of course cool. And I’ll back it when you kickstart it.
Paul Beakley like “that’s stupid cool, man”???
Aaron Griffin it’s cool but totally stupid.
I think I’m with Paul, hence the poll.
Remember: power rests in the family atomics.
Feudalism is not stupid. It is the best most efficient way to organize a hierarchy. Even today we are effectively a feudal society, only the details have changed. But the essential format, being granted control over the factors of wealth production in exchange for personal loyalty, is still the primary way power works, no matter what the trappings are called. Corporations are just fiefdoms with a veneer of law painted over them because people are quite content to be serfs as long as they can pretend they aren’t. But in the end, it gets to the same place.
Actual medieval style feudalism makes a ton of sense in a space setting. Particularly where communications and travel are slow and you need someone local with the authority to act decisively, but who is also beholden to someone higher and is willing to help that someone keep his fellows in line because he knows they’ll be willing to keep him in line.
One might argue that, far from being stupid, it is the most natural and quintessentially human system there is.
As to whether it’s cool. I guess that depends on how far up the hierarchy you are.
Ralph Mazza eloquently gets to where i was mentally struggling, too. While I’d disagree with some details there, the key thing is slow communication and high travel time start making feudalism very clearly the dominant choice.
Which, it turns out, is what we have in Dune. Space travel is expensive and slow, going through a guild that (generally) doesn’t allow for large scale war. Communication is no faster.
It makes a lot less sense if you have instantaneous, free communications, but, a lot of things break down if you insist on that.
The trappings change but the underlying doesn’t.
The primary reason why you want to decentralize power and rule through others rather than directly is always the same — you’d rather rule directly but you can’t…so feudalism is the next best thing.
When communications and travel are slow you can’t because you can’t get reports and issue orders timely enough, so you rely on a trusted local to act in your name.
When communications and travel are instantaneous, the world becomes a much bigger place…and now you can’t because there’s only so many hours in the day and so much mental capacity to process. So you rely on trusted subordinates to rule on your behalf.
The subordinates rely on you for their financial support (whether its a land grant, or the right to impose duties and fees, or a salary is just details) and in return they owe you service.
All hierarchies are effectively feudal, in that all power effectively stems from a cascade of personal relationships. It’s maintained by grants of privilege and the knowledge that your peers will turn against you and you against them if someone balks at compliance.
Whether you call them King, or President, or Chairman, or Autarch, its all just a slot in the hierarchy — granting privilege in exchange for service and loyalty, down; and giving service and loyalty in exchange for privileges received, up.
This is an awfully generous interpretation of what feudalism is.
You’ve made the bucket so big that literally any organization with bosses = feudalism. Which might be on-point social commentary but, IMO, not at all accurate.
My beef with “space feudalism” is that it’s purely trappings and not really ever about historic feudalism. It’s more like space ren faire: peasants and knights and royalty and castles, or their scifi equivalent.
It is generous, but also very accurate.
Medieval European feudalism had specific unique characteristic that we associate with the term feudalism, but those characteristics are merely artifacts of that particular time and place. They are no more definitive of feudalism than the Electoral College is of Democracy.
In early medieval Europe, the system involved land grants in exchange for military service, solidified by an oath with religious overtones. That’s because land was the source if wealth and military service was the kind of service needed. The religious oath served to draw on the power of a higher authority to punish oath breakers. But by later in the period, the military service wasn’t the primary thing. It was increasingly replaced by monetary payments so the lord could buy what he needed…showing that the details were flexible even then. Which doesn’t even touch on the varied differences between English-style, French-style, Spanish-style, and German-style feudalism.
From here, everything else is just substituting a different source of wealth, a different suite of services demanded, and a different higher authority to punish oath breakers, and it’s still feudalism.
The key characteristic is that it’s an intensely personal system. You are loyal to an individual. It’s through that individual that your benefits flow, and it’s to that individual you turn when beset. Stick to that, and yeah…most everything can be seen as just modernized feudalism.
As evidence, see William Nichols reference to Dune, above. Dune was written as social commentary on 1960s era politics. It’s telling that the feudal model fit modern politics so well.
Umm…Frank Herbert smoking a lot of dope and then /pffff/ Hey man, common citizens are just like peasants! doesn’t mean he actually knew anything about history. He was a journalist and free thinker, not a political scientist.
I’m still totally rejecting the notion that having a boss = feudalism.
