Having a diverse assortment of human-settled worlds is a plot-friendly aspect of many science fiction settings. Authors may find themselves perplexed as to how they are to provide their colonists with the means to reach distant worlds while avoiding trade-driven homogenization (which might inhibit the development of planetary cultures along plot-friendly lines). Not to worry! There are many, many ways to provide sufficient space for worlds to find their own destinies.
At least five, in fact.
One answer is to have someone (or something) else providing the means by which humans spread from one system to another. If humans do not control (or even understand) the means by which people travel from one system to another, routine contact may be impossible.
Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods features this in its backstory. The vast majority of the human race (save for a handful of humans and a community of robots) are whisked away from the Earth by some unknown agency. Recontact occurs thousands of years later, after considerable cultural divergence.
Alison Sinclair’s Cavalcade shows the beginning of a similar process; offered a lift out of the solar system by an enigmatic starship, multitudes board, only belatedly comprehending the consequences of isolation.
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Some settings offer human technology sufficient to bridge the gap between stars with extraordinary effort, but insufficient to do this as a matter of routine. The sublight Exodus Fleet1 from Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few was a desperate bid to find a new home; recontact with Earth centuries later followed considerable cultural divergence.
Similarly, the generation ships that colonized the nearer stars in Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s Search the Sky were sufficient to deliver small groups and the occasional trading cargo. The founder effect and the resulting inbreeding2 drives the plot.
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Routine contact might be sabotaged by economic, political, or military events. The same Bussard ramjets that delivered the Quakers in Joan Slonczewski’s Still Forms on Foxfield to Tau Ceti might have facilitated subsequent visits from Earth. Nuclear war put a stop to interstellar travel until enough time had passed for terrestrial civilization to recover along very different lines from the community on Foxfield.
Brian M. Stableford used this trope in his Daedalus series. Dozens of insufficiently studied alien worlds were settled with inadequate technology. Terrestrial crises forced a lengthy hiatus in star travel. A hundred years later, the starship Daedalus sets out to determine if any of Earth’s children survived, and if so, how their alien worlds have reshaped them.
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Authors cannot overestimate the utility of inconvenient natural events in this matter.
Grenchstom’s Planet, the setting for Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, is free to while away the centuries independent of galactic cultures thanks to a disease that makes the world a deathtrap for most visitors.
Events on a far grander scale isolate Alta in Michael McCollum’s Antares Dawn; a supernova reshuffles the fold points on which interstellar travel depends. With no means to reach other systems, Alta is forced to develop along independent lines. Luckily for the colonists, their infrastructure is up to the challenge.
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Finally, nothing isolates like mutual loathing. Lois McMaster Bujold’s planet of Athos was settled by religious extremists determined to avoid the corrupting effects of mainstream civilization. Consequently, few galactics visit Athos, while only extreme crises can convince Athos’ people to visit the other worlds of the galaxy.
The colonies in David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers setting engaged in displays of nationalist pride—no Johnny Foreigner wanted here!—rather than financially prudent ventures. The result is a wealth of borderline insolvent communities compelled by economic reality into contact, but lacking the requisite diplomatic skills necessary to avoid violent disputes. It’s a setting almost tailor-made to provide mercenaries with regular employment!
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No doubt there are a multitude of options I’ve overlooked above, because I didn’t think of them or because they were the sixth or greater example on a decidedly non-comprehensive list of five. No doubt some of you will be kind enough to mention those neglected options in comments, which are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]The Exodus Fleet is propelled by what may well be the least plausible power source ever used in an SF novel: the energy of people walking around in the ship.
[2]Culture change due to the founder effect, inbreeding, AND Kornbluth’s deep-seated faith in a genetic analog of Gresham’s Law (bad genes drive out good genes).
By coincidence, I just listened to Earthsearch, a venerable radio serial that used relativity and a dash of mad AI to isolate a community: a generation relativistic starship returns to its home world to discover one of the things lost during Totally Accidental Meteor Impact That Was Actually Mass Murder was any knowledge of relativity. The ship counted a century by their clock. The stay-at-homes counted it as a million years.
