Random Thought Depository

I've decided my Blindsight elsewhere fic is going to be set in the seventh or eighth millennium BCE after all. Notes on how I'll portray the humans, focusing on how I'll approach the question of war and socio-economic inequality in early Neolithic Anatolia (the setting of my fic):

Inland agriculturalists: probably the most populous local branch of humanity, and the one where most of our archaeological evidence of the first farmers comes from. Farm wheat and pulse crops, but acorns, pistachios, and figs are also important food sources to them. Some livestock, but hunting is still the primary source of animal protein for many communities. Foraging of wild and semi-wild plant foods (e.g. acorns from wild and semi-wild stands) is still important for many communities; communities often surrounded by fuzzy concentric circles of various intensities of eco-engineering rather than there being a sharp dividing line between farmed land and totally wild land. Agriculture, originally an extension of women's gathering activities, is still highly feminized in this era; men participate in farming, but a lot of plant cultivation is women's work. Inland agriculturalist gender relations more-or-less follow the hoe culture pattern.

Inland agriculturalist society is relatively peaceful and inlander agriculturalist communities are not very militaristic; to the extent that they are militarized it's often primarily oriented at defense against vampires and coaster slave raiders. Serious direct attacks on settlements are rare, so settlements are usually not very fortified; what fortifications exist are often mostly for protection against vampires and coaster slave raiders. The biggest threat to inland agriculturalist communities is the new crowd diseases being spawned by the agriculturalist lifestyle.

Inlander agriculturalist communities are mostly relatively socio-economically egalitarian. What social hierarchy exists is mostly gerontocratic; the words of elders carry weight. The inlander agriculturalist socio-economic system distributes most of a community's surplus more-or-less evenly among most of its members.

Inlander agriculturalist communities often do have leaders who are usually men and usually hand power down to their sons. However, these leaders are very dependent on the ongoing active consent of the governed to have any power, and they have about the same material standard of living as normal members of the community (though they do often possess symbolic luxury goods like precious stones and stone cups as symbols of office). Inlander agriculturalist communities do not tolerate leaders who try to tyrannize over their community or who live well while their people go hungry.

At the other end of the social scale, the other major exception to the relative socio-economic equality of inlander agriculturalist communities is, unfortunately, slavery. Slaves are mostly female refugees from the coastal zone, who are vulnerable to exploitation because they have no local social connections. Slavery is highly feminized because agricultural labor is feminized and because women are perceived as easier to control; inland agriculturalists have little interest in enslaving men (the equivalent bad end for coaster refugee men is to be killed as a trespasser or to be driven away into the wilderness and sooner or later end up as vampire food or meet some other similarly nasty fate). Slavery is not hereditary, and slaves may achieve integration into the community on better terms eventually. An imperfect but possibly illuminating recent historical analogy for early Holocene Anatolian inlander agriculturalist slavery is Iroquois slavery/bride kidnapping/adoption. Slaves are a small percentage of the inlander agriculturalist population.

Coastal farmer-fisher-whalers: probably originally a sedentary fisher-whaler culture on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Euxine Lake (what later becomes the Black Sea) which then adopted agriculture. This is a precociously urbanized, stratified, and militarized society with long-distance trade and raiding, deep sea fishing and whaling, and what could generously be called fortified city-states ruled by kings (though they're more like big villages by modern standards, a few thousand people). They're kind of like an early Holocene equivalent of Vikings (late Bronze Age Greece may be another relatively good analogy). They don't appear in modern history books because a lot of their settlement sites are now below sea level (sea levels were still lower than today during this era, especially the level of the Euxine Lake) and the ruins they left have been pretty thoroughly chewed up by coastal erosion and scavenging by later humans.

The coastal zone is much more militarized than the inland zone. War is more frequent and is often existential (whereas for inlanders it's usually a matter of disputes over things like acorn-bearing oak groves and hunting grounds on the periphery of a community's territory), so coastal settlements are much more heavily fortified than most inland settlements.

The coasters have not yet invented a social technology of territorial imperialism; the goal of coaster aggressive warfare is the capture of plunder and slaves, which are transported to the aggressor city-state to increase its wealth and labor force. A lot of this slave labor is then used for agricultural intensification. The result is a sort of Darwinism of communities; stronger communities attack weaker ones, enslave much of their population, use that slave labor for agricultural intensification, get even bigger, use the resulting increased military power to attack more communities, and so on. The main wrench in this is that these practices tend to also make coaster city-states festering factories of crowd diseases and spread those diseases around, but this tends to synergize with rather than disrupt this dynamic: faced with declining populations, coaster leaders tend to try to solve that problem by capturing more slaves. Greater militarization and boats capable of coast-hugging journeys of hundreds of miles means the coasters are also well-equipped for opportunistic slave raiding, and coaster slave-capturing parties have made themselves a major hazard over much of Asia Minor (they're basically a similar hazard to vampires; unlikely to attack a main settlement unless it's very weak, but will pick off individuals and small groups). These slave-catchers, and coaster traders and military expeditions, tend to spread diseases around as they travel, much like European explorers, conquistadors, and settlers did in the New World 1500-1900. The coaster society is a major driver of regional population movement, as the coastal zone is constantly drawing in captives while at the same time it has an outflow of escaped slaves, refugees from destroyed communities, etc. (they also indirectly drive a lot of population movement from the plagues they spread and from people moving to get farther away from them).