Since that’s not what I said…
.
Before this gets weirdly political, does anyone have any practical concerns with such a setting? Any neccesities, as you see it?
Oaths. Meaningful and binding in a way that is imo really hard to wrap one’s head around in the modern day.
Property grants: do what you want with this thing I’m giving you, but don’t forget it’s mine and you’d damn well better be ready to act when I call on you.
Hereditary grants and titles. Bonds to the crown based on family rather than merit.
Hm. I’d say if you were going for a feudal society you’d want the other two legs of the stool: peasants bound to the property, and an independent moral authority (church or equivalent) that can leverage power on its own.
.
Other two legs of the stool? You mean like Cubical Drones and wage slaves who are bound to the job because they need to pay rent. And the moral authority of Big Government looking out for us?
Like I said, the trappings are different. But the underlying power structure has remained essentially the same since the days of Sumer.
This is the way powerful people relate to other powerful people.
Nah. An employment contact is nothing at all like literally being owned as part of your land holdings.
And government as moral authority? Come on.
Just details and labels.
Ahahaha!
Anyway, Chris Mitchell, I hope there’s something there you can use. I’m a huge fan of medieval sci-fi! A Fading Suns AW hack has been tickling the back of my brain since forever.
Ralph Mazza
“The key characteristic is that it’s an intensely personal system. You are loyal to an individual. It’s through that individual that your benefits flow, and it’s to that individual you turn when beset. Stick to that, and yeah…most everything can be seen as just modernized feudalism.”
But my employment contract isn’t with an individual it’s with a company. The CEO of that company is American, doesn’t even live if work in the same legal jurisdiction as me, let alone owe any fealty to the UK government. Feudalism was eventually overshadowed by the burgeoning economies of the free cities, with their merchants and craftsmen. That’s the world we live in today. Large swathes of the population are self employed or on short term contracts they can walk away from at any time, and if they aren’t it’s by personal choice.
It’s a shame some still feel they have limited choices about their employment, but on the other hand many people on low income in the same situations move lock stock and barrel to new cities or countries all the time because they have the same right to do so as anyone else. No imposed chain of hierarchical obligations restrain them from doing so.
Simon Hibbs it’s intensely personal for the aristocracy. Not the peasants. If you’ve ever come close to the halls of power in a fortune 100 company you know that regardless of job titles it’s all about the personal relationships.
Ralph Mazza name a political or economic system where that isn’t true.
Most sci-fi space faring games I like most are these. Fading Suns, 40kverse, Nova Praxis and Battletechverse.
I forgot Traveller, depending on campaign.
Simon Hibbs exactly. Underneath the trappings, all power systems are ultimately feudal. It is, as I stated, the core nature of humans to organize this way.
The bucket is too big, man. If everything is feudalism, then nothing is feudalism.
Yeah. If everything ix X, then X is not a useful criteria. It may be right for some definition of X that can be agreed upon, but it is no longer useful.
And it certainly isn’t what the post is trying to get at: i doubt he’s asking about space human power structures!
I see what Ralph is saying. Human nature tends towards certain types of relationships. If you try to impose some theoretically ideal system of relationships, such as Marx’s naive ideas about communism naturally arising from human nature, and the USSR and Mao’s disastrous efforts to force the process along, you’re cutting against the grain.
But the idea that we naturally tend to self-organise into mini-feudalism a isn’t the same as the system as a whole being feudal in a strict sense.
I will agree wholeheartedly that a vast humanocentric spacefaring civilization will probably be run by humans who have relationships with other humans. I tend to believe they’ll involve bureaucracies rather than oaths of fealty between powerful individuals, which is why I think “space feudalism” is kind of a dumb idea. But I mean, whatever, it’s a game. Rationalize that cultural thing any way you want. Dial up the honor, dial up the church, whatever.
One of Foundation’s things, which I’m rereading, is that vast bureaucracy leads to stagnation and corruption, which leads back into feudalism.
Personally, I don’t see why feudalism and bureaucracy are mutually exclusive. The later is just paperwork for the former. Bureaucracy is politically neutral. It will be.
Either way, people are going to live their lives and whatever trappings of organization rich people put out there is simply a narrative, whether that’s communism, socialism, feudalism, whatever. People are going to work, and have children, and celebrate holidays and fight over perceived slights, and some people will have a lot of stuff and some people will have a little stuff and some people will have no stuff.
