Before I fill in the new 3 question template with info
re: humanity, some thoughts that I think might be pertinent to both
this and other music posts:
Guideline zero (the obvious): We, being modern humans, are going to be
(and this puts it politely) under-equipped to represent anything alien,
or, to be even more brutally honest, particularly foreign to our
manner of being and reasoning with anything resembling
authenticity. For musical composition, this seems to me not to be a
daunting problem - in fact, it is perhaps preferable that we avoid
true attempts at true authenticity and allow ourselves the benefits of
indirection; I am given to the belief that Peter and the Wolf sounds
better with a flute, oboe, clarinet, and horn trio than with samples
of birds, ducks, cats, and wolves. Even if the groups and characters
to be represented are far from the here and now, the audience,
especially if it is to be of non-trivial size, must be expected to be
very much rooted to the here and now (which is not in any way to show
disrespect for the linguistic jumbles of "A Clockwork Orange" or the
censor-avoiding non-English phrases creeping into Whedon's Serenity
universe - rather I don't think our developers are prepared to embark
on such an ambitious path nor is there as likely an audience for
something intentionally less accessible in the gameplay format we're
working with... but I digress). Suffice it to say that, in the
interest of the modern human listeners, even if a group seems likely
to be producing music that sounds like whale song and chirping insects
mixed with breaking glass, electrocuted field mice, and Tiny Tim on a
rhino-sized electric jazz ukulele, we can see fit to represent them
with something rather less cacophonous, but artistically evocative of
them for less literal reasons.
Humanity (a general overview, just to keep us honest):
Guideline number one - These are not the people you grew up with. At
least, many of them aren't. The people of the 33rd century, by and
large, bear less resemblance to you than you do to a 10th century
peasant - this much is to be expected. As per guideline zero,
identifying with them in a fully authentic fashion may range from
difficult to impossible, but that's okay. The most important point is
to just remember that they ARE different, so as to help keep us all
honest.
Guideline number two - Some of these "people" REALLY AREN'T the people
around you - at all. It's not just the cultural gap. Thinking about
the Purists as fairly normal, if scared, people, the Unadorned as
somewhat nutty religious people, the Forsaken (even more like modern
man than the Purists) as bitter people, the Highborn as self-absorbed
(and perhaps mildly self-deluding) people and the Merchants as deeply
materialistic people can lead to somewhat reasonable grips on how one
can think about these groups operating - they are, at heart,
fundamentally still human, if culturally distinct from today's
climate. Even the Mechanists can be superficially grokked by starting
with a zealous level of self-hatred directed at the limitations of
their human bodies, and taking that to the extremes made possible by
advances in technology.
However, thinking about the Andolians or Shapers (or, less
importantly, about members of any of the minor groups who are even
more aggressively trans-humanist than the two mentioned) as the same
sorts of humans you've grown up amongst is inappropriate and
insufficient. They are not yet alien, but they are intensely foreign
to the humanity we are familiar with; they no longer think like us,
and even if we can't fully recreate their mindsets, we can at least
force ourselves to remember and reason about the degree of their
differences from us. The Andolians, collectively, haven't forgotten
anything meaningful for well over 900 years. Each generation grows up
with almost immediate and nearly innate access to more information
than each generation before. They are connected, not just in the
simple physical sense of their link, but also in social senses that
modern man simply isn't. They don't think about self and the other in
the same way we do - they can't. The Shapers have fully adult minds by
the age of 7 and even their dullest healthy member surpasses most
modern humans. They are a society whose rates of idiocy, mental
defects, physical defects, malnutrition and insufficient pre-natal care
are so low, their disease rate so small, that one can begin to think
of them as a post disease, post illness, as an almost post frailty
society. Theirs is a society of extreme individualists that runs
smoothly because they're all up on the game that's being played -
duping the Shaper electorate makes bribing the Supreme court look like
something a drooling infant could accomplish by accident. We share
more genes with the SuSims than with the Shapers. They are not gods or
demigods, or any such thing, but to think of them merely as human, is
to do them insufficient justice.
Guideline number three - The "Purist/Luddite" test: while you need not
agree with the aforesaid groups, if you can't understand on a
permeating, gut level why these groups are so obsessed with bounding
what constitutes humanity and what it means to lead a human life, and
why this obsession is flavored with fear, then you probably don't yet
understand the "humans" of the 33rd century that inhabit the VS
universe.