Big and powerful coaster city-states have large slave populations. Coaster slavery is less feminized than inlander slavery, as the coasters have more use for male slaves for heavy agricultural labor, but it is still quite feminized, for the same basic reasons as inlander slavery. Standard coaster operating procedure after total defeat of a rival community is to massacre most of the men and enslave most of the women. Coaster slave catchers preferentially target women. Unlike the inlander society, in which the social technologies of coercion are very rudimentary, coaster society is beginning to develop things like slave barracks, chain gangs, professional slave overseers, etc.. Coaster slaves often do not reproduce themselves, due to short lifespans, the gender imbalance of the coaster slave population, and the "would you want to bring a child into that kind of life?" factor, but when they do coaster slavery is often hereditary, though coaster masters have the option of acknowledging children of slaves as their own (a lot of people born into coaster slavery are conceived by masters basically raping their slaves), in which case they inherit the social status of the father; the trend is to acknowledge sons (who are more useful to the masters as male heirs and warriors) early in life when they're young enough to thoroughly socialize into the master's culture while leaving daughters in slavery. Coaster society has much higher socio-economic inequality than inland agriculturalist or hunter-gatherer society. The basic unit of coaster social organization is the patrilineal clan, with smaller and poorer clans vassalized to bigger and richer ones, and clan membership and rank within the clan as major components of social identity and determinants of socio-economic status. Patrilineal descent being important means coaster society is more patriarchal than inlander society, with coaster women having less sexual freedom and less freedom in general than inlander agriculturalist or hunter-gatherer women (the fact that coaster city-states often have relatively giant majority-female slave populations also contributes to this; the institutions and cultural sensibilities of a society like that tend to be not great for "citizen" women either).

I made up the coasters cause I wanted to set up an Alien vs. Predator sort of conflict between the vampire pack in my fanfic and a suitably nasty human proto-state; I bet that shows.

Hunter-gatherers: these are still a major feature of the Anatolian world in this era, especially in the inland northeast and in regions that aren't great for agriculture (hills, mountains, uplands, swamps, etc.). They are mostly small groups of nomads; in this region larger and more sedentary hunter-gatherer groups have mostly adopted agriculture to some degree by this time. Already in this era these people can be understood as "barbarians" in the James C. Scott sense: people whose cultures have developed in dialogue with and reaction against settled people. A lot of these people are escaped slaves and refugees from the coastal zone and their descendants, and that influences their culture, e.g. intensifying the simple hunter-gatherer trend toward "fierce egalitarianism."

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Both the inland agriculturalists and the hunter-gatherers have to some degree developed a cultural identity of "not like those assholes on the coast and proud of that," and this has mostly influenced them in what I and probably you would see as good directions; weakening hierarchical institutions and cultural features and strengthening egalitarianizing ones. Unfortunately, I think the flip side of that process would be making the coasters worse; it'd be anachronistic to call the coasters fascists, but I think their culture would probably have a lot of that energy.

Back to Blindsight. I'm completely unsurprised that the only Blindsight fanfic I've found on Tumblr so far is gay kinky noncon vampire/human erotica. I say this with affection. Warning before you click that link: that fic is pretty sexually explicit and involves noncon and brainwashing and nonconsensual body modification.

Some thoughts I had reading it:

One of the ideas I'll touch on my fanfic is that vampires who coexisted with human farmers valued and deliberately created vampire/human hybrids because hybrids were immune to the crucifix glitch and could pass as weird-looking humans and could enter human settlements. Hybrids had less keen senses and slower reflexes than pure-blood vampires, so vampires wouldn't have wanted their whole pack to be like that, but in certain times and places it could be quite useful for a vampire pack to have a hybrid or three in it. This might have been an indirect pathway through which a lot of the vampire DNA in modern humans got there, as hybrids also inherited the dominant functional human variant of the protocadherin-y gene and hence didn't need to eat people and between that and being able to pass for human hybrids could integrate into human society relatively easily if they chose to. An unfortunate implication of that is there might have been a lot of cases of a vampire pack abducting a human woman and doing to her something kind of like what the vampire in Homocadherin-y does to his victims. Ancient vampires wouldn't have all the high tech stuff the vampire in Homocadherin-y uses to rewire his victims, but they might be able to do a sort of poor man's version using the sort of non-invasive tricks Valerie used to implant seizure cues in people (and the Homocadherin-y vampire is implied to use to soften up his victims). It'd be a lot cruder than the stuff the Homocadherin-y vampire does, but if anyone could figure out a way to do it vampires could, and they would have a lot of time to work on their victim. I think ancient vampires would probably want to leave the victim with a little more brains than the Homocadherin-y vampire mostly seems to anyway, as they would probably prefer a slave who could be used for labor (e.g. making and repairing and cleaning clothing, making and repairing gathering tools such as baskets, processing acorns and other processing-intensive foods) as well as sex/reproduction. This is definitely one of my squickiest and most nightmare fuel "what ancient vampires might have been like" ideas.

"No one knew why so many of our vampires, reconstituted from the scattered intronic embers of our stirred-up genome, turned out to be gay." - This would be very compatible with the way I'm writing ancient vampires! Though I think typical vampire sexuality would be demisexual-adjacent bi/pan, and modern vampires would mostly be almost asexual cause they're never around their own kind and humans wouldn't be very attractive to vampires (a human/vampire hybrid would basically have a bunch of minor sensorimotor disabilities by vampire standards, so we tend to ping to them as having undesirable genes). I think the species would have diversity of sexual behavior like humans do though, so a vampire with the proclivities of the one in Homocadherin-y could definitely exist.

"Blindsight also makes it clear that vampires are not at all friendly. Like some CEOs, they’re high-functioning sociopaths who occasionally consume their employees. Like some other CEOs, I assume they enjoy terrifically kinky sex lives." - I can definitely see vampires tending to be kinky, both in that aggression and fear are very prominent in their mental landscape and likely to get cross-wired with their sexuality and in the autism-ish sense that their sensory processing and emotions are different from human-typical so they might enjoy (by human standards) unusual stimuli. One filling in the gaps in canon I developed is hunting/fighting mode and sexual arousal are somewhat physiologically similar states for vampires: they rev up their metabolism, allow blood to flow freely through their outer tissues, and lower their sensory filters. Sexual arousal lacks the dothe-like quality of hunting/fighting mode and the experiences are rather different internally, but definitely kinky possibilities in the adjacency.

