I am worldbuilding a soft sci-fi setting called The Arm. The setting revolves around an interstellar humanity which is divided into many factions of a mostly ideological nature. Most of humanity lives within a socialist state, but the present day of the setting also contains a corporatocracy, an independent republic of heavy-worlders, a theocracy, and nomadic fleets of communal spacefarers.
It’s pretty good I think.
The only criticism I have personally is -assuming you want to be realistic on those points- a feudal system wouldn’t be able to deploy the industrial capacity to make things like spacecrafts and mechanized infantry on a large scale.
Feudal forces and relations of production are centered around agricultural labor in the countryside by serfs tied to their lord’s land meanwhile guilds are early bourgeois operations that the nobility keeps around because they are necessary for their manufacturing needs but never hesitate to violently repress if they become too powerful.
Furthermore, feudal nobility would probably suppress the kind of automation necessary for industrial mass production if a guild tries to develop any because a bourgeoisie with even the simplest actual factories would quickly overtake the wealth and influence of feudal lords with their inefficient serfdom, thereby forcing the lords to either abandon their fiefdom and become a bourgeois or be overthrown.
So by the time a society becomes able to go to space, the bourgeoisie would have long taken over and the society would by firmly capitalist, probably even late stage capitalist.
Thank you and I agree with this criticism. I made some changes to the Age of Andar to better reflect class relations that would more plausibly give rise to the scenario in the Age of Storms.
Some ground rules that I decided upon for this setting…
- Humans come from Andar, not Earth. Andar functions as a stand-in for Earth so that I can utilize historically-inspired elements without being tied down to too much real-world baggage.
- There are no sapient aliens. I like to include native creatures that live on various exotic worlds, but I have avoided any mention of extraterrestrial civilization, as this proved too disconnected from the themes I wanted to explore.
- This is a no-magic verse. That means you won’t find any psychics or Force powers or anything similar. These elements hogged up too much focus in an earlier phase of this setting’s development so I had to leave them out.
