prestigious ranks of the Emerald Guard and given a new command. By being physically annihilated by a burst of delta radiation, and his entire being, every molecule of his anatomy, flash imprinted into a giant magnetic (bragnetic?) tape cassette memory drive for a Bragulan supercomputer, complete with vacuum tubes, in the heart of a nucleonic-powered super overtank armed to the teeth with an entire thermonuclear arsenal.

The crew of that tank commander's previous command, who served him excellently, could be similarly "honored" and flash imprinted into other tapes and plugged into that supertank's subsystems, slaved under the commander's central-control consciousness.

BRAGULANS

Nuclear-powered, upload-controlled supertanks? I love it. It's like what a Bolo would have looked like if a Stalinist totalitarian regime built them.

[Shroom Man 777]

The key part is that the upload process consists of an award ceremony, a horrifying thermonuclear incineration, and imprintation in a huge ass lead-lined magnetic tape cassette to be played in a garage-sized supercomputer complete with vacuum tubes.

[speaker-to-trolls]

So in this thread there seems to have been more discussion about the Zigonians than there has about the USS or the Bragulans, the two main nations in the setting.

So, if anyone's still reading, that is, I'd like to bump this thread up to ask what ideas people have about the USS and its society? I mean it is clearly the most interesting of the races involved because there is much more you can do with it and because it's basically based on our own world, there is that much more to connect to. I mean, just for myself I can imagine the USS being like all of the interconnectedness and technophilia of modern life being dialled all the way up as high as they can go, so people in the heart of the Sovereignty would seem like polymathic geniuses to us because they are in constant communication with other people all the time, constantly receiving and dispensing information, they are undergoing absurd levels of mental stimulation and stress every second of every day, they literally don't sleep because being out of the loop for hours at a time is too big a risk for them. If you remove these people from their datasphere connection for any more than a few hours, in fact, most of them will start to crack, they'll literally get withdrawal symptoms, they'll start acting completely manic just to give themselves something to do, to get away from the silence all around them, they won't be able to organise their thoughts because they won't be able to access any information to help them do so.

Of course the more prepared among them will have external hard drives full of games and music in their heads to counter this.

I also once had an idea for a story where Facebook became the basis of politics, so if a country deleted you from its friends list you were no longer allowed in that country, if this happened while you were in that country you got deported/arrested as was the local custom, shops wouldn't serve you and people wouldn't hear you if you tried to talk to them, unless you directly threatened them, they might not even be able to see you unless you were putting them in danger. It'd be like the Borg where they don't recognise your existence unless you prove yourself to be dangerous. I don't know if that's actually too silly for this setting, though.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think, ironically, what you bring up is something that makes the average Solarian nigh incomprehensible to the average reader. And I think I mentioned this to Frod before, that also-ironically, the thing a modern reader would relate most to in the USS-setting would be the Replicant soldier. Artificially bred and designed and "programmed" people who spend most of their time fighting in the future war. Because the life of an artificial soldier would be regimented, would be sensible, it would be actually something a modern human could get - like how a medieval peasant can understand a modern Marine grunt's life (train with weapon, go to war kill shit, obey lords/officers) whereas there'd be no way a medieval peasant can understand the life of some guy who does computer programming or works in stock exchange, etc.

And, furthermore, a Solarian Replicant soldier that ends up retiring and entering civilian life might be a workable vehicle for the reader's own accustomization and introduction to the normal civilian life of the USS - as both of them would be unused to the wild cyberpunk biodigital information super-smorgasbord of Solarian society and would take time to adapt to it while encountering all of its idiosyncrasies. In the end, in the USS it's the artificial soldier that's actually saner and sensible to us. What does this tell us about this messed up society?


Thanks for diverting us back to track mang. I should get onto the Karlacks too.

[Invictus]

We were talking about the Zigonians because they needed fleshing out also.

It also fits how John Baylor might prefer to settle down as a fringe world yokel after he returns to civilian life, which I think was something you described once upon a many moons ago. I'm not actually sure if it's possible to justify the typical technological backwardness and general run-down-ness of Star Wars/Firefly-like frontier worlds, given this setting's highly effective AI social planning and fairly exponential transhumanist technology. But I'd expect there to be less ambient data in the air and a generally slower pace to life, simply because there aren't as many people out in the fringes as there are in the densely populated core worlds, and it simply doesn't take as much to keep people connected and entertained. The possibility that lots of other self-reliant replicants would also demob to the fringes would be another factor to bring about a different kind of culture than the metropolitan, sybaritic existence of the average coreworld dweller.

Therefore, I'm not so sure if John Baylor would get to interact with the most dissonant parts of the USS much. He might be in for a cultural shock when he checks out the fabled fleshpots of Zedath-Kalesh while on leave, though.

What are the fringe worlds like in general though? Industrious colonization initiatives? Cultural enclaves for primitivists and romantics? War-torn bulwarks against the Bear and the Bug?