Though I see the social position of most modern vampires (at the time of Blindsight and Echopraxia) as less sociopathic CEOs and more twenty-first century equivalent of royal harem concubines, fussed over and protected and valued for their intelligence but very controlled and imprisoned in institutions that mostly don't even pass the burrito test, let alone let them get up to weird coke-fueled orgies (let alone let them get up to the sort of stuff the Homocadherin-y vampire does). I'd guess that the Homocadherin-y vampire either is one of Valerie's co-escapees after escaping human control or got a "be useful enough to us and we look the other while way while you amuse yourself doing horror movie stuff" deal from the people he works for.

Re: my last post: A few minor notes on some of the weird stuff in The World of Ice & Fire:

Memecucker was right that there’s totally an island of Neanderthals! Like they said, they’re not called that, but it’s totally like “yeah, there’s an island of Neanderthals and they’re known for their whaling expeditions.”

One kind of nitpicky point: it’s mentioned that this Neanderthal nation used to have extensive holdings on Essos but then lost them in wars against the Dothraki, and it repeatedly mentions the Dothraki killing their men and carrying their women into slavery, but... Weren’t Neanderthals really strong? To the point that the difference between them and Homo sapiens sapiens was substantially bigger than the differences between the sexes within Homo sapiens sapiens? If so, that gendering seems kind of silly in this context; either any captives would probably be used for the same sort of hard labor male slaves tended to be used for historically (as they’d be too dangerous for household and/or sexual slavery), or they’d be too dangerous to keep as slaves.

Also it mentions a giant mountain range with three passes that are controlled by cities of women warriors, so at first I was like, OK, sounds like this world has its version of an Amazon myth, but then it gets deeply cursed:

“Many accounts inform us that the mountain warriors of Kayakayanaya, Samyriana, and Bayasabhad are all women, daughters of the Great Fathers who rule these cities, where girls learn to ride and climb before they learn to walk, and are schooled in the arts of the bow, the spear, the knife, and the sling from earliest childhood. Lomas Longstrider himself tells us that there are no fiercer fighters on all the earth. As for their brothers, the sons of the Great Fathers, ninety-nine of every hundred are gelded when they reach the age of manhood and live out their lives as eunuchs, serving their cities as scribes, priests, scholars, servants, cooks, farmers, and craftsmen. Only the most promising males, the largest and strongest and most comely, are permitted to mature and breed and become Great Fathers themselves in their turns.”

It sounds like one of those cults that basically exist so the high-ranking men in the cult can have harems, taken to its horrifying ultimate logical extreme and mixed with some gross fashy eugenics! EEEEEEWWWW!!!! That is a remarkably nasty-sounding dystopia there! I sure would not want to meet these people! It also reminds me a little of social insects, which is another level of the creepiness.

In another post I wrote:

“Like … right now I’m planning out a story I intend to write in January; it’s supposed to be a kind of deconstruction of the Fremen mirage, and very much one of the thoughts going into it is “yo, a Proud Warrior Race would be a horrible society to live in or have as neighbors, we shouldn’t romanticize them!” and yet … I feel that the “bad guy” culture in it is much better, from a literary viewpoint, for me having given some thought to the material base of their society and how that would shape their culture. I could have just written them as flat edgelordy-grimdark barbarians, but thinking about their culture in materialist terms gave me a more complex and nuanced picture that I think will make for a more interesting and nuanced story and a fictional society that feels more interesting and human and alive.”

So, I want to infodump a little about this fictional culture I’ve thought up! I decided to split my infodumping into three posts, of which this is the second. In my previous post, I talked about the material conditions and subsistence strategy that shape this culture. If you haven’t read it already, I suggest you click that link and read my last post before you read this one, as it’s important context for what I’ve written here. In this and my next post I’ll talk about these people as a culture instead of just as an economy. I was originally going to make this whole thing two posts, but there’s so much stuff that could go in the culture part I decided I better split that up. In this post I’ll make a broad outline of the less “where does the food come from and where does the sewage go?” aspects of these people’s social structure, try to give you a general picture of how their society works. In my next post I’ll try to give you a more intimate “human” picture of what these people’s lives are like and what sort of people they are; talk more about relationships and attitudes and so on.

History and context:

The ancestors of these people were abducted from Bronze Age Earth by imperialistic aliens and used as basically slaves and slave-soldiers by these aliens. Some time in the last millennium BCE these imperialist aliens and their enemies blew each other up in the interstellar empire equivalent of a nuclear apocalypse. In the aftermath of this war the alien civilizations never really recovered, but the descendants of the human slaves built their own interstellar civilization, and the space nomad raiders I’ve been talking about are one branch of that civilization (the surviving aliens now mostly live on a small number of their planets that avoided destruction during the big ancient war, while nowadays most inhabited worlds in local space are populated more-or-less entirely by humans). There’s complexity here I’m not going to get into now, but as I said in my previous post, a significant point is these space nomad raiders I’m talking about mostly interact with other humans; the foreigners they interact with are mostly other humans, and the victims of their raiding are mostly other humans.  The location of Earth was lost in the chaos of the big ancient war, and Earth continued its independent cultural development (i.e. real history) and was isolated from the rest of the setting and the rest of humanity for about 3500 years or so, with re-contact between Earth humanity and the rest of humanity happening maybe around 30 years before the story I’m planning to write (which takes place some time in the twenty-second or twenty-third century CE).

