On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 6:39 AM, Kenneth Barns <ken.barns@gmail.com> wrote:

Multiple modern minor races (human and otherwise) had Iron Age civilisations before -100,000.

Yeah. I noticed that, in skimming through the Integrated Timeline. One has to wonder how the Vilani ended up with their sprawling empire, when the rest of these races managed to hold a sector (at most).

I explain this with a very non-canon rational IMTU. Contrary to the usual view of the Vilani rigidly imposing their culture on all and sundry, my Vilani were content to reign lightly over (perhaps even merely drizzle upon) a motley collection of allied races, rather than attempt to rule them. They retained Vilani culture for themselves alone, merely accepting tribute from conquered races and colony worlds. This model incidentally explains why they spread themselves so relatively thin (as I've heard the canon world pop figures say they did).

Bottom line, the Vilani technological trajectory - until the conscious decision to cease issuing technology patents - was well within Terran norms.

You know, it suddenly strikes me that the late Ziru Sirka sounds a lot like Pournelle's Co-Dominium: a fragile alliance of convenience (in this case, between and among the various Vilani bureaus and castes) which elects to impose a moratorium on tech advancement to reduce the prospect of any upset to the existing status quo.

And - like the Co-Dominium - all it took was a small crack (in this case, the upstart Terrans allying with some disaffected fringe elements) to bring the whole rotting edifice crashing down.

The fetishistic neo-Vilani "curiosity as sin" may well be a product of Long Night-era Vilani looking back on the "glorious stable days" of the late Ziru Sirka . . .

I like that.

I personally play the modern Vilani as pretending that their culture never changes, even when it does. Whenever possible, changes are explained away as Rediscovery Of How Our Ancestors Really Did Whatever.

After all, Vilani megacorps managed to hold their own against Solomani-dominated megacorps in the marketplace of the Third Imperium.

As I've probably mentioned, my 3I is a lot younger than the canon version. I explain the Vilani megacorps holding their own as a combination of most consumers prefering to trust tried-and-true Vilani tech over the slap-dash Solomani version (IMTU most worlds outside the Core have been out of the Long Night for only a century or so) and the fact that - since their worlds weathered the Long Night with little incident - the old boy networks of the Vilani have survived largely intact, giving them a behind-the-scenes advantage over their competition.

Now if you want _fast_ advancement, the Geonee went from developing agriculture and writing, to colonising their stellar system in 4700 years, with a "volcanic winter" causing mass extinctions and "near-collapse of civilisation" about 2/3rds of the way through this period. They then developed jump drive a few years before the Vilani. How in hell did these bad boys lose to the Bureaux???

See my above speculation regarding "drizzling" vs ruling.

IMTU, the Geonee went for a mono-culture state, the erection of which both delayed expansion and also set an upper limit on how big their realm could grow. Given the realities of jump lag (which are worse IMTU because of additional restrictions I place upon viable jump routes), there is a relatively sharp limit to how large such a state can become without losing cultural integrity. The Geonee didn't want such a loss, so they voluntarily stopped expanding long before this was strictly necessary.

Of course, even my "drizzling" Siru Zirka was forced to stop growing eventually, since there was also an upper limit to how large even it's loose alliance could get, without passing beyond the point where it would be too large to control to *any* significant degree.

Richard Aiken

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"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester