Another World

The origins of the Gehunite civilization date back to the mid-1970s, when I wrote a massive swords and sorcery novel called Alura. I was dating a lady name Laura at the time, and she looked a bit like the semi-barbarian princess who starred in the book, so I named it after her. It had nothing to do with Supergirl's mother, though it wouldn't shock me if both originated in the same anagram.

I'd love to refer you to an old copy, but despite nearly a year of back and forth with a publisher, it never made it into print. You didn't have Amazon back then, or computers, or eBooks, and publishing a 600+ page book was an expensive undertaking for a small publisher who would have had to print around 5,000 of them and then hope they'd sell.

Worse, the manuscript was lost years ago, so there's no way to publish it now, either, even though digital publishing would allow it to be done for very little cost today. I still wish it had come out back when it was written, though. If I found it, and published it now, people would just claim I was ripping off Xena, despite the detail that Alura was written when Lucy Lawless was still a little girl attending primary school in New Zealand.

Alura was swords and sorcery. Returning, which was published this year, is anything but. Organically, the Gehunite Empire of Returning, a technological civilization perhaps a century or two ahead of our own, is a direct development of the magic-based civilization of Alura, but existing some five centuries later. Magic has been replaced by technology, just as it has been in our own culture. The major difference is that, in Gehun, the magic apparently used to work.

The plot is quite simple. In the 525th year of the Gehunite Empire, three starships are sent off to explore deep space. No one expects to ever see any of them again. This is a point where my concept of space travel differs from conventional science fiction. The starships can travel at just under the speed of light, but not faster than light. Relativity tells us that, at the speed of light, time essentially stops for anyone aboard the ship. This is fine if you're aboard, but so far as the rest of the universe is concerned, time just keeps marching on as it always has. If you make a 200-light-year jump, you arrive there only a few seconds older, but for anyone back on Earth, it still took you 200 years to get there. There's none of the usual "zip off at warp speed, travel ten parsecs before breakfast and get back a couple weeks after you left" stuff you'd find on Star Trek. In my concept, deep space explorers do it for their own satisfaction. They may plan to tell people about the experience when they return, but they also know they'll be telling people who haven't been born yet, not any of their contemporaries.

I have a feeling this is the way it will really work, even with travel by wormhole and the like. Time will still assert itself outside of a relativistic bubble around the ship.

One of the starships, Warrior, finally gets back in 2126, rather to the shock of the people living at the time. For the crew, the trip took 15 years. For the Earth, it took 86,985 years. More than enough time for everyone on the planet to forget the Gehunites had ever existed.

How do you destroy an advanced civilization? Starting with two moons, and dropping the smaller one onto a big island in the middle of the ocean handles that fairly well (not to mention providing a nice basis for the Atlantis legends). There would be some survivors, mostly in the southern hemisphere if the small second moon came down in the north, but not many. Just a few scattered bands here and there, their technology unexpectedly stripped away and unrecoverable, forcing a reversion to a subsistence or hunter-gather culture. You're left with a total, surviving world population of only a few thousand individuals, which likely isn't that different from the actual human population at that time.

In time, people would forget, ice ages would wipe away what was left of the cities, and the slow march of progress would begin again as the descendants of the survivors once again trekked out of Africa and slowly repopulated the world. Some names might survive, transformed into gods as history became legend, and legend became myth, but their origins would be lost in the mists of time.

Now, the thing is, with this book I had to come up with two speculative cultures. The ancient part was easy. Even if I no longer had the old book that started it all, I still had a notebook full of references. It was the future culture that was tricky.

Looking back over previous attempts, it's obvious that people just aren't very good at predicting the future. We were supposed to have flying cars twenty years ago. We should have domed cities, personal jet packs, and armies equipped with ray guns. We should be wearing fashions that look like something out of a Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serial, and have spaceships that fly through interstellar space buzzing like, well, like movie spaceships in the late 1930s.

In the 1890s, prognosticators envisioned a 21st century world still largely powered by steam. Just after World War II, the prediction for our own period was essentially 1954 America with slightly nicer appliances. Women were still expected to be mostly housewives, and it was presumed that vinyl records would still be the state of the art. Dick Tracy predicted two-way wrist radios and, later, televisions, so arguably Chester Gould was a better predictor of future technology than some futurists.

When Warrior returns in 2126, my fictional future suggests that the Gehunites are able to manipulate gravity, but that contemporary humansstill haven't figured that one out. No one hasfigured out teleportation. The consensus seems to be that no one ever will, because the amount of computer power required would be so huge, and there's still the question of whether teleportation actually involves transporting you, or if it involves killing you, disintegrating your body, and assembling an atom-by-atom duplicate at the destination that just doesn't remember how much it hurt at the sending end.

Since Returning is a book, not a television show, I don't have to worry about a special effects budget, which is the real reason science fiction television shows are so fond of teleporting. A vertical spotlight, some glitter, and fading the actor in/out of the scene is a lot cheaper than using models, or today computer graphics, to land a spaceship on a planet.

The Gehunites travel back and forth from ship to surface using shuttlecraft, roughly the size of a large military helicopter, but looking more like a flying bus. If you can manipulate gravity, you don't need tail booms, rotors, or, for that matter, ablative tiles to absorb reentry heat, since you can enter the atmosphere at a slow enough speed that there's no significant atmospheric friction to contend with.

In my 2126, England still has a monarch. For no particular reason, I've decided that will be King William VI. Presumably, he'd be Prince George's firstborn, and named after his grandfather. He's married to an astrophysicist, so the queen is even more excited about meeting space travelers than he is. They hold a formal reception for Warrior's senior officers at Buckingham Palace, with a number of international dignitaries attending. The Emperor of Japan, the President of France, and the President of Russia are among those mentioned. Whatever current issues there may be with Russia, they seem to have been resolved by 2126.

