17 October 2021

POC To The Future!

The one thing that didn't bug me about Foundation is the number of POC cast.

It's more than ten thousand years in the future with people living under diverse suns, more melanin is a survival trait if your star and planet combine to let more UV in.

I got a mild freak-out from my players once in a Not-Traveller campaign I ran on the topic of race.

We didn't have any canon information why the Solomani Rim war started, so I made it a race war.

Imperial policy had embraced the Homogeneous Humaniti Project, the Sol descended people objected to the idea strongly enough to start a war about it.

What the Homogeneous Humaniti project was is simply to spread the genes of everyone as widely as possible with the idea that eventually there is no such thing as "race" and we all get along Kumbaya...  The idea was lifted from the Hiver.

What the HHP would have done, eventually, is pretty much eliminate recessive traits and that would lead to darker hair, eyes and skin tones.

So a POC in the future, especially one a few thousand years from now?  Not even noteworthy.

I see, now, that the HHP would never have gotten traction in The Imperium.  The major races of Humaniti can't interbreed with a few of the minor races and in a universe that has that sort of racial divide shit like hair, eye and skin color stops mattering really fast.

Especially since you need a gene sequencer to tell Solomani apart from Vilani and thanks to The Rule of Man and enthusiastic interbreeding, most Imperial and Solomani major race humans are really Terrani.  Oh, except for the nobility, they were Terran descended and kept it that way.

During the Rule of Man, it was advantageous for a common Vilani to marry with Sol-stock because of political power.  A Terran having kids from a Vilani spouse gets that longer lifespan dominate gene.  Everybody wins!

The Terran bloodlines dominating politics is what leads to the Solomani movement and first a civil war, then an autonomous region then a secession then a real war.

If you want the complicated details, you're going to have to read the books.


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