My memory is sufficiently poor and time sufficiently inadequate that I can only come up with a few examples:-
First, of course, will be The Mote in God’s Eye, in which the Second Empire of Man has been busy picking up the pieces of the First Empire, including bringing worlds without Human contact back into the fold.
Trantor eventually becomes such a world in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (because there are only three books in the Foundation series, after all), as I recall.
And, finally, I’m re-reading The World Is Round, and don’t really know all the details yet, and, yes, the characters are treated as though they’re humans even though the Introduction admits that they probably aren’t, but certainly there has to have been some earlier exploratory phase during which the planet in question was settled by ancestors of the main characters.
What about pocket universes, like Tekumel?
In Piper’s TFH the FTL is low enough, and stars far enough apart, that they are isolated enough to avoid complete homogenization.
McCaffrey’s Pern is isolated via being thought to be long term uninhabitable. It would be fun to see how her Federated Sentient Planets coped with dragons.
Iain M. Banks’ Against a Dark Background settles for just being ridiculously far away from the rest of the Galaxy. Not that the plot is high on sociological speculation.
Poul Anderson’s “Starfog” has isolation produced by being in a, well, sort of “fog” — an interstellar cloud. The inhabitants of the isolated world have become unable to interbreed with other humans over the centuries, and there are other social effects of their isolation.
An odd aspect of Piper’s Federation is that trips of six months or so appear over and over. Zarathustra is six months from Earth, it is six months from Uller to both Niffleheim and Earth, six months from Fenris to Earth and six months from Earth to the Trisystem.
Somewhere or other Piper mentions that ship time passes at a different rate than planet time but I forget the conversion. It means habitual travellers like Jack Holloway are even more socially isolated than they might otherwise be.
Catherine Asaro’s Skolian series of novels has #1 as a backstory. From Wikipedia:
An odd aspect of Piper’s Federation is that trips of six months or so appear over and over. Zarathustra is six months from Earth, it is six months from Uller to both Niffleheim and Earth, six months from Fenris to Earth and six months from Earth to the Trisystem
“Well, ain’t this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!” (O Brother Where Art Thou)
To be honest this makes sense. Everywhere in London is 45 minutes away from everywhere else. In Los Angeles it’s an hour and a half.
I’m reminded of Ken MacLeod’s “Engines of Light” trilogy where humanity was whisked away to the other side of the galaxy on FAL ships. (Fast As Light) Travel between the various worlds takes years to those living on the planets, but just an instant for the passengers of the FAL ships. So things change a lot, especially when the worlds are about 20-40 light years apart.
Douglas Adams’ HitchHiker Trilogy has a variant on Isolation by Mad AI. The planet Krikkit is cut off by an impenetrable cloud in a deliberate effort to inculcate universe-annihilating xenophobia.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series has the planet Barrayar isolated for many years after a wormhole collapse. It was “rediscovered” when a new wormhole linking to it was found.
Liu Cixin’s Death’s End also has planetary isolation dialed up to an extreme with ‘black domains’ that civilizations can create to hide and/or shield their planet or solar system from other attacks by lowering the local speed of light, as well as the existence of micro-universes that draw mass from space.
Jayne Castle in her “Harmony” series has humans discover portals/gates and use them to expand into space, then the portals close, apparently forever, leaving colonists to scramble to sustain life on new planets.
I’ve used an asteroid belt that damaged a colony ship and trapped them on a planet. Another planet was quarantined because of a plague so no humans would come near it.
Dave Duncan’s Strings provides Earth with the ability to open portals to other Earthlike worlds. The catch is portals to any given world are transient and the time they are open isn’t really long enough to determine if the Earthlike worlds are actually habitable in the long run. All those colonies are very isolated and quite possibly doomed.
8: Public transit trips in Kitchener-Waterloo tend to be broken into legs each about one radio-drama episode in duration. I am certain this is coincidental but it shapes my listening habits.
Some classics:
Let’s start with Earth in Asimov’s duology about Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw (there are only two such books as, alas, Asimov never wrote the third one), which is deliberately isolated by the “Spacer” worlds and left to develop under conditions of population pressure, agoraphobia, and xenophobia.
A short-term version is the accidental colonial society in Tunnel in the Sky, which is showing interesting growth patterns when it is interrupted by being rediscovered.