That said, the following is targeted primarily at "Human" humans, Homo
Sapiens Sapiens (with whom one presumes more than a passing
familiarity, culture gap aside
), and is at present likelyincomplete for groups further removed from our current conception of
mankind - for the purposes of musical composition, it's not yet clear
to me how much additional exposition will be necessary to touch upon
the various subgroups, both less human and all too human, and so,
while I've added some grouping specific comments (at the end) where I
felt there were clear musical implications , I imagine some further
posts at a later point will be necessary for additional clarifications
and commentary.
Humans:
1. history (combined with fundamental emotion, reason, and result of the emotion)
(I'm not going to dwell on human emotions too much for run-of-the-mill
humanity - the emotional landscape of Homo Sapiens Sapiens is familiar
to us, even if the borders of those portions of it deemed by various
cultures as normal and/or acceptable to inhabit may shift seemingly
arbitrarily)
Homo Sapiens Sapiens originated on the third planet orbiting
Sol. Through geography, biology, and happenstance, unity has avoided
association with humanity. There has never been a single government,
entity, or organization ruling over the entirety of the species. The
beginnings of sub-light interstellar colonization occurred alongside
the demise of the last great nation-states as meme-groupings became
the dominant mass organizational paradigm. Even as nano-tech advances
pushed the whole of humanity toward post-sufficiency economies and
standards of living sailed steadily upward, the resource investments
required for interstellar colonization still limited access to this
option along divisions of wealth and material resources with roots
long pre-dating the meme-group paradigm shift. As has ever been the
case, the haves helped themselves to the prime pickings (of colony
targets), and left the less fortunate to fight over the scraps or to
risk less assured ventures further afield in space and therefore in
time. Dozens of mono-meme-group colony missions were launched, and
later, multi-meme-group missions organized by tolerant, if wary,
alliances of those not capable of pursuing such a task on their own
(such as was the case with the colonization of Bantam).
The discovery of the jump network, and the possibility of FTL changed
this dynamic. It also woke the nano-plague, lead to the deaths of
billions, the loss of entire colonies, and the realization that a fair
number of early colonies weren't even on the jump network, and would
remain beyond the reach of FTL access until the development of SPEC
drives some centuries later. The playing field of remaining groups was
culled unevenly, and in a manner arbitrary in some respects, yielding
a balance of power and fortune that would not likely have been
otherwise expected. New groups also arose from this event, such as the
Interstellar Church of True Form's return, an indication of the shock
that this event dealt to all of humanity.
As rebuilding gave way to a returned expansionism, an FTL land grab
commenced that gave rise to the Forsaken, the dispossessed settlers
whose intended colony worlds were settled by others while they
continued in their sub-light travels. The eventual development of SPEC
drives greatly increased the rate at which discovery of and
exploration through new jump points was possible. Rates of expansion
increased among groups that had successfully rebuilt their economies.
With SPEC era expansion and exploration came first contact with an
alien sapient, in the form of the technologically primitive Mishtali,
discovered by the Unadorned. Second contact was to prove much more
defining for humanity. The Klk'k homeworld of Ktah, with a developed
civilization already reaching out to explore their solar system, was
subjugated by the Lightbearer meme-group, an action which, upon
discovery by an Andolian exploration mission entering through another
jump point into the system would spark the first human interstellar
war (there had been engagements before, but this was the first true
war).
The Fraternal war would result in the Lightbearer memes becoming
defunct, the liberation of the Klk'k, Shmrn, and Space-born, and, as a
reaction to Andolian military dominance and the totality of
Lightbearer destruction in the conflict, the stirrings of what would
become the Confederation of Inhabited Worlds. It was not lost on the
other major human groups that the Andolians were unapologetically
responsible for killing more humans than any other group in history. A
greater chance of survival through a more structured means of
inter-meme interaction than armed conflict was a sufficiently common
goal to bring together the, by this time extremely ideologically
divided, human polities, but not sufficient to bind them more than
loosely. The polity governing the dispossessed settlers, for reasons
of jump network topology and lingering distrust and animosity did not
join the Confederation.