The story I’m planning takes place against a background of a utopian-ish future Earth society that was in the process of colonizing the solar system fighting an “alien invasion” of these space nomad raiders.

Gender weirdness:

These people went straight from Bronze Age to space age, they completely missed the Enlightenment etc., and their former alien masters had little interest in giving them a more “progressive” culture (and were kind of too starfish alien to even really think in those terms; e.g. they were genderless hermaphrodites, so why wouldn’t they more-or-less just shrug and accept a Bronze Age human’s ideas about human gender?). So, to us these people’s culture would look like a strange mix of the very primitive and the space age, with the two combining in strange ways.

These people have strong gender roles and no concept of gender equality in the sense we think of it. Their society still runs on a “men are warriors, women are non-combatants who at best get patronizing protection and at worst are part of the spoils the men fight over” paradigm. Most younger men are more-or-less full-time warriors; their lives are more-or-less completely dedicating to raiding, defending the community from raids, and preparing for doing these things. If they survive long enough to become too old to fight they usually “retire” and then spend their time doing maintenance work on the weapons and passing on their knowledge to the younger generations of warriors and warriors-in-training. Women do most of the non-combatant work.

This might sound like a recipe for a rather brutal patriarchy, and in a way that conclusion isn’t wrong, but... This means women are doing most of the work of keeping the space habitat running. And remember, much of the labor of keeping a space community alive is specialized skilled labor; the sort of work where trying to extract labor through simple brutality wouldn’t work well. Women are most of the machinists and the repair technicians and the nuclear reactor operators and the doctors and so on. As I said in my last post, you really don’t want to anger the person who fixes the machine that makes the air you breathe, one of the people who tend the nuclear reactor that provides energy to your community, or the person who might do surgery on you. So this is a society with lots of female power (which coexists with horrifying institutionalized abuse of other women).

Now, in my last post I stressed how a society like this will be labor-limited and want to make efficient use of labor, so you may be thinking that having half the population be full-time warriors sounds extremely inefficient. And it would be! But that’s not what these people do. For one thing, that’s a simplification of their system; there are gender-variant male eunuchs and enslaved men who do “women’s work,” and as I said retired warriors do maintenance work on the weapons and raiding ships. But what really helps in making their system viably efficient is their population isn’t 50% male. This is where it gets weird.

Remember when I said earlier that a small almost-self-sufficient space community would have tightly controlled reproduction? Among these people, there’s a powerful order of priestesses that does that. They regulate reproduction to prevent over-reproduction or under-reproduction and to minimize the effects of inbreeding ... but they’ve also spent the last couple of thousand years doing eugenics and genetic tinkering on these people. Partially they’re into creepy fascist trying to breed superior warriors stuff, but also at some point they fiddled with the human meiosis process to give these people a naturally unbalanced sex ratio. I’m thinking they got it to the point where something like 60% of the children born among these people are female. The sex ratio among adults is even more skewed because of higher male early mortality rates, a tendency to ritually kill male captives while keeping female captives, etc.. This gives maybe 20% of the adult population being active warriors (remember, the retired warriors are mostly functionally maintenance workers until they get too old and feeble to do that too), which is probably still inefficiently big but manageable.

So these people have some of the social structures and cultural attitudes of a patriarchal society, but they’re a society where men are a minority and masculinity is defined by doing something socially prestigious but economically marginal (and, incidentally to this point but important to understanding their culture, they’re a society where warrior vs. almost everything else is heavily gendered).

Tribal warrior barbarian hordes IN SPACE:

Another aspect of these people being a weird mix of the extremely primitive and the space age is that they have advanced technology but they are basically a patriarchal clan rule society.

The basic social unit of this society is the patrilineal kin-group, i.e. the patriarchal clan. Inheritance is patrilineal and marriage is virilocal; when a woman marries she moves into her husband’s family’s dwelling, she becomes part of her husband’s clan, and her children “belong” to her husband’s clan. Because social kinship is basically unilineal, these clans become quite big; a normal size is thousands of people (and that’s if you don’t count non-kin dependents). A typical habitat community contains maybe five or six of these big clans. Usually the most powerful clan (usually the biggest) is the “royal family” and exercises hegemony over the habitat, while the other clans are allied to it in an arrangement similar to feudal vassalage. Attached to these clans through various vassalage-like and slavery-like arrangements are a large number of non-kin dependents, who usually make up the majority of the community’s population (more on them later). These clans are very much families in the Mafia sense of the word. So, I said earlier that the mobile space habitat community is the basic political unit of this culture, but most of those communities are more like five or six allied big Mafia gangs/families in a trench-coat.

The social glue of this society is blood ties, marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of what can broadly be called fictive kinship style relationships. The line between marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of fictive kinship is often blurry - indeed, these are basically Earth Western concepts that I’m imposing on this society to communicate what it’s like; these people would not carve their own social reality at the places I’m carving it by using these terms. As I said, this is a clan rule society; your social position is basically entirely a question of who your relatives and in-laws are or who you are affiliated with or owned by; the concept of an individual having legal rights (or even really legal personhood) separate from their clan affiliations basically doesn’t exist.

Status and rank within a clan is mostly hereditary, though it’s mediated by gender and age, and there’s also a significant “meritocratic” charismatic component (e.g. a younger son of a previous patriarch who’s a distinguished warrior and popular with the cousins may be chosen for leadership over a less distinguished and less popular older son who all else being equal would have been ahead in the succession order). The clan overall functions as a disciplined hierarchical organization with a delegation of authority and duties that’s orderly enough to be more-or-less functional (patriarch bosses around his brothers and sons, who boss around his cousins, who boss around their cousins, etc.), but there’s a significant amount of jockeying and potential for overlapping conflicting authority within that. Note: I’m making this sound like a basically male hierarchy, but remember that this is a society with lots of female power, the wives of high-status men tend to be high-status themselves and often have significant power bases of their own, so high-status women are very much big players in this.

