My Universe - The People

The distant future? Well, yes. As I write it.
The city of Lanterna from Beneath the Lanterns

"My universe" seems like a rather extravagant claim. Let's just say that I have a standard background setting for most of my stories, one that I have developed over the years. Other than A Summer in Amber, Some Day Days and A Night on Isvalar, all my stories have a common background and back story. In this post I'm going to talk about the people in the rest of the stories. Be warned, I've never set this backdrop down in words, until now, so I tend to ramble.

First off, all of my character's ancestors come from Earth and all of the stories are set far into the future - 50,000 to 100,000 years or more in the future. The underlying premise is that humans have bio-engineered themselves into a "new, improved" species, "Homo Stellar", in order to eliminated the ill effects of weightlessness and space travel, to made them resistant to all known diseases, to give people conscious control over their emotional responses, and women control over their ovation, as well as extending their lifespan to around 200 years. This extension does not double the whole life cycle. It keeps youth and the "golden age" (sic) the same, i.e. about 25 years each, but increased our "prime" middle years five-fold, i.e. 150 years. I also introduced robotic and enhanced medical treatment in most, but not all stories.

What I didn't do was change the nature of humans. They are very familiar. indeed, no different than what we are today. This, given the timeframe is probably not realistic. Humans, if still around 50,000 years from now, would probably be unrecognizable to us. I turned a blind eye to this because I had no interest in speculating as to just how they might be different. Plus, I wanted to write stories with relatable human characters (plus dogs & cats), not Morlocks.

One reason why I lengthened my characters' lifespans was so that I could tell the stories I wanted, without having to rush through them. For example, the story arc of two Lost Star Stories spans over 20 years, starting with the characters in the range of 40 -50 years old and some more. The extended lifespan gives them plenty of headroom to have as many adventures as I could dream up without fudging either ages or compressing the time line in the stories. They can take several months to get somewhere, instead of minutes or hours. Longer times spans make my universe bigger.

I'm not an "ideas" writer even though ideas are the tentpole feature of SF. However, with this longer lifespan, there are issues to explore, and I do occasionally explore ideas. One of those ideas is what impact would a 200 year long lifespan have on human life and society? What would people do with all that extra time? Would people still fall in love and get married in their 20's? Would many/any of them stay married all their lives to the same partner? We're talking 170 years or more. How long can love last? Given two centuries of life, would it be normal to have several or numerous marriages/partnerships? How many children, and how often will couples raise a family, given 150 years to have them? How many children would a woman want over the course of 150 years given that they would have a choice? Would people raise numerous families with different partners over the course of 150 years? Lots of ideas to explore.

While I am aware of these questions, still, I've kept most of these considerations largely in the background of my stories, by either focusing on "spaceers" in space ships, or young people in the Tropic Sea stories. Many are largely unresolved in my mind. Some I do address rather obliquely. In my upcoming Chateau Clare story I've had to touch on many of these questions, since families and family relationships are an important element in the story, as well as in how the society operates in an otherwise very familiar world. In that story, an adult may have great-great grandparents alive and not consider it unusual. One might have many cousins of varying degrees, some as old as our grandparents or as young as our grandchildren, if you're that old, as well as a variety of half-siblings who might also be a century older or younger than yourself. However, because I use a first person narrator to tell these stories, this aspect of life is seen through his eyes and taken as customary, so that exploring these feature in great detail with sweeping descriptions of the society would be too much out of character for a character grown up an intimately familiar with that society. You almost always have to cheat anyway, but you can make it a little less obvious with little, off-handed explanations as you go along. Which works for me, since even I don't have a sweeping overview of it myself. I explore it as I go along.

I'm just rattling on and on, so I'll cut my discussion here, and return next week to rattle more about the my societies.