Five Classic SF Books About Rival Nation-States in Space

[james_davis_nicoll]

Classic science fiction authors loved to project present-day tensions between existing nation-states into the future... and especially into SPAAACE!

Five Classic SF Books About Rival Nation-States in Space

Comments

[redbird]

James, I'm sure I had better things to do with the last half hour than try to figure out what to do about Ochuka's Wikipedia page.

[redbird]

James, I'm sure I had better things to do with the last half hour than try to figure out what to do about Ochuka's Wikipedia page.

[ba_munronoe]

I recall a short story (name escapes me) in which a Soviet-US summit is being held in The Future, and the twist is the reveal the US is descended from US colonies on Venus and the USSR from Soviet Mars colonies (or possibly the other way around) while Earth has been nuked to death long time ago.

[ba_munronoe]

Then there's Ken Kato's "Yamoto" series in which the Earth has also been destroyed, but outer Space has been divided between Russians, Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, the USA, etc. (with the last two sort of cosplaying as Phillip II's Spain and Elizbeth I's England).

Alan Dean Foster's "Codgerspace" similarly has space divided up between current states and coalitions of states (including, IIRC, something called "the league of forgotten nations" or something similar - all those nations lacking states of their own on Earth), but Earth is still in one piece, simply largely abandoned by the great and mighty and now something of a backwater.

Paula Downing's "Rinn's Star" has (at least) Soviet, Chinese, European, American, and Shi'a (I guess the Islamic Republic did very well in this TL) blocks doing interstellar colonization.

In Williamson's Settee setting, we have Martian Nazis, Jovian Soviets, and Venusian Imperial Japanese all competing in space (the US, or rather it's corporate overlords, controls the Earth and Moon and is by far the strongest, IIRC)

[kgbooklog]

No mention of Aliette de Brodard's China and Vietnam in Spaaaace?

[ba_munronoe]

I've heard of that setting, but I haven't read any of it: is that regular science fiction (set somewhere in 'our' future) or more "future alternate history", some _other_ world's future? Or is it a "secondary world" where Vietnam and China just happen to be the Space Powers and there's no concert with a historical backstory?

[kgbooklog]

She doesn't infodump on the worldbuilding (at least not in the short fiction I've read), so I have no idea.

[ba_munronoe]

Have you run into any mention of -other- space powers besides the Chinese and Vietnamese?

[kylinn]

It's pretty far future, and it's not really clear whether we're seeing all of human-occupied space or just a part of it. There are indications that the universe is larger than what we've seen, though what we see is pretty big by itself.

Xuya

[(Anonymous)]

The premise of Xuya is outlined in her website.

https://www.aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/novels/the-universe-of-xuya/

Re: Xuya

[ba_munronoe]

OK, so explicitly the future of an alternate timeline.

[adrian_turtle]

Sometimes I think Cyteen and all the related books set in the Alliance-Union Universe are about the Cold War. Then I remember Regensis. *sigh* Cyteen is set in a universe where there are two interstellar empires, both approximately alike in dignity, bitterly opposed to one another. Some planets have one kind of government and economic structure, and others have a different one, with mutual hatred and contempt. (And spies and merchants and space stations with uncertain loyalties.) Each central government builds up its military in case of invasion, but even without war it's impossible to ignore the other empire...you have to defend against spies, you have to win hockey games or go to the moon or whatever to prove you're better than the other empire. It was published in 1988, and likely written earlier.

Regenesis is a sequel written 20 years later, but the plot picks up the same month. (Possibly even the next day.) None of them notice that they are suddenly living in a world with a SINGLE superpower. All the planets are suddenly working together in a Coalition of Everybody But Terrorists. It's not like they never read the newspapers! These are people close to the corridors

[(Anonymous)]

One of the odd subplots in the very odd _The Garments of Caean_: The Japanese Empire and the Soviet Union are still fighting the Russo-Japanese War (yes, I know the Soviet Union postdates that war) in SPAAAACE. As cyborgs. Both sides have completely forgotten their Terran origins, or indeed that their ancestors were never cyborgs to begin with.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 513, 2024 article 57.

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