So if you've read the "About Roselight" page, you may know my original take on the story was a post-apocalyptic sci-fi one, in which humanity flees a solar-system-sized cataclysm and settles on a new set of planets - Rosa's Children. In my head this looked something like the end of Interstellar, where (spoilers for an 8-year-old movie!) Amelia and CASE begin unloading supplies from a spacecraft for a concerted colonization effort on the late Wolf Edmunds' planet. I had pictured society pretty much continuing where it had left off, maybe with some rough spots after being in space for centuries, but nothing too major.
Now, I've already cast aside any notion of hard sci-fi for Roselight, and I'm trying to steer clear of establishing any real details about the apocalypse that drove humanity from its home (other than that it must've been pretty bad). However, I've started to think I might want there to be significantly more time between humanity's first landing in the Rosa system and the setting of the main part of the story.
I'm imagining the initial colony setup begins, but is already at a significant disadvantage - the journey was really rough. A lot of equipment doesn't work after the very long flight, some technology and skills have already been forgotten, and the population was struggling even before landing. It took a monumental effort for even a few people to stumble across the threshold of another world, and it wasn't a strong start. Despite a concerted effort to establish a foothold on several worlds, population collapse decimated the nascent society and left it teetering on the edge of extinction for a few generations. This caused something of an information choke point; for modern society, very little is known about the time beyond the veil, and any truth about what happened to bring us to this point has been totally lost in the landscape of myth and legend. There could well be some interesting mythology that in some way tangentially relates to the truth, but it's hard to know for certain.
Overall, human culture loses a lot of what it used to have - I don't want to say "regresses," because non-industrial societies have so much value of their own, but they do lose a lot of explicitly useful and beneficial stuff like healthcare technology and the lessons learned about sustainability from the old worlds. Sure, these people will be starting anew and living in harmony with the land, but with the loss of detailed knowledge about what happened and where they came from, they're wide open to the possibility of making the same mistakes twice. The context lives on in something of a religious way: of course they're going to retain the sense of being a displaced people, alone in a foreign landscape after something of a fall from grace, dare I say a paradise lost.
One big advantage of the ancient world concept is that it helps to justify the very patchwork technology set I want them to have - a strange mix of old and new, where it's really more about what's practical than being in line with a particular overall level of advancement. The entire manufacturing industry needs to be redone from scratch, so you'll find no microchips here - but computers, jet engines, and spaceflight were once solved and can be rediscovered with some expedience, interpreting ancient texts and instructions with a sense of mysticality.
There's another really interesting thread here. irid'An is the obvious candidate world for human settlement as a Plan A, if you're intending to just set up shop and have it work out (which it won't). pr'Sefone and Orus are comparatively less appealing, but you know they'll be useful so you establish some early colonies or outposts there. Then, the collapse occurs, and suddenly society is crashing so hard that these colonies become isolated from each other. It's possible that radio communications are ritualistically maintained during the long dark, but spaceflight would have entirely ceased, leaving different populations to grow apart culturally and even physically. This opens the door to pseudo-"indigenous" populations that differentiate from each other before the eventual reunification. Furthermore, I sense that while pr'Sefone's offshoot colony might survive and grow pretty well (I'd already conceived of the "Sefones" people), an isolated, skeleton crew outpost on Orus would fare pretty terribly, and might even go fully extinct. Anything they'd learned about this world would be lost behind the veil, and it leaves the world vulnerable to the rampant exploitation we'd see centuries later from ASMC - after all, it's a dead planet that kills anything it touches - surely it can have no further value than to be stripped of its resources and cast aside...
This began as a comparatively minor adjustment in my brain, but the more I type the more I realize there's a lot of potential here to really strengthen the worldbuilding. It's late now, but I definitely need to come back to this and start developing these concepts further. Soon!
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