Not to be nihilistic.
Chris Mitchell Space feudalism is very cool and evocative. As many others have said, in a world where travel and communications are slower than light, feudalism would even be a plausible way of governance for large empires. It would be interesting to have a campaign where a feudalistic society is contrasted with a decisively non-feudal system, i. e. a neighbouring “Star Trek-like” society that is post-scarcity, ultra high-tech and effectively egalitarian in nature.
Would the setting’s equivalent of peasants start making demands when they become aware of how the “other side” has it so much better than them? Would the feudal lords actively try to suppress that knowledge? If so, do they succeed? If not, is that a peasant’s war IN SPAAAACE… erhm… I mean, on a galactic scale?
That kind of stuff could lead to much fun.
Dune.
I disagree that it’s meaningless. In fact. I argue strenuously that it’s the exact opposite.
Realizing that all power structures ultimately evolve into feudalism doesn’t render feudalism not a useful concept. It tells us that other power structures will ultimately be co-opted into serving feudal impulses. Such as Chris’s spot on comment about bureaucracy above.
That allows us to either design structures to resist those impulses or take advantage of them.
Pretending that doesn’t happen just means we live under perpetual feudalism while trying really hard to pretend we aren’t.
That’s the usefulness. It’s not just a historical label.
Ralph Mazza Maybe, but that’s rather far afield from discussing whether space fuedalism is cool, isn’t it?
In terms of practical concerns, the difficultly of warfare is one issue with space feudalism. The threat of force and leveraging vassals against themselves is somewhat of a core tenant, or else with distance, everyone becomes a king. Jump gates are probably a must. The Faded Suns precursor solution, the Guild, et al. There always seems to have to be several magic solutions in order to facilitate some of the trappings.
Anyone think of any others?
Perhaps. I was more addressing why its not stupid…because its a) a perfectly reasonable reflection of how power gets distributed even today, and b) it doesn’t matter what titles you give to people. It doesn’t have to be Lords and Barons and Princes to be essentially feudal.
Ralph Mazza That’s fine; lord /CEO / president. Who cares.
The question, i think, is if something that looks like a naive and charitable understanding of feudalism existing throughout Known Spaces is awesome, or dumb.
Which is different from asking if all human based power structures throughout Known Space must inherently be feudalism.
Those are inherently different questions.
It also seems that almost all of the settings I can find have some sort of Catholic Church analogue where technology replaces religion and the church surpresses its use. Something like this might be mandatory to explain the suppression of advanced technology.
But I guess distance plus time could also explain that, especially in the case of a general failure of civilization.
Just adding random thoughts about the genre now.
Is it realistic that FTL travel is faster than FTL communications? Some of the science is kinda weird, given that it’s fairly simple, yet has complex cultural overtones. Slight changes to the tech of the setting might result in very different states.
Probably explains the genre’s general wave of impatience in the direction of science.
I guess a cursory look says that it is? Or at least, as we understand it, FTL travel is more likely than FTL communications, but neither is very likely. Hmmm. I’ve got a way past that, but I also think it’s dumb.
Chris Mitchell Doesn’t FTL travel bring with it FTL comms, at least via the travel?
Ehh. You’d think. But some settings differentiate between sending their comms through subspace, which is an area smaller than our space, so it arrives instantly. But they can’t travel through that, so they have to use hyperspace to travel, which is … something else? It’s all pretty hand wavy.
In a setting like this, you need slower or restricted FTL travel, or else planets don’t matter since everywhere is everywhere at once. But comms are the real issue. We (Americans?) generally think of political systems as an upward trend from tribalism to good ol democracy. So the thought is, if they have real time FTL comms, like a universe wide internet, then why wouldn’t they have a real time voting democracy? So comms usually are limited.
The subspace/hyperspace thing is Star Trek, no? Not really a fan of that universe, so not sure.
Apparently comms as psychic powers are a regular thing as well, usually tied to a religious organization.
Nah, i mean: if i can get myself from place A to place B, then I can bring information with me. That is, if i can travel from point A to point B in time t, that is the slowest possible speed of sending a message.
Chris Mitchell Star Trek is just real space/subspace. They use subspace for communications, and there are subspace breaches, and all of that treknobabble — but travel is just warping real space. For all intents and purposes, in Star Trek you still have to “go around” things from time to time, because they’re just really fast sailboats.
