KJ Wrote:I thought we were trying to avoid grimdark... somehow the whole "slow heat death of hopes and dreams" and associated angst is even worse.
Allright. I trust that by now everybody has had a chance to get chill, walk it off, whatever your favorite euphemism. So let's start again. The topic for discussion is moving the 'current date' up from 2014 to 2022. What happens in those intervening eight years? How has Fenspace changed? How has Earth changed?
To kick things off, I'd like to quote a thing from the Candle in the Dark thread over on Spacebattles. I think this gives us a reasonable beginning point of reference:
Nomar, from Spacebattles Wrote:The Boskone war ends in 2014. The war is important because it gives the Fenspace Convention credibility as a government on account of the Convention having done two very classical government–y things: it has enforced its monopoly on violence by waging a war. This means Fenspace is no longer viewed as the anarchic no–man's–land beyond the frontier where only complete nutters would go, it may be still a bit wild–westy but it's definitely a civilized place now. Also, by this time Fenspace has living space for rent, jobs to be filled and you can even buy regular commercial flights there (Swissair if I recall correctly). All in all, a recipe for a big immigration boom, especially if the first world's economy is still stagnating in the aftermath of the financial crisis (did that even happen in Fenspace? If not, why?). First contact happens in 2024, that's ten years for Fenspace to grow. Not very long, but quite enough if the economy is booming, especially given the miraculous properties of handwavium.
Now, obviously the whole 'first contact' thing doesn't apply here, but let's take this as a start. Where do we go from here?
Before we begin, I'd like to establish a ground rule: everything is mutable. Always in motion the future is, and we've got the luxury of changing things. Until we all agree, nothing we discuss here is locked into a permanent state. That goes for faction-specific stuff as well as more general concepts. If you're really wedded to a specific idea and you get called on it, be ready to back that idea up with an argument.
Ready? You may begin at your leisure.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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