Probably the most extravagant example is Le Guin’s Hainish universe, where the human(oid)s of Hain-Davenant colonized numerous worlds Iains ago and either lost interest or lost touch (never really clear which), only to reestablish contact just in time for a series of novels and short stories, so that each develops not only its own culture but its own set of cultures, worlds being big places.
Taking this same concept at a small scale, look at the divergent cultures of Diaspar and Lys in Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars.
And, of course, there’s the world in Eric Frank Russell’s “And Then There Were None,” which, again isolated, has developed a sort of anarcho-libertarian culture that is far more attractive than it would be in real life :)
@8 ajay: I was a teenager living in a suburb of LA in the late 1960s. Pretty much everything was “Oh, twenty minutes away on the freeway,” whether or not that was an accurate description or naively optimistic. If the trip involved commuting to work, though, all bets were off.
On Saturday, I foolishly described the light rail station nearest the theatre I work at as a short walk away, forgetting that other people see half a kilometre differently than I do. Not to mention that that was the most direct distance and many people prefer to stick to sidewalks while walking.
Six months was about the time for the longest voyages on earth in the days of sail, my guess here is that Piper went with that time as “not so long that culture is completely changed” while “not so short that interstellar travel is trivial.”
Isolated by plague or some other horrible hazard is always a good start. Combine that with very slow travel and poor communications and you have a recipe for problems – see e.g. Fred Pohl’s Stopping at Slowyear (1991), where the crew of a cargo ship are slow to learn just how much they don’t know about their port of call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_at_Slowyear
I’ve always wondered about the rest of the universe in Janet Kagan’s Mirabile stories. The protagonists were sent out on generation ships, and they often cuss the decisions made by the scientists back on Earth, but they don’t seem to have any current contact.
Also, John Barnes A Million Open Doors goes from slower space drive technology, with very few transfers from planet to planet, to a transporter-based instantaneous technology.
19: See also Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt, where one of the bits of news that didn’t make it to nearby systems was that Heaven suffered a civilization-ending civil war.
There was a trend in stories I read in the 80s (probably in Analog, maybe in books) to have an established colony that was set up by groups intending to perform their own sociological experiment, way back when colonization was expensive, suddenly discover neighbors of a radically different sociological group now that colonization is cheap. Bonus points if the newcomers have been dumped there because now colonization is so cheap the planet is the new Australia.
I always wondered why, when you’ve got a whole planet, you don’t just dump them on the opposite side, so the inevitable clashes happen once they’re far more established. It was obvious from the situation that whoever dumped them didn’t expect them to get along at all. But then, the culture clash was the point of the story.
The Foundation trilogy took an interesting shot at this. There was an entire galactic empire where everything was connected to some extent. The books were inspired by the fall of the Roman empire. Asimov told a story of a declining empire, to the point where communication with the outskirts was totally cut due to the decline of the empire and lack of interest in the area. That area then starts to develop under the predictions and moves of the first protagonist of the story. That lost in contact happens due to the declining nature of the empire, and it triggers changes to the region, making them prosper due to the loss of contact with a corrupt and dying civilization. It’s brilliant writing by the best scifi author ever.
22: You deposit the latecomers near the original settlers because that’s where the infrastructure for off-loading and supporting people is likely to be.
Canada got a million immigrants last year. There are lots of comparatively thinly populated regions in Canada newcomers could go. They don’t because there is very little infrastructure in those regions, a sparse economy, and in many cases, a climate that can turn live people into dead people. Immigrants head to already developed places like the urban corridor for the food, housing, and jobs.
The Steerswoman books haven’t (yet?) made it clear why their world is isolated.
Bujold also has the planet Barrayar isolated from the rest of the universe when the wormhole leading to it closes
@2 – Speaking of The Mote in God’s Eye, the rest of the universe was inaccessible to Mote Prime because the only tramline from its star terminated within the photosphere of a red giant, and the Moties didn’t have anything like the Langstrom Field to protect their ships against that environment. None of the ships they’d sent out had ever returned and they couldn’t figure out why. So they’d been bottled up in their solar system for hundreds of thousands of years.
Another good example of a plot-friendly interstellar isolating mechanism is in John Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire series, where secular changes in the Flow suddenly isolate the worlds of the Empire from one another.