Sure, but what’s the fastest? Most setting say you can’t send radio waves through hyperspace, so comms are basically by the space pony express.
Alfred Rudzki The space is an ocean method.
Chris Mitchell On super fast communication: Mass Effect says the fastest is Quantum Entanglement Communication. I’ve got a subatomic particle, you’ve got a subatomic particle, and the system is installed so that even though each one’s state elicits and opposite reaction out of the other, the computer gets the gist and can communicate properly. The limitation is that this is point to point — I can’t QMail Person C, only you.
Operating under the assumption that a space fuedal hegemony could master quantum communication on a grand scale, I could envision something like instantaneous interstellar telegrams. I vibrate my particle, and its dedicated relay station gets a vibration and if necessary transmits it to the next relay station up the chain — or if its a general bit of info, goes to boring radio band comms and broadcasts it locally.
The final result would be something like: the space rabble have normal comms and have to make due with the space pony express. The Feudal Space Lords of a given system have a quantum line to the “local” (for, you know, maybe a dozen stars or whatever) QStation that will “route the call.” So you have to “go upstairs” to spread word, but the powers that be would have effectively instantaneous communication while the rabble does not. And since you have to follow the channels to get your word anywhere, it feels properly feudal for the sake of this question.
I mean, yeah, ME did this, but it was literally just the macguffin so you could talk to your space boss elsewhere, and no one else had these comms. It’s bounced around in my head for a while just what a neat idea I thought it was, and how much I want to see a setting expand on it.
Alfred Rudzki also done in Singularity Sky, if memory serves. The Super Fast Space Things send quantumized half of a computer across the galaxy, and relay information home.
That’s great. ME also used the precursor jumpgate method for FTL travel, right?
That’s correct. Space ships work like you would expect: sublight, needed to radiate heat to work, the usual hard stuff, and you would use the local Mass Relay to get yourself launched across space FTL.
EDIT: As far as I know — and I’m pretty sure on this — the jumpgates don’t allow for the transmission of data or comms, meaning that you have to actually go some place before you can start broadcasting. Hence why the QMail method was a big deal.
In a story? Cool.
In real life? Probably not cool.
More thinking RPG settings
In that case, definitely cool.
Argh don’t make me choose!
(My answer is both)
of course cool. And I’ll back it when you kickstart it.
Paul Beakley like “that’s stupid cool, man”???
Aaron Griffin it’s cool but totally stupid.
I think I’m with Paul, hence the poll.
Remember: power rests in the family atomics.
Feudalism is not stupid. It is the best most efficient way to organize a hierarchy. Even today we are effectively a feudal society, only the details have changed. But the essential format, being granted control over the factors of wealth production in exchange for personal loyalty, is still the primary way power works, no matter what the trappings are called. Corporations are just fiefdoms with a veneer of law painted over them because people are quite content to be serfs as long as they can pretend they aren’t. But in the end, it gets to the same place.
Actual medieval style feudalism makes a ton of sense in a space setting. Particularly where communications and travel are slow and you need someone local with the authority to act decisively, but who is also beholden to someone higher and is willing to help that someone keep his fellows in line because he knows they’ll be willing to keep him in line.
One might argue that, far from being stupid, it is the most natural and quintessentially human system there is.
As to whether it’s cool. I guess that depends on how far up the hierarchy you are.
Ralph Mazza eloquently gets to where i was mentally struggling, too. While I’d disagree with some details there, the key thing is slow communication and high travel time start making feudalism very clearly the dominant choice.
Which, it turns out, is what we have in Dune. Space travel is expensive and slow, going through a guild that (generally) doesn’t allow for large scale war. Communication is no faster.
It makes a lot less sense if you have instantaneous, free communications, but, a lot of things break down if you insist on that.
The trappings change but the underlying doesn’t.
The primary reason why you want to decentralize power and rule through others rather than directly is always the same — you’d rather rule directly but you can’t…so feudalism is the next best thing.
When communications and travel are slow you can’t because you can’t get reports and issue orders timely enough, so you rely on a trusted local to act in your name.
When communications and travel are instantaneous, the world becomes a much bigger place…and now you can’t because there’s only so many hours in the day and so much mental capacity to process. So you rely on trusted subordinates to rule on your behalf.
The subordinates rely on you for their financial support (whether its a land grant, or the right to impose duties and fees, or a salary is just details) and in return they owe you service.
All hierarchies are effectively feudal, in that all power effectively stems from a cascade of personal relationships. It’s maintained by grants of privilege and the knowledge that your peers will turn against you and you against them if someone balks at compliance.
Whether you call them King, or President, or Chairman, or Autarch, its all just a slot in the hierarchy — granting privilege in exchange for service and loyalty, down; and giving service and loyalty in exchange for privileges received, up.
This is an awfully generous interpretation of what feudalism is.
You’ve made the bucket so big that literally any organization with bosses = feudalism. Which might be on-point social commentary but, IMO, not at all accurate.
My beef with “space feudalism” is that it’s purely trappings and not really ever about historic feudalism. It’s more like space ren faire: peasants and knights and royalty and castles, or their scifi equivalent.
It is generous, but also very accurate.
Medieval European feudalism had specific unique characteristic that we associate with the term feudalism, but those characteristics are merely artifacts of that particular time and place. They are no more definitive of feudalism than the Electoral College is of Democracy.
In early medieval Europe, the system involved land grants in exchange for military service, solidified by an oath with religious overtones. That’s because land was the source if wealth and military service was the kind of service needed. The religious oath served to draw on the power of a higher authority to punish oath breakers. But by later in the period, the military service wasn’t the primary thing. It was increasingly replaced by monetary payments so the lord could buy what he needed…showing that the details were flexible even then. Which doesn’t even touch on the varied differences between English-style, French-style, Spanish-style, and German-style feudalism.
From here, everything else is just substituting a different source of wealth, a different suite of services demanded, and a different higher authority to punish oath breakers, and it’s still feudalism.
The key characteristic is that it’s an intensely personal system. You are loyal to an individual. It’s through that individual that your benefits flow, and it’s to that individual you turn when beset. Stick to that, and yeah…most everything can be seen as just modernized feudalism.
As evidence, see William Nichols reference to Dune, above. Dune was written as social commentary on 1960s era politics. It’s telling that the feudal model fit modern politics so well.
Umm…Frank Herbert smoking a lot of dope and then /pffff/ Hey man, common citizens are just like peasants! doesn’t mean he actually knew anything about history. He was a journalist and free thinker, not a political scientist.
I’m still totally rejecting the notion that having a boss = feudalism.
Since that’s not what I said…
.
Before this gets weirdly political, does anyone have any practical concerns with such a setting? Any neccesities, as you see it?
Oaths. Meaningful and binding in a way that is imo really hard to wrap one’s head around in the modern day.
Property grants: do what you want with this thing I’m giving you, but don’t forget it’s mine and you’d damn well better be ready to act when I call on you.
Hereditary grants and titles. Bonds to the crown based on family rather than merit.
Hm. I’d say if you were going for a feudal society you’d want the other two legs of the stool: peasants bound to the property, and an independent moral authority (church or equivalent) that can leverage power on its own.
.
Other two legs of the stool? You mean like Cubical Drones and wage slaves who are bound to the job because they need to pay rent. And the moral authority of Big Government looking out for us?
Like I said, the trappings are different. But the underlying power structure has remained essentially the same since the days of Sumer.
This is the way powerful people relate to other powerful people.
Nah. An employment contact is nothing at all like literally being owned as part of your land holdings.
And government as moral authority? Come on.
Just details and labels.
Ahahaha!
Anyway, Chris Mitchell, I hope there’s something there you can use. I’m a huge fan of medieval sci-fi! A Fading Suns AW hack has been tickling the back of my brain since forever.
Ralph Mazza
“The key characteristic is that it’s an intensely personal system. You are loyal to an individual. It’s through that individual that your benefits flow, and it’s to that individual you turn when beset. Stick to that, and yeah…most everything can be seen as just modernized feudalism.”
But my employment contract isn’t with an individual it’s with a company. The CEO of that company is American, doesn’t even live if work in the same legal jurisdiction as me, let alone owe any fealty to the UK government. Feudalism was eventually overshadowed by the burgeoning economies of the free cities, with their merchants and craftsmen. That’s the world we live in today. Large swathes of the population are self employed or on short term contracts they can walk away from at any time, and if they aren’t it’s by personal choice.
It’s a shame some still feel they have limited choices about their employment, but on the other hand many people on low income in the same situations move lock stock and barrel to new cities or countries all the time because they have the same right to do so as anyone else. No imposed chain of hierarchical obligations restrain them from doing so.
