Re: Empire Building

Laserlight wrote:

> I suspect people design empires the way they do for two main reasons:
> a) wish fulfillment. 

> b) insufficient imagination.	I would not, on my own, come up with a
lot of
> the things which human societies have: practicing ritual cannibalism;
> signing up to be a royal guard when you know you'll be beheaded and
buried
> with the king when he dies; self-castration due to religious frenzy;
> fasting; the Ghost Dance societies of the Plains Indians; and many
more.  I
> think about all most of us can do is take elements we know and combine
them,
> hoping for an occasional flash of inspiration to strike.  Most of
creative
> writing is not inspiration, it's working out the details and
implications.

I plead guilty with the Ou to the second. It seemed to me that given the
initial "Oceanic Union" concepts, it would have to be a loose
federation, with 2 main interest groups: a Mostly Desert Continental
land Mass, and a vast agglomeration of island-states.

Australia is currently a number of City-States perched precariously on
the edges of a vast wilderness. I live in the largest (by far) inland
city, which has a whopping 300,000 population. That's a lot more than in
the whole of the Northern Territory, an area larger than Texas + New
Mexico + California (Or France + Germany + Benelux if you prefer).
This makes it rather easy to "transport" holus-bolus into an
interstellar  background, because essentially in the Tuffleyverse,
there's been about the same amount of colonisation of various planets as
there has been in our neck of the woods.

>From looking at my past posts, the general effect is more like late
18th
- mid 19th Century England (Central government with 2 major
parties/special interest groups, plus numerous far-flung outposts out of
regular communication and basically valueless in the main except for
stratgeic position). This wasn't my intention, "it just growed" that
way.
OTOH it's very difficult coming up with a system of society that hasn't
been tried somewhere, sometime. A Technological Participatory Democracy?
Just look at ancient Athens. Militaristic Christian
Whacko-Fundamentalism under a certifiable loony?  Have a look at the
Chinese Tai P'ing.

   
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