The Fraternal war also marked the beginnings of rampantly increased
militarization of budgets throughout human space. This tangible
symptom of unease and distrust was only accelerated by contact with
the Rlaan, Uln, and later the Aera, in the two centuries following the
Fraternal war. This served to slow the pace of economic and physical
expansion somewhat, but the intense R&D efforts were not without
benefits, and contact with the Rlaan, Aera, or even Uln, would likely
have been quite a different underatking for a humanity not devoting
itself to unkindly causes.
2. main interests of the race, and what they're not interested in. "Values"
Humanity has specialized itself in specializing, but at a profound
loss to cohesiveness, and, in many cases, an abandonment of tolerance
for the often easier sufficiency of isolation. One could frame this in
terms of a dominant sense of "wanting to become something more" with a
profound set of disagreements concerning both what "more" is and what
getting there entails. On the other hand, one could merely say that
the main interest of humanity is surviving our tendency to repeatedly
mix hubris and curiosity - but that would be an uninformitively
cynical phrasing. Humanity has become self-absorbed within each of its
meme-groups, each narcissistically interested in its own world view
and preferring to not have to accommodate others, but chafing because it
has once again become unavoidable. This lack of any pretense of
cultural unity makes it difficult to discuss the value system of the
aggregate body of humans - except that the depth of this lack of unity
is a key value among the human communities, in contrast to the mostly
superficial diversity of the Rlaan or the loyalty structures of individual
sublimation binding Aeran society.
A differentiating species-level technological direction, albeit a
muted one, is that of the field of non-organic artificial
intelligences. To contrast, the Aera make excellent computers, but are
painfully uneasy with allowing "thinking" machines, as they feel they
already have competitors aplenty without creating more, and the Rlaan
kept themselves mostly to AI approaches derived from manipulation of
existing living brains. Thus, only humans interact with a full-fledged
community of inorganic AIs, albeit a very small one.
3. What is the level of their development as a race? (in parallel to our world: developed country, developing country, etc) Maybe their primary industry would give us some insight. OF course, without making things up as you go. Just from what all players should already know.
The most appropriate description can be summed up in a single word:
uneven. The Andolian Protectorate is intensely industrialized and
thickly populated, albeit in a unsettlingly clean fashion, whereas the
sparsely populated High-born worlds are optimized for luxury over
productivity. Purist and LIHW colony worlds range from pastoral
outposts to continent-wide slums, to floating financial islands on
world-oceans. Expansion and exploration continues coreward, with
older, or more expansion-constrained regions being more densely
populated than the leap-frogging colonies extending from more settled
human space. The Forsaken, albeit operating at significant initial
penalties in time and resources, have rebounded over the centuries to
achieve a respectable existence, with upward trends in both
productivity and standards of living up until the Aeran invasion of
Forsaken space. Though the Forsaken continue to lag somewhat behind
the Confederation technologically and developmentally, the vast
majority of the gap has been closed, and the continuing nature of the
gap is as much a feature of the relative sizes of the entities as
anything else - the Forsaken do not have sufficient infrastructure to
engage in projects of the same scale that the Confederation does.
4. The major human subgroupings and meta-groupings, and corresponding intuitions with possible musical implications, if any have seemed clear to me
There are a lot of groups, human and otherwise - themes for each of
them may be a bit much, but it still seems worth noting something
about each of them, where possible. Any direct musical discussion is
merely my opinion of what popped into my head as correlated, and
should not be seen as a request (they aren't nearly that formally
reasoned, and besides, that's the music committee's responsibility,
not mine).
NOTE: For those not keeping track of such things, the Confederation of
Inhabited Worlds is composed of (in decreasing order of number of
systems) the Purists, the LIHW, the Andolian Protectorate (Andolians,
Klk'k, Purth, Space-Born), Shapers, Unadorned, High-Born, Mechanists,
and Merchants. When it comes to the population of humans, almost all
of them are either living in the Confederation or among the Forsaken.
Andolians
- An element of the Andolians which seems like it could be translated to the musical domain is one of structures where, when work is to be done, operation is uniform and in near-perfect synchrony, resulting in a capacity for great forcefulness, but, on their own time, each of the contributors can softly pursue its own self-expression undisturbed and unhindered.