Simon Hibbs it’s intensely personal for the aristocracy. Not the peasants. If you’ve ever come close to the halls of power in a fortune 100 company you know that regardless of job titles it’s all about the personal relationships.
Ralph Mazza name a political or economic system where that isn’t true.
Most sci-fi space faring games I like most are these. Fading Suns, 40kverse, Nova Praxis and Battletechverse.
I forgot Traveller, depending on campaign.
Simon Hibbs exactly. Underneath the trappings, all power systems are ultimately feudal. It is, as I stated, the core nature of humans to organize this way.
The bucket is too big, man. If everything is feudalism, then nothing is feudalism.
Yeah. If everything ix X, then X is not a useful criteria. It may be right for some definition of X that can be agreed upon, but it is no longer useful.
And it certainly isn’t what the post is trying to get at: i doubt he’s asking about space human power structures!
I see what Ralph is saying. Human nature tends towards certain types of relationships. If you try to impose some theoretically ideal system of relationships, such as Marx’s naive ideas about communism naturally arising from human nature, and the USSR and Mao’s disastrous efforts to force the process along, you’re cutting against the grain.
But the idea that we naturally tend to self-organise into mini-feudalism a isn’t the same as the system as a whole being feudal in a strict sense.
I will agree wholeheartedly that a vast humanocentric spacefaring civilization will probably be run by humans who have relationships with other humans. I tend to believe they’ll involve bureaucracies rather than oaths of fealty between powerful individuals, which is why I think “space feudalism” is kind of a dumb idea. But I mean, whatever, it’s a game. Rationalize that cultural thing any way you want. Dial up the honor, dial up the church, whatever.
One of Foundation’s things, which I’m rereading, is that vast bureaucracy leads to stagnation and corruption, which leads back into feudalism.
Personally, I don’t see why feudalism and bureaucracy are mutually exclusive. The later is just paperwork for the former. Bureaucracy is politically neutral. It will be.
Either way, people are going to live their lives and whatever trappings of organization rich people put out there is simply a narrative, whether that’s communism, socialism, feudalism, whatever. People are going to work, and have children, and celebrate holidays and fight over perceived slights, and some people will have a lot of stuff and some people will have a little stuff and some people will have no stuff.
Not to be nihilistic.
Chris Mitchell Space feudalism is very cool and evocative. As many others have said, in a world where travel and communications are slower than light, feudalism would even be a plausible way of governance for large empires. It would be interesting to have a campaign where a feudalistic society is contrasted with a decisively non-feudal system, i. e. a neighbouring “Star Trek-like” society that is post-scarcity, ultra high-tech and effectively egalitarian in nature.
Would the setting’s equivalent of peasants start making demands when they become aware of how the “other side” has it so much better than them? Would the feudal lords actively try to suppress that knowledge? If so, do they succeed? If not, is that a peasant’s war IN SPAAAACE… erhm… I mean, on a galactic scale?
That kind of stuff could lead to much fun.
Dune.
I disagree that it’s meaningless. In fact. I argue strenuously that it’s the exact opposite.
Realizing that all power structures ultimately evolve into feudalism doesn’t render feudalism not a useful concept. It tells us that other power structures will ultimately be co-opted into serving feudal impulses. Such as Chris’s spot on comment about bureaucracy above.
That allows us to either design structures to resist those impulses or take advantage of them.
Pretending that doesn’t happen just means we live under perpetual feudalism while trying really hard to pretend we aren’t.
That’s the usefulness. It’s not just a historical label.
Ralph Mazza Maybe, but that’s rather far afield from discussing whether space fuedalism is cool, isn’t it?
In terms of practical concerns, the difficultly of warfare is one issue with space feudalism. The threat of force and leveraging vassals against themselves is somewhat of a core tenant, or else with distance, everyone becomes a king. Jump gates are probably a must. The Faded Suns precursor solution, the Guild, et al. There always seems to have to be several magic solutions in order to facilitate some of the trappings.
Anyone think of any others?
Perhaps. I was more addressing why its not stupid…because its a) a perfectly reasonable reflection of how power gets distributed even today, and b) it doesn’t matter what titles you give to people. It doesn’t have to be Lords and Barons and Princes to be essentially feudal.
Ralph Mazza That’s fine; lord /CEO / president. Who cares.
