Author Feedback: Voyager

[Steve]

I'd like to welcome Lexi to the ranks of posted, confirmed TGG Multiverse authors.

I'm looking forward to seeing you show more of the Otrerans and what is certain to be a very fun fish-out-of-water tale.

[frigidmagi]

There seem a multitude of female dominated states in the multi verse... Or is that just who gets the screen time?

You know I do wonder how an advanced industrialized state would keep up slavery from time to time. Slave Powers make great villians but well... Slave labor is simply deeply inefficient and in many ways unprofitable on touch of being vile and morally indefensible.

[Steve]

The history of the Otreran universe is... unique.

[frigidmagi]

There seem a multitude of female dominated states in the multi verse... Or is that just who gets the screen time?

You know I do wonder how an advanced industrialized state would keep up slavery from time to time. Slave Powers make great villians but well... Slave labor is simply deeply inefficient and in many ways unprofitable on top of being vile and morally indefensible.

[LadyTevar]

It started out ok, but the dinner meeting was hard to read through. Too much moralizing, too much prostelyzing, not enough meat there to be really interesting.

[Steve]

That's probably my fault.

One of the things being aimed for was showing how different things are. For the Otrerans, their universe does have a "might makes right" philosophy in dominance. Because, well... Athens won. The men who proclaimed "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" before they had the Melians executed or enslaved prevailed in the Peloponnesian War, these effects drastically altering all of Human history afterward.

On the other hand, Alexandria Verdes is a more idealistic figure than her predecessors, save perhaps Mamatmas. She believes in right makes might. And those two world views can clash.

[Voyager989]

Yes Steve, it is your fault.

LadyTevar, I'm a new writer; can you expound on what you mean by "meat", so that I know what you're looking for? I know the scene comes off as them having an argument (And Zillyah is going to have a moment of gut-clenching terror when her mind catches up to what she did, lecturing such a powerful woman like that) and just talking past each other for much of it.

[frigidmagi]

Considering the other side was the Spartans who believed the same thing... I'm not seeing how Athen's victory changes much in regards to morality.

[Voyager989]

The timeline and progression is complicated - but the summary is that RQA-22 (The Otreran home universe) is completely devoid of the Enlightenment concepts most of the rest of the Multiverse takes for granted.

[LadyTevar]

First, all below is IMHO. Opinions are like bellybuttons, everyone's got one, and none are alike.

1. While the chapter before had introduced the head Amazon and a bit of her mindset, we meet the POUS with only a slight knowledge. Yet, we're shown equally inside her head, without the same introduction as the Amazon's PoV.

2. Its an argument. A Long, Drawn-Out Argument. Over Political/Cultural PoVs. Between two nation/countries/leaders we've barely met. Talking about situations a new reader have no idea about, as it's not mentioned anywhere in the last two chapters. So it came off to me as a Wall of Text explanation for why these two women shouldn't like each other's nations or beliefs, and it did so in a very bombastic 'My Way Is Best' manner that I found off-putting. Like a GOP political article off-putting.


Now, this might have worked better if there had been a few chapters between, like the full Diplomatic Dinner had been before. Some of the matters discussed could have been brought up there, letting the reader learn the Amazonian history via a more dynamic background. Then, when the PoUS and the Amazonian have a private dinner, this could come to a head more dramatically.

Sidenote:
"Dressed in the Minoan fashion" made me think a fine flowing linen dress with a tight bodice cut to leave the breasts exposed. Not the best outfit to meet the head of a foreign nation who may not have the same cultural acceptance of nudity.

[frigidmagi]

Okay, that's fair. It's certainly possible for butterflies from Athenian actions to lead to that. This is just me talking but I would assume religions like Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroasterism are greatly changed or did not arise?

For that matter that would deeply affect Islam, Sikhism and Baha'i as well... Hinduism might have remained in it's primal state being a religion mostly concerned with purity and sacrifices to the gods (it's the oldest religion on the planet, it's not going away if your POD is at a late date). Jains might still be around, but no one ever listens to them anyways. Confusionism and Daoism is another question... (they kinda come in a pair you see...)

It also seems that the European nations did not colonized the rest of the planet? She seems to be aware of Rome so the Roman Empire happened in some way shape or form?

[Simon_Jester]

Basically, the classical Greco-Roman world evolved straight into the Industrial Revolution. Religion wound up mutated beyond recognizability (at least, by the equivalent of whatever year AUC it is in the Otreran timeline).

A few terrestrial societies were able to catch up with the Greco-Roman industrial boom and make the jump to colonize space before extremely destructive wars started wrecking everything (repeatedly). But the last common ancestry they share with any society in the history we know and love would be around, oh, somewhere between 200 BC and 200 AD.

As a result, philosophy evolved in very different directions. And this evolution was pressed by the driving necessity of the industrial and post-industrial age, just as the Enlightenment philosophies evolved into things like Marxism under similar pressure.*

So you wind up with, on Earth some time in the "first millenium AD" (I don't even know if Christ was born in this timeline), a nuclear-armed Roman Empire. Which is still, culturally, very recognizable as Rome even if some of the institutions have changed with the time and the invention of steam engines, telegraphs, and whatnot.

If this makes you shiver a bit, that is a good sign. :D
________

*The evolutionary process here involves a certain amount of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, it's not pure direct descent, but I think you understand what I'm saying even if you disagree with the details of my analysis.

[frigidmagi]

One would hope that gunpowder alone would force a certain change in the Roman Empire... But I might be whistling in the dark there.

[Simon_Jester]

The really critical thing that doesn't happen in the Otreraverse, in terms of setting the course of the future to come, is that the idea of "human rights," rights you enjoy by virtue of being a person independent of your status in the community, never really emerges. Being a Roman citizen in Steam Age Rome means you have rights- but being a slave in Steam Age Rome means you don't.

Sure, mechanization might change the social dynamics. Slave-farmed latifundia become less profitable (though historically they could survive the feudal and industrial ages IRL in places like Sicily, right up until land reform broke them up). Slavery might become a rare thing, or a thing used purely as a mechanism for putting people to work at extremely shitty jobs and providing personal body-servants for the wealthy. But what doesn't happen is that you don't have abolitionists arguing that it is wrong to treat people like property.

That's the problem with the argument "slavery is unprofitable" in my opinion; the only logical conclusion of that is that slavery 'should' be restricted to niche markets, not that slavery is inherently wrong.

Similar effects apply to things like the rights of women, the idea that the state should be intrinsically restrained in how violently it suppresses rebels or prosecutes a war, and so on. What's missing, in the broadest sense, is the idea that mercy is a virtue for the state. Thus, lines in the history book like "the defeated soldiers were castrated and worked to death in the mines" are far more common, and indeed normative- this is "what is done" to people who cross swords with the state and lose. Rebels get treated like Spartacus's slave revolt, because that's "what is done," it's normal to be that brutal to someone who tries to overthrow the established order, or at least normal enough that no one's surprised when it happens.

The pure economic forces that altered society in the industrial age might have gone in very different direction if not for (for lack of a better term) the memes that permeated the society making the changes. Look how different Japan and Britain are, culturally, how weird Japan seems when we take a West-centric perspective about how society 'naturally' behaves.

And Japan and Britain share far, far more common cultural ancestry than either of them shares with Otreraverse Rome (or Otrera).

[Steve]

MORE! MORE! MORE!