On 8 October 2014 22:51, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:

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).

The nature of the Ziru Sirka can really be filled in however you choose. G:IW explicitly makes a few statements about the Ziru Sirka:

* 10% of the population of the Ziru Sirka are minor human, and another 10% are non-human.

* 4000 worlds have "substantial" Vilani populations of up to 1 billion; another 4000 are outposts only, and tend to be more cosmopolitan.

But if you leave this source aside, you could easily manage to foresee a Vilani Empire that, compared to the 3I, is lightly populated. Personally, I find a lightly populated Ziru Sirka makes the subsequent Long Night more believable - sustainable pocket empires are less likely to spring up.

On the other hand, if the Vilani have their choice of Vland-like worlds, and a population growth rate of just 0.5% pa, they would easily have maxed out the population on every Vland-like world in the Ziru Sirka within 2000 years. So a Vilani monoculture is a possibility too.

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.

Yes, I do like the idea of running the bureaux (or the castes, or the different provinces) as the real powers, a la Eastern -v- Western Roman Empires, or the smaller states of the Holy Roman Empire, and having the Emperor as a figurehead only. Of course, few Vilani travel beyond their homeworld far enough to realise that the Ziru Sirka is a convenient fiction masking significant cultural and political differences, even open warfare at times.

On the other hand, if the bureaux are competing that intensely against each other, I imagine it would be very difficult to stifle technological progress in any meaningful way.

Perhaps the 7000-year span of the Ziru Sirka actually saw numerous de-centralisations and re-centralisations of power, perhaps with the Imperial capital moving depending on which dynasty or bureaux (if any) was ascendant at any given point in time. Because there was always an "emperor", and because the titles and offices did not change greatly, those in subsequent post-Long-Night millennia are going to see a single "Ziru Sirka" in the same way most people nowadays would imagine an unbroken "Ancient Egypt" or "Middle Kingdom".

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.

Oh, absolutely. Bunch of bloody hypocrites! I see the Authenticist movement the same way.

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.

The vibe I get from the Timeline is that the Geonee, while technologically proficient, never seemed to have the aggressive outward drive that the Vilani had. Other possible complicating factors are a low baseline population, and a fractious system of government that seemed focussed on the core worlds, while leaving colonies to go their own way. The fact that space around Shiwonee has numerous J2 gaps and no long mains probably hampered their initial expansion quite a bit too.

That fits with YTU, where the (main, homeworld) Geonee state is monocultural and voluntarily stopped expanding, but allows the possibility that other Geonee spread far and wide and, perhaps, established pocket empires over a couple of sectors.

It also nicely steps around Tim's concern about the "one government to one species" trope.

Cheers,

KenB