These communities are economically egalitarian but socially inegalitarian. Your clan leader isn’t much richer than you; he probably has some servants and a somewhat bigger apartment and somewhat nicer clothes and furniture and somewhat better food and so on, but that’s about it - but he can control your life in more-or-less the same way your parents controlled your life when you were 14, you must show him deference, and if he wants almost any sort of favor you’d better give it to him. Power in this society isn’t about having stuff, it’s about being respected and obeyed.

The clan is responsible for the conduct of its members and your conduct reflects on your clan, so this is an “honor culture” where reputation is very important; you can expect to get killed by your own relatives if you harm or embarrass your own clan badly enough, and on the flip-side if you do something heroic your whole clan gets a boost to its reputation and “soft power” by association with you. Between this and what I said in the rest of this section, this is a society where most people (of any gender) have little personal freedom.

One thing these people mercifully mostly don’t have is the spiraling inter-clan blood-feuds that often happen in clan rule societies on Earth. You really, really, really don’t want gloves-off open gang warfare in a space habitat. So, these people have developed powerful social mechanisms for resolving disputes before they get to the blood feud stage. Unfortunately, these dispute resolution mechanisms themselves include lethal violence, i.e. there’s a tradition of often lethal dueling. These basically controlled murders are a significant cause of male early mortality among these people, so in that sense this is a very violent society even internally, before you get to all the violence they inflict on outsiders. However, this violence is very gender-asymmetric; among these people the taboos against killing women are stronger than the taboos against killing men, and there are especially very strong taboos against killing female skilled specialists (doctors, engineers, etc.). Ironically, as a consequence of the way male eunuchs and enslaved men are considered not really men, they are more-or-less grouped with the women for purposes of these taboos, so they are often actually safer from intra-community violence than higher-status men are.

This basically fits with men in these communities doing something that is prestigious but economically marginal; they get some prestige and power and privilege, but they are treated as disposable, and you can interpret the dueling as them having internalized this collective judgment on them. Mind you, it’s mostly not the same people getting both ends of this deal; it’s mostly the high-status men who get the “prestige and power and privilege” end of the deal, and the low-ranking warriors tend to get more of the “treated as disposable” end of the deal. Though in fairness this society is one with an idea that a leader is supposed to actually lead in battle, so high-status men often do take the same sort of risks as their subordinates (on the other hand, the strong hereditary element of power in this society means it trends toward gerontocracy, so the guys at the very top are often “retired” from direct participation in fighting).

In my previous post I said that humans usually prefer sharing or trading to violent theft because violent theft means risk of injury or death. That’s kind of true of these people, but with these people there’s an internal social pressure that acts in the opposite direction. In this society, heroic deeds in battle reflect positively on your clan and increase its prestige and “soft power,” and also because of the charismatic “meritocratic” component of their hierarchy impressing people by performing heroic deeds in battle is one of the few avenues of social mobility available to men in this society (note: “heroic deeds” in this context often means things like pulling off some particularly audacious heist; things that directly benefit the community if they succeed, so in a sense this is a smart incentive system). So this society will have a lot of ambitious young men who at least kind of want battles to happen so they have opportunities to prove themselves, and clan leaders will similarly often want battles to happen so they have opportunities to increase the prestige and influence of their clan.  Also, individuals and clans who contribute to a successful raid often get to keep some of the loot or have the right to control how some or all of it is distributed, and that makes raiding tempting to people who aren’t satisfied with what they have in the status quo even if the community as a whole has enough resources. So this is a society that’s likely to be more violent than is “rational,” if you define “rational” as “acts like a hive mind instead of like an actual human community made up of people who have their own goals.” Their whole social structure basically reflects that sort of dynamic; their warrior class is probably inefficiently big, but masculinity and participation in the raiding have become so entwined that they can’t shrink it without facing ferocious resistance from people who have their whole identity invested in being warriors; you can’t take somebody who’s been literally raised from birth to do one thing and has their whole sense of self-worth bound up in it and just casually reassign them to a different job (I’m thinking the man = warrior thing started when these people were slave-soldiers + logistical support “camp followers,” and survived a transition from “we’re an army with some ‘live off the land’ short-term self-sufficiency capacity” to “we’re space nomads who use violence as part of our survival strategy”).

“Women’s spaces” and non-kin clan dependents:

Societies with very strong gender roles often have lots of homosociality, and these people very much fit that pattern. Because women do most of the productive work among these people, most of the habitat community’s work-spaces are female majority spaces that the male warriors don’t directly interact with much (there are male eunuchs and enslaved men working in there with the women, but in these people’s gender system those hardly count as men, and anyway the women outnumber them quite solidly). So, basically, this society has a more-or-less separate majority female social world that has its own social networks, its own strong affiliation/friendship groups (mostly work gangs), and its own centers of power.

Being a clan-based patriarchal society, these people also have a marriage system that’s kind of a bad deal for women (patrilineal and virilocal marriage strengthens male-centered social networks while disrupting female-centered social networks, and makes wives vulnerable to abuse). This is a society where patriarchal family institutions coexist with a semi-separate female-majority social world and lots of female power, so a lot of women respond to the former by never marrying. If this was a more conventional patriarchal society this might mean lots of childless spinsters, but this is a society where maintaining high genetic diversity is a community survival imperative and where a female majority population and high female homosociality makes it easy to create all-female cooperative child-care arrangements, so the result is lots of unmarried mothers.

Note: “unmarried” may be a simplification here, I’m thinking there might be a sort of “marriage lite” where the woman gets some of the benefits of marriage (e.g. her husband has “honor code” obligations to protect her and her children from harm and take revenge on anyone who harms or kills her or one of her children) but she and her husband keep separate residences and her husband and his kin have no authority over her. But if this status exists it’s basically a formal recognition of a boyfriend/girlfriend type relationship and the woman can “divorce” the man whenever she wants. Possibly the line between boyfriend/girlfriend and husband/wife in this culture is fluid (IIRC in a lot of past societies all a heterosexual couple had to do to be considered married was live together and call each other husband and wife, and I could see the sort of “marriage-lite” I’m talking about here being similarly fluid, though since the couple not living together is part of the point of it the details of how it works would have to be different).

Children of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are for purposes of clan affiliation considered to have no father. This means they’re by default more-or-less outside the clan system, especially if the mother doesn’t have a patrilineal descent connection to one of the local clans (e.g. if she’s an abductee who was taken in a raid). Because being an unmarried (or “married lite”) mother is a better deal for the majority of women, offspring of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are usually a majority of the habitat community’s population. So in a typical community of these people, the local big clans dominate the community politically but are actually a minority of the community’s population.

I’m thinking the way this is usually handled is legally fatherless people legally directly “belong” to the “king” (the leader of the community’s most powerful clan). But in practice legally fatherless children are usually raised by majority-female cooperative child-care groups in majority female social spaces that have a lot of independence, and if they’re female they’ll usually spend their entire lives in those spaces and follow the same reproductive strategy their mothers did. So the effect is to strengthen the semi-separate social world character of these female majority work-spaces.

That’s how it works with legally fatherless girls and women, with legally fatherless boys and men things are more complicated. If you’re a legally fatherless boy among these people you spend the first 11-12 years of your life with your mother, and then you’re given various aptitude and fitness tests, and if you fail you’re left with your mother to be raised to be a worker, and if you pass you’re taken away from your mother and given to a group of legally fatherless warriors and retired warriors to be raised by them and if all goes well ultimately become one of them. It’s a bit like what the Spartans did, though thankfully the training is actually significantly less nasty than what they did in the agoge; I’ll talk about it more in my next post.

I’ll generally talk more about the details of what life in this society is like in my next post!

So, in my last post I wrote this:

“Like … right now I’m planning out a story I intend to write in January; it’s supposed to be a kind of deconstruction of the Fremen mirage, and very much one of the thoughts going into it is “yo, a Proud Warrior Race would be a horrible society to live in or have as neighbors, we shouldn’t romanticize them!” and yet … I feel that the “bad guy” culture in it is much better, from a literary viewpoint, for me having given some thought to the material base of their society and how that would shape their culture. I could have just written them as flat edgelordy-grimdark barbarians, but thinking about their culture in materialist terms gave me a more complex and nuanced picture that I think will make for a more interesting and nuanced story and a fictional society that feels more interesting and human and alive.”

So, I want to infodump a little about this fictional culture I’ve thought up! I’m splitting this up into two posts because otherwise it’d be long in a way my Tumblr’s format is not kind to; in the first post I’m going to talk about the material base that defines this fictional society I’ve thought up, and in the second post I’m going to talk about more historically contingent features of their culture.

Note: for a lot of what’s in this post, I tried to make something hard SF-ish, but much of what I’ve written was the result of kind of “working backwards” from the sort of culture I was imagining to a material base that might create such a culture. So this is more playing with an idea than an attempt at anything particularly realistic.

Material base:

The basic political and economic unit of this society is the semi-self-sufficient space habitat community. These communities are about the size of a small town, I’m thinking thousands to tens of thousands of people (though I haven’t quite fixed it firmly, and anyway there’s wide variation; more successful communities are bigger). This town-size community lives in a semi-mobile space habitat, which I’m thinking is more-or-less a hollow cylinder spun for centrifugal gravity attached to a central spindle which is spacecraft construction facilities, engines, etc.. This space habitat contains enough hydroponic gardens, industrial machinery, etc. that the habitat can sustain itself completely independently for at least a few years. The space habitat has a rocket engine and a hyperspace engine, so it’s mobile, and these people are at least semi-nomadic, often moving their habitats when faced with opportunity or danger. The space habitat carries smaller spacecraft that can be detached and sent out to mine asteroids and KBO-type bodies, scoop helium 3 up from gas giant atmospheres, etc. and return these resources to the main habitat. Along with a closed life support system and efficient recycling, this makes such a community almost self-sufficient (though the almost qualifier is important, as I’ll discuss later).

People who are remembering Brett Devereaux’s last essay here may have noted a certain parallel with steppe nomads, with the main habitat being kind of analogous to the mobile but vulnerable main nomad camp where the non-combatants, livestock, and valuables are kept while the smaller resource-gatherer etc. craft are kinda analogous to the highly mobile horse-mounted war parties.

The reason these communities are so small is that their economies are not resource-limited but machinery-limited, labor-limited, and skilled specialized labor limited. Most raw materials these people may need are super-abundant to them, the bottleneck is transforming those raw materials into air, food, machinery, furniture, useful energy, etc. and maintaining efficient almost-closed loops of recycling. Sustaining a space community requires lots of complex machinery and lots of specialized skilled labor, and maintaining and replacing the machinery often requires more complex machinery (tools to make the tools) and more specialized skilled labor. Keeping humans alive in space is hard, so the return on investment from this is low. Therefore, these communities generally try to make efficient use of labor and maintain more-or-less the smallest viable population.

This implies reproduction within communities like this will probably be carefully controlled. A community like this must stay within a delicate balance; they must have enough people to do all the necessary labor with a comfortable safety margin to avoid situations like the only person with some important skill dying unexpectedly before they could train their replacement, but they must not have so many people that they strain the life support capacity of their habitat. That suggests reproduction usually tightly and deliberately controlled to stay at more-or-less replacement rate and no more.

It also implies a community like this will probably be quite communitarian and disciplined. Consumption will have to be tightly controlled. The means of production will probably be directly controlled by the political leadership. Its economy would probably look communist-ish to us, or maybe like a Bronze Age palace economy, with most necessities and luxuries being distributed basically as rations. Commercial transactions will be marginal to the internal economies of these communities; they’ll probably exist, but only in the form of informal mostly small-scale barter (think something similar to the cigarette economy that may exist in a prison), and they will not be anyone’s primary occupation or source of subsistence or power. Internal economic inequality within a community like this will be mostly a matter of status, not wealth; if somebody eats better it’s because they receive more and better food as an entitlement associated with their political office and/or social status, not because they own a big pile of gold that they use to buy food or something. Probably a community like this will be fairly economically egalitarian even if it is socio-politically unequal; if there’s a king he might have a somewhat bigger apartment, somewhat more and better food, a nice wardrobe of good-quality clothes with lots of bling, etc., but the difference in access to resources between him and one of his servants would be trivial compared to the difference in access to resources between me and a billionaire.

OK, but these people are supposed to be “bad guys” and a “Proud Warrior Race,” so where does that come in? Well, now let’s look at the economy of a community like this and ask: what might they need to get from other communities, and by extension what might they want to violently steal from outsiders?

Certainly not raw resources! If they want water, nitrogen, deuterium, iron, copper, platinum, etc. they can just send out a mining ship to an asteroid or KBO-like body to get some and bring it to them. If they want helium 3 they can just send out a scoop-ship to go down into the atmosphere of the nearest gas giant, gather some up, and bring it to them. And so on. Raw resources are mostly super-abundant to a culture like this and it would make no sense to risk injury or death stealing them from armed outsiders (there are a few exceptions to this that prove the rule, more on that later). So, if not raw resources, what?

Remember that their economy is machinery-limited. They need lots of complex machinery to survive, and then they need more complex machinery to repair and replace that complex machinery (tools to make the tools), and then sometimes they need tools to make the tools to make the tools, and so on. If each community had to be completely self-sufficient this might spiral out unmanageably. But it becomes much more manageable if they are just mostly self-sufficient and tap into larger commercial/industrial networks, e.g. a mostly planet-dwelling society with some orbital infrastructure and asteroid mining that has millions of people. Then if there’s the occasional hard to make spare part they can’t make themselves, it’s not a big deal, they can just send a trading expedition to get some of those parts from outsiders every ten years or so. Or if there’s some hard to make anti-viral drug they can’t make themselves, again, no big deal, they can just send a trading expedition to get some of it from outsiders every few years. A trading expedition ... or a raiding expedition.

Probably they would usually prefer to trade, humans usually prefer sharing or trading to violent theft because it’s less risky, violent theft means the possibility of injury or death (plus in this case complex machinery would be likely to get smashed up in a violent heist). A mutually beneficial trading relationship between a culture like this and a planet-dweller culture would be quite natural; to these people a planet-dweller society is rich in labor but poor in mineral resources such as platinum, while to planet-dwellers this space-dweller culture is rich in mineral resources but poor in labor and certain kinds of machinery and high value added finished goods. But here we have a potential basis for a culture that follows a Viking-style strategy of “if they outgun us, trade, if we outgun them, raid,” with the consequence of this culture’s relationship to other societies being a mix of trade and war.

Some raw resources may be worth stealing here; exceptions that prove the rule that for a space-dwelling culture like this raw resources aren’t worth stealing but value-added finished goods may be. For example, it’s theoretically possible to sift small quantities of naturally occurring antimatter from gas giant magnetic fields, and that stuff might be valuable for catalyzing fusion reactions. That might be worth stealing, because in a sense it’s a raw resource that’s kind of like a finished good; the difficulty is concentrating the very diffuse stuff; an antimatter capture facility with its Penning traps almost full might be worth raiding in the same way a big hoard of gathered acorns might be worth raiding for hunter-gatherers (this resource is abundant but diffuse, somebody else has taken the trouble to gather a lot of it into one spot, you can effectively appropriate their hard work by stealing the hoard). Similarly I could see this culture opportunistically intercepting freighters carrying helium 3, mined semi-refined asteroid material, etc., not so much stealing the resources as functionally stealing the labor of gathering and refining the resources.

There’s another thing a community like this might want to take from outsiders: people.

The economy of a community like this is also skilled specialized labor limited. In fact, that’s probably the more fundamental bottleneck: they can’t build and operate all the machinery they need to be truly self-sufficient because they don’t have the skilled specialist labor, and this is an equilibrium trap because trying to create more skilled specialist labor has a low return on investment for them; keeping a human alive in space is resource-intensive, and a new human probably won’t begin to give them a return on the investment for at least 15 years or so, likely longer (skilled specialized labor, so think e.g. doctors and engineers and literal rocket scientists; training them will take time). One way a community like this can adjust the equation to be more in its favor is to acquire skilled specialized laborers who have already been raised and trained by a different community; then they can skip all the investment in the child and go straight to benefiting from the labor of the fully trained adult.

There’s another reason a community like this might want to take people: genetic diversity. We’re talking about a small community, maybe a few tens of thousands of people, that is somewhat isolated. Inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity can kill small and isolated communities. As I said earlier, reproduction in a community like this will probably be extensively controlled, and I think one aspect of that might be controlling marriages to eliminate or minimize the risks associated with inbreeding. But it would be helpful if a community like this could assimilate some outsiders every generation, to increase its genetic diversity. So the community may want to assimilate even outsiders who don’t have any particularly in-demand specialist skills, to boost its genetic diversity.

