Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[cptbutton]

Watching various discussions of the Firefly universe here and elsewhere, I've come up with my own rationalization to produce a setting basically like that in the series.

Note that I am not trying to make up something that matches every jot and tittle of canon, just something that gives a plausible explanation for the societies. Including things like the relatively recent Earth history connection, the high tech core, and the subjugated low tech fringe.

(And I am not even going to try to make sense of the “dozens of planets and hundreds of moons” suitable for terraforming part.)

The ecological explanation is propaganda.

The real threat was some ultra-tech horror. Genocidal AIs, a nanotech plague, a technological mindmerge hivemind takeover, etc. The ecology story is to cover this up, to prevent people from investigating those things man was not meant to know because of the way we got screwed by them last time.

When the threat emerged, the outer planets and space colonies had time to build a sublight colonization fleet. But not a lot of time, and it was not well organized. There were sleeper ships and seedships, with human crews.

The sleeper ships carried people in hibernation/stasis/whatever. Those people were a real mixed bag of whoever they could get.

The seedships were full of sperm, ova, exowombs, and as much robotic parenting equipment as was available and trustworthy.

So there were three different groups of humans. The ship crews, the sleepers, and the potential test tube clones.

The trip was going to last centuries, so the ship crews had to be large enough to form a stable society. Because of the need for stability, it became a very controlled and “rational” society dedicated to maintaining the social order, duty, conformity, harmony, etc. And by the time they got to the new system, the crews couldn't really imagine people being any other way. But they did know intellectually that the sleepers would not be like them. And they were very, very scared that if technology was not controlled, sooner or later someone would recreate the Great Disaster that drove them from the Solar System.

So they reached the system and started doing all that terraforming using ultra-tech. That ultra-tech was perilously close to the tech that cause the Great Disaster, but they had no choice.

Since they did not trust the sleepers, they left them asleep while they terraformed. Instead they grew and raised cloned children from the seedships, and of course it was in their harmonious conformist culture. These children became the bulk of the population on the Core worlds, with the crews becoming the technocratic elite.

Once the heavy terraforming was done, the crew elite heaved a great sigh of relief and locked all that nasty ultra-tech away. They had never really explained it to the cloned masses, and instituted a thorough program of misinformation and revisionist history designed to conceal the truth about ultra-tech and the Great Disaster, and prevent any developments in that direction.

So now it was safe to gradually wake up the sleepers, and integrate them into society. Some would undoubtedly dislike that society and want to change it, but most would see the benefits of stability and harmony. And the dissenters could be managed, one way or another.

That was the theory, anyway.

But it did not go well. Most of the many different groups of sleepers didn't like the Core world society, and caused trouble. When they couldn't get their way, they started sneaking off to the fringe worlds, which weren't supposed to be settled yet because the terraforming wasn't really finished.

The crew elite was very frustrated with the intransigence of the sleepers and their descendants, and many supported letting them go to the fringe if they wanted. After a few years away from the comforts of the Core worlds they would come crawling back, and if they didn't, so what? They wouldn't be able to really do anything dangerous out there.

Wrong again. They stayed out there, and built things up, and their example started stirring up the clone-descended masses. Soon they were going to start mucking about with forbidden ultra-tech. Something had to be done. They would be brought back into civilization by force, for their own good.

So you have the conformist Core worlds, ruled by an elite with secret forbidden knowledge they are determined to keep secret. And determined to maintain control, by any means necessary. Secret spy agencies full of blue-gloved death squads, philosopher assassins, and brainwashed psionic super ninjas included.

And you have the fringe worlds with generally lower technology, but lots of higher tech anomalies. Full of cranky people who hate the arrogant Core worlders who try to rule them.