The question, i think, is if something that looks like a naive and charitable understanding of feudalism existing throughout Known Spaces is awesome, or dumb.
Which is different from asking if all human based power structures throughout Known Space must inherently be feudalism.
Those are inherently different questions.
It also seems that almost all of the settings I can find have some sort of Catholic Church analogue where technology replaces religion and the church surpresses its use. Something like this might be mandatory to explain the suppression of advanced technology.
But I guess distance plus time could also explain that, especially in the case of a general failure of civilization.
Just adding random thoughts about the genre now.
Is it realistic that FTL travel is faster than FTL communications? Some of the science is kinda weird, given that it’s fairly simple, yet has complex cultural overtones. Slight changes to the tech of the setting might result in very different states.
Probably explains the genre’s general wave of impatience in the direction of science.
I guess a cursory look says that it is? Or at least, as we understand it, FTL travel is more likely than FTL communications, but neither is very likely. Hmmm. I’ve got a way past that, but I also think it’s dumb.
Chris Mitchell Doesn’t FTL travel bring with it FTL comms, at least via the travel?
Ehh. You’d think. But some settings differentiate between sending their comms through subspace, which is an area smaller than our space, so it arrives instantly. But they can’t travel through that, so they have to use hyperspace to travel, which is … something else? It’s all pretty hand wavy.
In a setting like this, you need slower or restricted FTL travel, or else planets don’t matter since everywhere is everywhere at once. But comms are the real issue. We (Americans?) generally think of political systems as an upward trend from tribalism to good ol democracy. So the thought is, if they have real time FTL comms, like a universe wide internet, then why wouldn’t they have a real time voting democracy? So comms usually are limited.
The subspace/hyperspace thing is Star Trek, no? Not really a fan of that universe, so not sure.
Apparently comms as psychic powers are a regular thing as well, usually tied to a religious organization.
Nah, i mean: if i can get myself from place A to place B, then I can bring information with me. That is, if i can travel from point A to point B in time t, that is the slowest possible speed of sending a message.
Chris Mitchell Star Trek is just real space/subspace. They use subspace for communications, and there are subspace breaches, and all of that treknobabble — but travel is just warping real space. For all intents and purposes, in Star Trek you still have to “go around” things from time to time, because they’re just really fast sailboats.
Sure, but what’s the fastest? Most setting say you can’t send radio waves through hyperspace, so comms are basically by the space pony express.
Alfred Rudzki The space is an ocean method.
Chris Mitchell On super fast communication: Mass Effect says the fastest is Quantum Entanglement Communication. I’ve got a subatomic particle, you’ve got a subatomic particle, and the system is installed so that even though each one’s state elicits and opposite reaction out of the other, the computer gets the gist and can communicate properly. The limitation is that this is point to point — I can’t QMail Person C, only you.
Operating under the assumption that a space fuedal hegemony could master quantum communication on a grand scale, I could envision something like instantaneous interstellar telegrams. I vibrate my particle, and its dedicated relay station gets a vibration and if necessary transmits it to the next relay station up the chain — or if its a general bit of info, goes to boring radio band comms and broadcasts it locally.
The final result would be something like: the space rabble have normal comms and have to make due with the space pony express. The Feudal Space Lords of a given system have a quantum line to the “local” (for, you know, maybe a dozen stars or whatever) QStation that will “route the call.” So you have to “go upstairs” to spread word, but the powers that be would have effectively instantaneous communication while the rabble does not. And since you have to follow the channels to get your word anywhere, it feels properly feudal for the sake of this question.
I mean, yeah, ME did this, but it was literally just the macguffin so you could talk to your space boss elsewhere, and no one else had these comms. It’s bounced around in my head for a while just what a neat idea I thought it was, and how much I want to see a setting expand on it.
Alfred Rudzki also done in Singularity Sky, if memory serves. The Super Fast Space Things send quantumized half of a computer across the galaxy, and relay information home.
That’s great. ME also used the precursor jumpgate method for FTL travel, right?
That’s correct. Space ships work like you would expect: sublight, needed to radiate heat to work, the usual hard stuff, and you would use the local Mass Relay to get yourself launched across space FTL.
EDIT: As far as I know — and I’m pretty sure on this — the jumpgates don’t allow for the transmission of data or comms, meaning that you have to actually go some place before you can start broadcasting. Hence why the QMail method was a big deal.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubspaceAnsible
Interesting TVTropes article because of the inversions.