Note: while this is a setting where aliens exist, it’s one that’s demographically dominated by humans, so most of the foreigners these people interact with will be other humans. This is significant here.

These two motivations synergize with each other. Most obviously, assimilating a skilled specialist outsider increases the community’s skilled specialist labor pool and also the community’s genetic diversity. But also, because of dynamics adjacent to Baumol’s cost disease, even relatively “unskilled” labor would be valuable in a community like this. Somebody who cleans toilets frees up somebody else to be e.g. a doctor or a nuclear engineer, in a much more reliable and direct way than is the case in a high-population capitalist society like ours. So even assimilating a relatively “unskilled” outsider could both increase the community’s genetic diversity and give it a real economic boost (as with a skilled specialist, compared to creating a new worker through natural reproduction and education, it’s a significant savings to the community if the new worker has been raised to adulthood by a different community).

I’m putting “unskilled” in quotes here cause I think when people say “unskilled” when talking about labor often what they are really talking about is “skills that are taught outside formal school institutions” or “skills that are transmitted but not taught.” I think “unskilled” in this sense is often a political term used to devalue people’s labor and justify people being paid little, worked hard, exposed to unpleasant working conditions, etc., so I don’t like using it ... but I can’t think of a better word to quickly communicate the concept I want to communicate here; I must work with the language my culture has given me. But I’ll put it in quotes here, to indicate I’m not using the concept uncritically.

Aside: you might think that a labor-limited community would make lots of use of robots and other automation, but I’m not sure that’d be true of these people. You’d think a futuristic super-Roomba would be a labor savings compared to a person with a simpler hand-pushed vacuum cleaner, but what about all the labor and machinery needed to make the Roomba? A Roomba represents a strategy of investing secondary sector labor to save tertiary sector labor, and that makes sense if you’ve got a big population and can build big factories so you can benefit from economies of scale, but it might not work as well for almost-self-sufficient small communities. A Roomba factory may be worth it if it saves the labor of a million human cleaners, but what about if it saves the labor of 100 human cleaners? A human is a very useful general-purpose gadget that can replace many specialized gadgets. So I think, counterintuitively, in a community like this you might actually see a lot of theoretically relatively easily automated manual labor being done by humans. This would synergize with a strategy of assimilating some relatively “unskilled” outsiders to increase genetic diversity; these people must be fed, given air to breathe, etc. like everyone else, so it would make sense to try to take advantage of their “as a human, they are a very useful general-purpose gadget that can replace many specialized gadgets” feature. Remember, this is a community that would want to make efficient use of labor and that would want to maintain approximately replacement rate reproduction.

As I said, humans generally prefer sharing or trading to violent theft, because violent theft is risky, and I think that would probably apply here too. Space communities like this would likely have traditions of peacefully “trading” people with each other. One relatively nice way this might happen is e.g. every ten years communities exchange groups of young volunteer emigrants. A less nice way is something like a political leader selling another community’s political leader a doctor and receiving as payment two relatively “unskilled” but young, pretty, and fertile women to be brides for his sons. But again, where trade is a possibility, violent theft is also a possibility. So along with stealing machinery and value-added finished goods, a primary goal of raiding may be capturing people; especially skilled specialists such as doctors, nuclear engineers, etc., but anyone who looks like they might make a good slave might be opportunistically abducted.

If this is starting to sound like nightmare fuel, you’re not wrong, but there is one significant mitigating factor. Remember that the most high-value and sought-after captives would be skilled specialists such as doctors, nuclear engineers, etc.. This is the kind of work where trying to extract labor from people by simple brutality doesn’t work well. You can’t just whip a computer programmer to make them code faster, and you really don’t want to anger the person who fixes the machine that makes the air you breathe, one of the people who tend the nuclear reactor that creates energy for your community, or the person who might do surgery on you. So the experience of being captured and enslaved by these people will often be less chain gang or Gor novel stuff and more “You are given a small but comfortable apartment, decent food, and moderate work assignments. It is made clear to you that bad things will happen to you if you make trouble or don’t work. If you obey your captors and do the work they tell you to do, they will be nice to you and treat you well. Their ultimate plan is to get you to become accustomed to your new life, make friends, get a boyfriend or girlfriend and make a child or three with them, and in this way become sufficiently invested in your new community that you wouldn’t want to go home even if you could.”

Of course, let’s not be too charitable to people who are basically enslavers; that’s how relatively high-value captives are treated, less valued captives are at much more risk of physical and sexual abuse, reproductive coercion, and unsafe and unpleasant working and living conditions.

If you’ve read James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed and Against The Grain, this may remind you a little of Mr. Scott’s thesis that for much of the history of civilization states were labor-limited, not land-limited. Mr. Scott’s work was a big inspiration to me when I was imagining this culture. Someday I might make a post talking about how I think “the purpose of war isn’t to acquire resources, it’s to acquire people, infrastructure, and machinery” is one of the more plausible paradigms for war in space, but this is long enough so I’ll leave that for another day.

Earlier I drew an analogy between the resource gatherer ships of these people and the war parties of steppe nomads. The context I’ve described here makes the analogy much better. Communities like this won’t just carry resource gatherer ships, but also raiding ships, built for raiding and heavily armed. This also implies violence will be a substantial factor in the life of a community like this; either they will have a significant class of professional warriors, or raiding and preparing for raiding will be a significant part of the average person’s life. I’m going with the first option, which is how you get a Proud Warrior Race instead of weekend-warrior types; as is usual in cases like this, the “Proud Warrior Race” is actually a specific privileged class within this society, and when you read that they are proud you should think of it in that context. I’ll talk about that a lot more in my next post, in which I’ll talk about these people as a culture instead of just as an economy.