Premise for my uni: redux

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Somes J
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Premise for my uni: redux

Post by Somes J »

I've been sitting on Children of Man (my Omniverse One uni) for a while, trying to come up with a premise that works for me. I think I've finally settled on something. I'm posting it here - again - before I commit to putting any of this in the ChoM forum proper (and honestly, again, because this forum gets more traffic), and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.


The Premise:

Sometime in the future modern civilization ends. I'm not exactly sure of the nature of the disaster yet. I'm toying around with a catastrophic climatic shift initiated by global warming and dramatically compounded by unsuccessful attempts to reverse it through geoengineering. A plague is another possibility. Although honestly I dislike the grimdark of having 99.9% of humanity die and the suffering then be continued for eons. Another possibility I'm playing with is that in the future we develop a spacefaring civilization and Earth becomes a backwater because of its position at the bottom of a deep gravity well and eventually is largely abandoned (turned into a national park or something). The only people left are a handful of die-hards who refuse to leave and they can't maintain civilization. At some later point humanity leaves the solar system entirely for some reason. Another possibility is Earth facing some disaster and being mostly evacuated, although I'm hard-pressed to imagine what sort of disaster would make doing such a thing worthwhile but leave survivors. In either case, civilization is either dead or has moved on.

Whatever the case, the people left reverted to primitive hunter-gatherers and never recovered (at least up to "today"). Our civilization has disappeared into the mists of deep time, and is no longer even a legend. Its only visible traces are a handful of time-battered monuments like Mount Rushmore, now objects of mystery and awe to the primitives, who can only guess at their origins. I'm tentatively thinking of a date of roughly 1 million years from now; it's a nice round number and it should leave enough time for the evolutionary changes I want.

As a million years have passed evolution has begun to shape humanity into a number of divergent species. The process has been slow, as human cultural adaptation tends to remove the need for physical adaptation, but it has happened. To be honest I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I think it's justifiable as a fundamental conceit of the story, and it doesn't strike me as too implausible. Neanderthals became physically adapted to cold due to 500,000 years of reproductive isolation in Europe, Homo Floresiensis became midgets over 800,000 years of isolation on a small island, and modern human populations often show physical adaptations to cold or warm climates, despite having left Africa less than 100,000 years ago.

This premise seems to me to be the best way to create the kind of world I want to explore while invoking a minimal amount of contrived stuff compared to other scenarios.


The World

Present day ChoM world, as I indicated, is faintly recognizable as our world, but very different. Dozens of ice ages and climatic shifts have rearranged the landscape. Species have evolved. The ruins of our civilization have disappeared into the dirt, save for a few eroded monuments; a man wandering the world would scarcely find any sign that our civilization had existed, and the memory of us has degraded to the point that it is not even recognizable in myths. I'm thinking at present ChoM world is presently experiencing a warm interglacial with conditions comparable to the early Eemian period. Sea levels are slightly higher than today, the tundra line is farther north, and large areas that are now desert like the Sahara and the Middle East are fertile grasslands. And, of course, man himself has changed, with evolved posthuman species now wandering much of the Earth.


The Races

OK, thinking of some of the posthumans that might have arisen:

Furries: cold-adapted humans. I'm thinking probably the distant descendants of Europeans. They have developed compact frames that better retain heat and layers of fat to insulate them. Their body hair has also gradually increased to the point that they effectively have fur coats, and no longer require warm clothing to function in cold weather. They range over Europe, Siberia, and Canada, perhaps with limited penetration into more southern regions of North America and Asia.

Desert Dwellers: humans adapted to extreme aridity. Require less water to survive than baseline humans, are able to get much or all of the water they need from plants and animals they eat. Probably sweat much less than baseline humans or may have given up sweating altogether in favor of some cooling system that doesn't require them to waste large amounts of water. Have a variety of adaptations for handling extremes of heat and cold. Probably there would be several such races, convergently evolved; perhaps one in Namibia, one in Australia, one in the American Southwest, and one in Central Asia. The Sahara and Middle East might or might not have one too; they do periodically become grasslands during the warmest periods.