@22) The most obvious example of the trend you mention (isolated groups forced into undesired contact after a much faster interstellar travel mechanism is invented) is John Barnes’ series that started with the book Pam Adams mentions in comment 20 — A Million Open Doors.
@27: Scalzi came to mind as I read the topic; Brin had the same effect on a larger-scale punchline to his Uplift universe (which at one point had several more galaxies in the polity — a fact that some parties seem unreasonably intent on hiding). ISTM that making the disconnections permanent after long connection makes stories of the isolation more difficult; one would expect each isolate to go downhill, and never see the interesting effects when isolation is ended.
@20: Barnes is another interesting example, including the original mechanism: an extension of @0’s 2nd case, involving dumping incubators, genetic information, and widely-varying cultural indoctrination on a lot of worlds. Barnes argued (in a short-story-and-essay collection) that this would produce lots of robust cultures, which gave him room for lots of conflict when they met.
I see people have brought up both Barrayar and Tunnel in the Sky; ISTR that both involved space ~storms that broke contact before conveniently dissipating. Anything for a good plot….
@29 There was no space storm isolating Barrayar. The wormhole originally used to settle the planet collapsed and never re-opened. Eventually someone found a new wormhole leading there.
Another great example is Larry Nevin’s integral trees and the smoke Ring, in the gas torus that surrounds a neutron star, humanity continues to evolve in a weightless atmosphere.
Isolation by secret location: make your doubletalk space drive so extremely cheap and efficient that anyone can easily get anywhere, but only if they know how to find it. It’s a big galaxy after all. For example, in Vance’s Demon Princes series the Oikumene has a common currency, language, and something resembling a police force, but Kokor Hekkus can easily have his own private, isolated world simply by being the only person who knows how to get there.
@24 That would’ve made sense, but they didn’t do it that way – the original colonists would have no infrastructure to handle space ships because they left when it was an expensive one-way trip, and they’d discover the unwanted guests when someone got lost or was on a long hunting trip. It was obviously just a lazy way to set up a culture clash, and if there’d only been one of them I’d have totally forgotten it.
#8 One of the things i like about Ben Abramovitch’ s Rivers of London series is that the police are constantly getting caught up in traffic and take much longer to get to the Scene than expected.
And of course in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (which is only SF/F if you accept Susan Wood’s postulant that since all fiction takes place in an imagined universe, all fiction is SF/F) West Covina is constantly described as being only two hours from the beach, but when the gang hire a party bus for the trip it is impossible to actually get to the beach. The pole dance is fun though.
One of the things i like about Ben Abramovitch’ s Rivers of London series is that the police are constantly getting caught up in traffic and take much longer to get to the Scene than expected.
This is realism. Average traffic speed in central London is 8.3 mph. Buses go at a brisk walking pace.
West Covina is constantly described as being only two hours from the beach
Small-island syndrome; I doubt that there is anywhere in the entire UK that is more than two hours from a beach!
The Foundation series was mentioned above (23), and I think it came up with an interesting and realistic mechanism, rather than handwavery about warp storms or magic stealth universes or whatever: political dysfunction, lack of money, and lack of interest.
At no point in the series does it become physically impossible to go from Terminus to Trantor, or even more physically difficult. It’s just that spaceflight is expensive and complicated. As the Empire falls apart, people become poorer, so there’s less reason for trade, and that means there’s less reason to keep up the huge industrial base needed to support spaceflight, so there’s less trade and everyone gets poorer still. The Empire gets into a vicious circle of decline.
Isolation by secret location: make your doubletalk space drive so extremely cheap and efficient that anyone can easily get anywhere, but only if they know how to find it.
You could definitely make this work if you had a very big and dysfunctional space empire. They plant a colony somewhere, the colonists aren’t yet at the stage where they can build their own starships, and the empire just forgets about the colony, or at least forgets exactly where it is. The file gets lost or something. Every now and again some overworked clerk thinks “oh, whatever happened to Colony 13259? Haven’t heard from them in a bit. Ah well, I’m sure they’re fine…”
35: Five or six years ago, the pattern of road repairs near where I live was such that there was no practical way to get from where I live to the local bread outlet by car in a reasonable amount of time. I could easily walk there in half an hour, though.