Forsaken
- Determined - in some sense, stubborn, in their choice of independence over assistance at the cost of absorption - struggle in the face of externally imposed calamity and setbacks, but with a bitter hardening and buildup of survival oriented cynicism, rather than a Job-like acceptance of their suffering. The Forsaken lack the uniformity of the mono-meme groups, but share sufficient commonality through their mutual displacement and subsequent struggles, that overarching aspects of their society have evolved, tolerant in limited ways, if not welcoming, by necessity of the various, and increasingly temporally displaced groups slowly arriving over several centuries into their territory of quasi-exile. Personally, I felt that Falik's "Son of Sand Flea" and "MezzaMessa" were perhaps better suited to the Forsaken than the Aera, but that is a decision for the music committee to make, and I will restrict my commentary on that to the above statement unless subsequently asked for my opinion.
High-Born
- Neo-chivalrous throwbacks at once impassioned in avarice and ego, but convinced of noblesse oblige as an unquestionable operating principle of the universe, there seems a certain fit to ornamentation in all aspects of their existence, including musical, that is perhaps best evoked by baroque (and here the term is used not in the directly musical sense) complexities. There are also some martial overtones to their society, but it remains at root one defined by luxury and opulence, legacies thereof, and efforts to preserve said for the small existing population, often at the expense of others, much moreso than any particular accomplishments.
Interstellar Shipping and Mercantile Guild (Merchants)
- The upper ranks of the Merchant's guild (see history link re: CMT - ) are heavily influenced by their High-Born heritage and continued socio-political ties. They have shed their noblesse oblige, however, and have embraced the unadulterated ambition of a Gordon Gekko mindset. Ruthlessness in ensuring that competition is an internal exercise in organizing dominance hierarchies rather than an outside threat has stripped the higher ranks of much of the frivolous nature of the High-Born even if it has not cured them of ostentatious flares - the fat cats may still be fat, but only the clever ones with sharp smiles are still around to be smiling. At the same time, however, the public face of the ISMG, away from the core of their organization, at the megamarts and commodity trading centers, is one that must be bubblegum and roses in its commercial and universal nature, with all teeth hidden whenever possible. Perhaps then, the Merchants are suited to a pairing of musical evocations for their paired public and private faces.
LIHW
- Being a meta-group composed of loosely affiliated minor memetic and mixed colonies, there is no underlying theme that springs to mind to encompass the LIHW, except perhaps to think of them as those who have escaped both greatness and the great by being many and varied - but that's not really that thematic, and comes off rather more heroic than they actually are, as their entire existence is the result of pragmatic rather than heroic accomplishments.
Mechanists
- The Mechanists strive to abandon flesh, and with it the limitations of flesh. There is an appreciation for sounds that no human could produce unaided, the playing of instruments in fashions unlikely to be possible for mere human hands, and a dispassion for organic smoothness over the abruptness possible only through machines.
Purists
- The Purists are backward looking (though not "backward" in the commonly used derogatory sense), and interested in what can be done by humans in a human fashion. The synthetic does not appeal to them, and they would look to the past (though just as likely still our future as our present or our past) for forms to work with and in.
Shapers
- In contrast to the Andolians, wherein a uniform group disperses to attend to the personal, the Shapers work as the individual and compose, adapting when necessary, to become more. Like the Andolians, there would seem to be some readily direct musical embodiments for this approach.
Unadorned
- The Unadorned have a vaguely Platonic reverence for forms mathematical, and, thus, in their view, perfectible. Simple and stark cleanliness of timbre and tone, progressions along structured sequences, a computed landscape of ambient, unornamented sound - these are what come to mind when I think of the Unadorned and music.
5. Minor human subgroupings, possibly of some interest at a later date, for personal amusement, or to as something to work on during composer's block
Interstellar Church of True Form's Return
- Somber, restrictive retreats into the past, even moreso than the Purists. There is no play left in the Luddites, all is deadly serious.
Interstellar Socialist Organization
- Because anthemic revolutionary music could be fun to conjure up
Space-Born
- Wholly subsumed by the Andolians, it might be interesting, although assuredly not necessary, at some later point when more pressing things have been covered, to do some variant of the Andolian theme for Space-Born installations
Various Pirate Groups
- A place to possibly put coarse and aggressive sounds
and dynamics