Mountain Dwellers: like Furries but also incorporate adaptations to high altitudes like increased lung capacity and red blood cell count. I imagine there might be two such races, one in the Andes and one in the Himalayas and Tibet.

Humans: good old Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Those living fossil populations that have not changed significantly in the last million years. I imagine they might very well still be the most common hominids, ranging over pretty much all the areas where the more specialized forms don't have some sort of advantage. That said, I do kind of like the idea of hinting that they're gradually losing ground to the posthumans and, barring a major change of events, will probably eventually end up being replaced by them. I have a fondness for this because it neatly inverts the old Tolkeinian trope of having the nonhuman races dying out as the future belongs to man. Here it's the other way around: we'd be the elder race which's glory days are past and the nonhumans would be the more vigorous younger races destined to eventually inherit the world. Of course, I suspect something would probably be set up to upset the apple cart before this came to pass.

Carnivore People: these are humans that were living in some location where the bulk of the easily accessible nutrients (to humans) came from protein. Perhaps a grassland or tundra region. They gradually moved toward being pure carnivores. Their digestive tracts shortened and they developed a number of adaptations to a carnivorous lifestyle, such as regaining their fangs. I'll grant it's probably not the most plausible ones in there, but dammit I like the idea! Range widely over the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and possibly Australia as well.

Blind People: a few isolated tribes of humans that gradually moved into living entirely in a cave system somewhere. Now they survive almost entirely on catching roosting bats and have completely adapted to an underground lifestyle, to the extent of losing the function of their eyes and perhaps developing a primitive system of sonar (relevant link - apparently even baseline humans can learn to do crude echolocation, so it may not be as radical an evolution as I thought it would be). Again, probably not the most plausible one, but dammit I like the idea.

Water Dwellers: these are humans that started out as fishers, probably on some small island, and gradually developed to be amphibious. They have large blubber layers, streamlined bodies, webbed fingers and hypertrophied feet that act as paddles, they can hold their breath for much longer than baseline humans, and they have lost their body hair. They range extensively over the coastal regions of much of the world.

Islanders: it's definitely worth considering the islands. The populations there will be totally isolated for a million years. I've already touched on the idea that some might become amphibious; I imagine the Water Dwellers may have started out on some tiny island in Micronesia and island-hopped back to the mainland when they become good enough swimmers. Island dwarfism might be another common adaptation; it happened with Homo Floresienses. I could see Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanasia etc. being full of a wide variety of pygmies. And then there's large isolated islands like Madagascar and New Zealand to consider, and island continents like Australia. They may develop some unique hominids.

Assorted: there are undoubtedly others I haven't mentioned here. For instance, I have vague plans for a posthuman species that's finally starting to redevelop civilization somewhere. Maybe a hive-like species like in Stephen Baxter's Coalescent. And I'm interested in the possibility of other hominids with a radically alien social structure. Hmm, I wonder what evolutionary pressures shaped the behavior of bonobos... There is also the possibility of artificial transhumans produced before the collapse of civilization which might have "gone feral" and survived as a species.

Thoughts? My only worry is it may sound too derivative of All Tomorrows.
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Re: Premise for my uni: redux

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

This will no doubt be extremely annoying to hear, but I actually liked your original backstory, with the paralell universe master race and their slaves coming to an uninhabited world and being stranded, it had a real narrative quality to it. Nevermind.

I think the idea of the Earth being abandoned and Terran civilisation gradually decaying until it finally collapses altogether is a good one, though might require a certain amount of doom and gloom in that it would require the spacelings to be either unwilling or unable to help the earthlings out of their plight. I quite like the idea, though, that life of some kind could go on elsewhere in the universe, maybe it's just evolved into something so inhuman that it has absolutely no interest in the Earth and its people anymore, save to occasionally send probes down to survey the local wildlife. You could have an interesting story about a 'star' falling to Earth which turns out to be a sentient spacecraft.

The primitive children of men go about their petty lives and are watched dispassionately by the courts of the steel dragons in Heaven. I like the image.

