The technology of Galactic Christendom, while often fantastic by today's standards, is not of uniform development. Part of this is historic. When the nations went their separate ways in colonizing the galaxy, they left at different times and met different situations along the way to their eventual destinations.
Some of their colonies failed, some became lost for a time and only recently returned to the galactic fellowship, and some suffered losses that destroyed previous capacity or retarded existing ones. Couple this with an ethic that emphasizes local economy over galactic trade, and an aesthetic that prioritizes wise use of local resources--natural and Man alike--over creating the stereotypical steel-and-chrome trope of Science Fiction.
In short, this is what you should be expecting out of Galactic Christendom:
And not this
Follow @wrathofgnon on Twitter, and get into his aesthetic- especially his Good Urbanism posts and threads. Then add giant robots and laser swords. Yes, it still works in giant O'Neill-style space colonies with space battleships and Faster Than Light travel, and it's not as silly in practice as it seems, especially early in the colonization effort when logistics is going to be dodgy as best to maintain from an extra-solar source. (That, by the way, is why mining asteroids is such a big deal and why in-system belts are a routine sight in colonial settlements.)
The Executive Summary is this: More wood and stone, less steel and chrome. More local commerce, less interstellar trade. Feudalism, monarchy and subsidiarity fits this scenario very well, which is one of the reasons the Church promoted it alongside relentless support for nationalism.
Maintaining this practice as colonies mature into new kingdoms allows a local population to establish and maintain a distinct local culture rooted in their new homeland, measured against maintaining connection with brother kingdoms of their nation as well as ancestral connections with their homeland on Earth via pilgrimage. Wicked-fast interstellar travel and communications, if properly regulated, can promote this without the risk of reviving the very globohomo culture--"Babylon"--that ramped up before the Cataclysm.
Bradford
ReplyDeleteInteresting thet we share a similar esthetic commitment. It's clear that his good urbanism is a severely neglected trope that needs to be fleshed out without falling into 12 century faux medievalism
My meca novel is also heavily informed by wrathofgnon's tweets. My esthetic will be Mediterranean emphasizing rural Catalan architecture with a mix of Carlos V polity and the early colonization period of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.
xavier