The President of the United States is notably absent, for reasons I'll get into a little later.

Just for the hell of it, billboards in London are proclaiming that a certain popular British science fiction program will be starting series 121 that year. I really couldn't resist the Doctor Who jokes, even though I managed to resist actually mentioning the show by name anywhere in the book. There are arguments in a London pub over the relative merits of numbers 87 and 92. Gehunite inter-ship solo travel pods apparently resemble Daleks, judging from the reactions of the people aboard the space platform Warrior parks next to. The Gehunites, who certainly travel in space, find the show's premise amusing (they're also rather fond of Galaxy Quest, as they know some aliens who strongly resemble uncloaked Thermians).

I think some of the predictions I've made are fairly safe. People still travel by car, by then almost entirely electric-powered and self-driving. There may be a touch of KITT in some of them. A Seattle British embassy vehicle's on-board computer is prone to stating estimated travel time, then telling the driver how much longer it's likely to take if he insists on driving manually.

The elimination of the internal combustion engine in transportation by 2126 has less to do with air quality than it does with dwindling oil supplies. Eventually, we're going to start running out of oil, and what's available will be more valuable as a lubricant or as a chemical ingredient than as a fuel. There are plenty of ways to generate electricity that don't require burning anything. We can probably expect batteries to be a lot more efficient a century from now, too, so that traveling five to six hundred miles on a charge becomes practical.

A good bit of this story takes place in the UK, and for those who care about such things, it's written in English, not American.

Language gets a look. I have people talking more or less as they do now. This is for practical reasons. If it's hard to predict technology, it's even harder to predict linguistic evolution, and if you invent a completely new language, contemporary readers won't understand it anyway. The Gehunites are most affected by language changes. They speak their own language, naturally, but certainly don't expect anyone living on 2126 Earth to do so after nearly 87,000 years.

They don't even expect to be easily understood on their own colonial worlds, for their visits are rare and the language naturally continues to evolve between them. Chaucer spoke something that would be recognizable as English, but we'd have a hard time trying to carry on a conversation with someone from his time. Trying to speak with an Old English speaker would be just about impossible, and likely easier for a modern Dane or German than for an Englishman.

The Gehunites rely on computer translation systems to communicate. These are far more sophisticated than anything we have now, so they generally get the nuances correct. Structurally, their language resembles Japanese, which has a much more formal grammar than English. However, since the book is written for English readers, this is merely mentioned in passing and in dialogue everyone speaks the way we do. The only exceptions are when there's a reason to have the character actually speaking Gehunite or Callaaish, so normally the reader is getting the translation, not the original.

Predicting the future of the UK, and of Europe, was mostly just a matter of looking at current trends and wondering where they'd go. Just as has been the case in most societies throughout history, minorities and "troublesome" immigrants are presumed to have assimilated as the younger generation was educated in the host country's schools and came to identify with their new culture, rather than their parents' old one. That's been going on for hundreds of years, and there's not much reason to expect the future to be different.

Predicting the future United States was harder, but a novel requires some sort of conflict, and letting the radical right take over certainly provided it. In Returning, by 2126 the US has a new Constitution that replaces the current House and Senate with a unicameral Congress, gives the President the power to make law (subject to legislative veto, but only by a 90% vote of the entire Congress), and strips the Supreme Court of its constitutional review power. The President in 2126, Will Gordon, has been in office for 29 years. Before running for President, Gordon was a fifth-generation televangelist. His grandfather was one of the backers of the "Convention of States" that threw out the old Constitution and wrote the new one.

This isn't as far-fetched as we might think. Various groups, mostly on the right, have been urging a constitutional convention for decades, calling it a "Convention of the States." It's the standard suggestion whenever a pet legal wish turns out to be unconstitutional. It's also a very dangerous idea, for there is very little to really limit what a constitutional convention can do.

The one in Returning — there are a number of events included that happen between the time Warrior leaves and when it returns — is supposedly limited to writing a constitutional amendment making abortion illegal, and another defining marriage as male-female only. A number of those involved know right from the start that what they'll really do is throw out the existing Constitution and write a new one. That's more or less what the original Constitutional Convention, called to do nothing more than amend the Articles of Confederation, did back in 1787.

Returning's new Constitution is far more repressive than the original. Having been imposed by the right, it does whatever it can to limit liberal influence. Giving the President semi-dictatorial powers is one way. Taking away the right to abortion under any circumstances, and making any homosexual conduct between men illegal, are only a couple of the issues the Americans in Returning have to face.

A major American problem, or threat, is a vast relocation center called Camp Antelope, located in a corner of Wyoming that never appears on any American internet satellite views. By 2126, the government has become very intolerant of dissent, but finds killing dissidents and "trouble-makers" distasteful, so it ships them off to this camp, where they will live out the rest of their lives. Officially, the place doesn't exist. This is particularly hard on those sent there accidentally, because no one who enters the place, with the exception of the staff, can ever leave.

When a 15-year-old Ham radio operator from Denver accidentally becomes the first person to communicate with the Gehunites — albeit, with neither actually having the slightest idea what the other is saying — she finds herself being smuggled out of the country by British Intelligence in order to visit the starship. Her parents, thanks to an overzealous FBI agent, and much to the annoyance of the President, end up in Antelope. So does her best friend, who makes the mistake of texting her and telling her what happened.

What happens to the girl in England, and during her visits to Warrior, and the consequences of these events, provides most of the plot for the latter part of the novel.

Returning suggests what has always proven to be true. People will put up with an astonishing amount of repression, so long as it doesn't affect them personally. It also suggests that, sometimes, seemingly minor events can have a greater effect than seemingly important ones.