@35: Average traffic speed in central London is 8.3 mph.
That’s what you get when you buy your traffic light control system from Microsoft.
@36. Speaking of very big and dysfunctional space empires, that’s how it works in Star Wars; planets are constantly getting lost, deliberately hidden, and “rediscovered.”
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race has a colony world get cut off twice, once due to a cataclysmic war back home (leaving the colonists to collapse to a “medieval” setting while Earth rebuilt and re-established space travel) and once to unknown causes (all the viewpoint character knows is that the messages from high command just stopped a while ago, and his colleagues who went home to check in never came back).
@38: Not really. That’s what you get when you put millions of people into a place where some of the roads were built in the 1600s.
I think Scalzi’s Interdependency was probably mentioned (I mean, there was a reference to Scalzi, but not titles). It’s definitely a case of being isolated by natural(ish) events (_somebody_ triggered the events, long, long, ago, but it it’s as natural as, say, causing an earthquake).
I just remembered that King David’s Spaceship, set in the Mote universe, is about a planet that was isolated by the fall of the First Empire, trying now to gain admittance to the Second Empire.
That’s what you get when you put millions of people into a place where some of the roads were built in the 1600s.
The newer roads were built (or at least laid out) in the 1600s. You could find your way quite easily and mostly accurately around the City of London using a map showing only the streets that were already there in 1270 – only the spelling has changed.
@38 All these kids making us feel old for remembering the days of 8.3 filenames
@43: Well, I knew the risks when I made that joke.
Charles Sheffield wrote what I’ll have to call, spongey sci fi: not really hard as such, and full of holes. That forewarned –
If you were lucky enough to read his McAndrew shorts, one way he figured out an isolated colony was to have the colonists take over a large comet, and hollow it out as an O’Neill cylinder. Then the colonists would strike out for the nearest stars. Massive colonies are massive so the thrust can’t accelerate the comet much. And Sheffield won’t hold with that cryogenic-sleep malarkey. So there you go: it takes centuries to get anywhere, and the people leaving might well be cultists unwelcome down here (Abraham/Frank picked on the LDS here) so – no transcommunications.
After a few generations, there’s faster tech, investigators from Earth (or Mars, wherever) don’t need colony-tier luggage, maybe they’ve sussed out hibernation as well. When they catch up, they see what has sprouted from the space seed.
wiredog @@.-@: I’ve speculated that Pern was colonized by the FSP as part of an intentional effort so that they’d eventually be able to put teleporting time-travelling dragon brains into brainships, to defeat some kind of overwhelming menace that their current technology couldn’t handle. “We set up this colony with the little teleporting lizards, and provide it with the nudges and challenges that will result in them breeding up to dragons with the necessary abilities. When the program is “mature”, they put the dragon brains into brainships: they’re used to flying, and their fire-breathing instinct goes to weapon control. Then they’ll teleport back through time to us, and they’ll be able to take on *our* enemies who have blocked our current FTL and crystal drive technology…”
In C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the original human colonial mission to set up space stations at a specific series of stars had some kind of computer glitch-cum-accident during a warp jump and ended up lost. They lost contact with Earth because they didn’t know where the heck they were, and neither did Earth.
It took @47 to remind me that Darkover (according to Darkover Landfall, (c) 1972) was colonized when a Terran spaceship (21st century, on its way to an established colony around another star) was “thrown off course by a gravitational storm — that’s the layman’s term”. I don’t recall Bradley ever being clear on whether the ship also dropped through time or whether Earth just took millennia to investigate Cottman’s Star. I suspect there are other examples of this handwaving analogy to pre-space Earth-ocean travel.
The RPG setting Big Ideas, Grand Vision by Anders Sandberg is a good example of this idea. A dozen or so solar systems are settled from Earth using slower-than-light cryogenic colony ships, lose contact with Earth due to changes there, and develop their own cultures over the next few centuries, only to be suddenly brought back into contact after FTL technology is obtained from a extraterrestrial source.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth uses the same basic idea, on a simpler scale – a human colony settled by slower-than-light means, unexpectedly visited by an FTL colony ship fleeing the destruction of Earth.