A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols.\u00a0 Fascinating stuff!\u00a0 Really epic!\u00a0 Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols.\u00a0 When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?<\/p>\n
This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow!\u00a0 This would be so cool<\/em> as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.<\/p>\n Here’s what I came up with.\u00a0 I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.<\/p>\n First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization.\u00a0 That much is obvious. \u00a0 The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) <\/em>would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.<\/p>\n The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle.\u00a0 Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.<\/p>\n The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer.\u00a0 Similarly, the\u00a0 Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military.\u00a0 Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high.\u00a0 Basically, every Hameji ship is<\/em> a warship.<\/p>\n Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.<\/p>\n First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian.\u00a0 That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature.\u00a0 When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise.\u00a0 There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated.\u00a0 What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job.\u00a0 Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.<\/p>\n In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy<\/em>, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community.\u00a0 But basically, it was rule by strict tradition.\u00a0 With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law.\u00a0 Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe.\u00a0 They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.<\/p>\n Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal.\u00a0 They believe in a ruling class and a following class.\u00a0 Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.<\/p>\n Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born.\u00a0 Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city\/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock.\u00a0 Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.<\/p>\n You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive.\u00a0 They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing.\u00a0 Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.<\/p>\n Mongols in space.\u00a0 How cool is that?\u00a0 It’s definitely got potential, I think.\u00a0 I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile<\/em> as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict.\u00a0 We’ll see which one ends up getting written.\u00a0 It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth <\/em>and The Phoenix of Nova Terra <\/em>get written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols.\u00a0 Fascinating stuff!\u00a0 Really epic!\u00a0 Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially… Continue reading The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,32],"tags":[39,52,4,599],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds","category-ge","tag-schoolwork","tag-story-ideas","tag-the-lost-colony","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-56","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}