I also think casting modern man as the dying elder race is a nice idea, but that you may have to rethink the other races before this happens, the ones you have outlined here seem quite environment specific and would actually be at a disadvantage compared to modern, live anywhere, eat anything humanity in most environments. If anything they'd only be guaranteed a place in the food chain because they're well suited for places modern humans are bad at and wouldn't really want to live in. Maybe if there were some of those Saldhanai humans you've talked about in other places to outcompete modern homo sapiens? In any case I think there need to be some more generalised new species to be forcing modern mankind out of its place.
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Somes J
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Re: Premise for my uni: redux

Post by Somes J »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:This will no doubt be extremely annoying to hear, but I actually liked your original backstory, with the paralell universe master race and their slaves coming to an uninhabited world and being stranded, it had a real narrative quality to it. Nevermind.
OK. I've found I'm just not all that comfortable working with alternate universes though. I prefer something more grounded in the real world.
I think the idea of the Earth being abandoned and Terran civilisation gradually decaying until it finally collapses altogether is a good one, though might require a certain amount of doom and gloom in that it would require the spacelings to be either unwilling or unable to help the earthlings out of their plight. I quite like the idea, though, that life of some kind could go on elsewhere in the universe, maybe it's just evolved into something so inhuman that it has absolutely no interest in the Earth and its people anymore, save to occasionally send probes down to survey the local wildlife. You could have an interesting story about a 'star' falling to Earth which turns out to be a sentient spacecraft.
That's why I was thinking of maybe throwing in something about the solar system eventually being abandoned; to explain why nobody helped the primitives out.

Yeah, I kind of like the idea too, as I find the idea of a true apocalypse with no recovery of civilization for a million years to be so depressing it's kind of a turn-off for me. I prefer the idea that our civilization continues somewhere, in some form.
I also think casting modern man as the dying elder race is a nice idea, but that you may have to rethink the other races before this happens, the ones you have outlined here seem quite environment specific and would actually be at a disadvantage compared to modern, live anywhere, eat anything humanity in most environments. If anything they'd only be guaranteed a place in the food chain because they're well suited for places modern humans are bad at and wouldn't really want to live in. Maybe if there were some of those Saldhanai humans you've talked about in other places to outcompete modern homo sapiens? In any case I think there need to be some more generalised new species to be forcing modern mankind out of its place.
You have a point, the posthumans are pretty much all more specialized forms. The idea I had in mind was that humanity was gradually being replaced by a number of specialized species which didn't have the same potential for planet-wide success as humans but were better for their particular environment. For instance, Furries probably outcompete humans pretty much everywhere above roughly lattitude 45 N (and further south during glacial periods). You're right though, humans would probably always manage to survive somewhere, because we're adaptable to so many different environments. Unless a creature that was a better generalist came along.

I don't think it would be something like the Saldanhi, as they are better suited to a different universe thematically. My whole point in coming up with them was for them to be a subversion of the idea of humanity as the top of the evolutionary ladder and an example of how sometimes evolution doesn't always favor the organism that is the "best". So they really work much better as something that existed in our pre-history and died out before the dawn of civilization.

One possibility I can think of for the "up and coming" posthumans is a human society that has taken after naked mole rats, adopting a hive-like social structure. Frank Herbert and Stephen Baxter already beat me too it, admittedly, but I think it's an idea that might still be worth exploring, and might work well here. Say, a society isolated on an island and forced to throttle back their breeding rate to avoid starvation; the same scenario roughly as Stephen Baxter uses to create the Coalescents. Maybe they're just now starting to build Kon Tiki-like sailboats capable of taking them beyond their island.

If nothing else, I like the idea because the concept of an empire which's Legions of Terror consist entirely of overgrown eternally prepubescent girls really tickles me. It gives me great mental images of the Uruk-Hai from the LOTR movies marching, only with vaguely creepy-cute androgynous girls with really high voices instead of Orcs. Come on, you've got to admit that would be totally weird and awesome.

CHARGE! FOR THE HIVE!
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Re: Premise for my uni: redux

Post by Magister Militum »

While I really did like your original premise, I find that this concept is also an interesting one, particularly the idea that we just abandon Earth and anyone who refused to leave the planet. Your concept for posthumanity taking on a hive-like social structure is also intriguing as well and has a lot of potential for some very interesting world building potential. What else do you have in mind in terms of changes for Children of Man?
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