My Universe - My Societies

In my last post I about the impact of a 200 year lifespan on my characters. But what about the society they live in?

In our society we rely on a constant turnover in the hierarchy of every aspect of our lives. You put your time in and over the course a several decades, move up the hierarchal structure, be it from kid to adult, to parent, to grandparent. Or in your career or job, from new hire, through various levels of management, to maybe, CEO, or from apprentice to master craftsperson. These steps involve often little more than a decade or two due to the span of our current lives. However, what would society and our lives look like if people could, in theory, stay in a position at the top for a century or more blocking everyone's advancement down the line? Would most humans be content to advance in their career at a glacial pace - spending 50 years to accomplishing what takes 10 years for people today? And then there is the question of how long would it take to get bored with any job? In my view, I see a society where most people would not want, or expect, to stay in the same job or even the same field for their full lifetime so that most people will periodically embark on new careers. This need and ability to start over a number of times would have to be built into the society one way or another.

Another related aspect of a long lifespan is how it would affect the shape and dynamics of the society over time. Given the time and opportunity to change not only relationships but careers, and a population of people with a wide variety of ages and experience, it would seem that society might by in constant flux. Change would happen because there was time to change and change again within one lifetime. 

And yet... We see that in our society, changes come very slowly, generation to generation. Paper newspapers are still printed, I have to believe because the generation that grew up reading them is still around. My wife still watches the half hour national news program everyday, even though all the news is available all the time on the internet. The life and outlook of people are formed early, and are retained, at least in part, throughout their lives. Would not this be true as well, if their lifespan was doubled or tripled? I'm sure the issue can be argued from both ways - frequent changes because people have time to change vs slow changes because people don't change.

I have generally adopted the latter view for my stories. I have my societies very static because of the innate conservative nature of people, which when held for the better part of two centuries, would tend to extend and impose the values and ideas of their youth on many subsequent generations, despite the multi-generation mix and flux of a long lifespan. And in much the same way, I think that families and children will be postponed or widely separated throughout a long life, especially with woman being able to control their fertility. 

I also use semi-utopian societies in my stories, unless the initially advanced civilization has collapsed for some reason - also a common feature of my stories, like my Tropic Sea stories. My assumption is that 50,000 years of civilization will slowly evolve into a single, homogeneous and inclusive society. In the stories set in the Nine Star Nebula, I pictured a very stable and secure society - The Unity - with a built-in safety valve that allowed the tiny percentage of people who do not fit into the main society to set up alternate societies - dissenting communities - on the various moons - just so long as they met certain human rights standards, and allowed their inhabitants to opt out of it at any time. For those who found even dissenting communities still to socially claustrophobic, they could immigrate to the "drifts" beyond the control of The Unity. This feature allowed me to easily set my characters in more historically backward locations, which I like writing in.

I also like portraying my societies without politics. Given a homogeneous society without outside threats in the form of other countries, I picture a society where all policy issues have been decided upon thousands of years before. Therefore, no new laws would be needed, and the society is administered to by a professional bureaucracy according to detailed long established rules as in the Earth of The Girl on the Kerb, and my upcoming novel Chateau Clare. Just dreaming.

All this said, I don't spend a great time on thinking about my societies, no more than I need for the story's backdrop. As I said, I'm not an ideas writer, I only invent things that I need to write the story I have in mind, and build a world of sorts as a backdrop.