Rheddie wrote: ↑24 Aug 2017 23:11 The police were woodlice, segmented isopod crustaceans from under the Earth....
Wow. I'm impressed. I am interested in reading this novel when it is published, and that's also very rare for me.
I originally wrote " Very rarely do I stumble upon an idea that makes *my* imagination seem tame. " but realized that i sound like Im full of myself ... i think what I meant was that it's rare that my fascination with parasites and other dangerous creatures hasnt prepared me for the mental imagery i get when i come across someone else's idea ... at any rate, i dont mean to offer praise that really is thinly disguised self-praise.
The police are not to be confused with the Anti-Sex Police, a separate organisation charged with preventing sexual activity and thoughts amongst the ordinary people. They report to the Sinquisition, a secretive body of nine hooded, black-robed judges.
...and thoughts?
It looks like you lighten up the dark setting with comic relief in the form of puns, too.
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I'll try to add here things that arent already available on FrathWiki. These societies are based in a world where the technology is comparable to Biblical times on Earth, so they may seem unrealistically complex, but I plan to allow for tolerance of a low level of disobedience and inefficiency to be built into each system.
MOONSHINE:
http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Moonshin ... government
Moonshine is a cold-climate empire stretching from 37N to 60N on the planet Teppala. They are famous for their extremely feministic culture, expressed in every facet of life from day-to-day interaction to the laws and structures of their government. Because the Moonshines (sic) originated as a branch of the
Crystal political party, however, they are unique in many other ways, and these other traits have come to be associated with feminism.
Moonshine is a single-party state, and therefore the form of government is prescribed by the Moonshine political party:
- Only women can hold power. Men cannot hold an office of any kind, even as a temporary stand-in for his wife. This is a law rather than a political position, and therefore cannot be changed.
- There is no head of state; the top level of the government is instead a committee of 8 women, one for each of the eight departments of government.
- These women do not have absolute power, either; their power can be overruled at lower levels by toparchs, the women who run each city within the Moonshine Empire. Thus, Moonshine can be considered a confederacy, in which the local governments are much stronger than the federal government.
- Uniquely in the world, much of the Moonshine government is based on a circular power structure, where everybody has authority over people below them, but is checked by people above them. In this system, from any woman in power, it is possible to draw a line down to officeholders of ever-decreasing power, only to end up eventually at the woman who directly supervises the woman at the beginning of the line. Thus all of these women can be considered equipotent, and decisions are usually made cooperatively.
Moonshine's government employs a large subset of its female population, far more than in other empires. There is no democracy; women join the government by enrolling in school and indicating that they wish to serve in the government. Any student who passes their courses is awarded a government job upon completing their coursework, and therefore the government is very large. It is difficult to accumulate inordinate amounts of power in Moonshine, however, so few women are tempted to enter the government solely to wield power over other people. Likewise, the constant influx of teenage girls fresh out of university prevents old entrenched power structures from developing and excluding newcomers who may have more liberal (or atavistically conservative) ideas.
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KAVA:
Kava is a literal plutocracy in which the government is controlled by the legislature, and voting rights are purchased from the central government. Therefore, the more money someone has, the more potential votes they have, but in order to vote, they must spend their money. All voting is done by referendum, and therefore, anyone can choose whether to vote on a given referendum or wait for an issue they care more strongly about to come up.
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edit: finishing earlier post.
GHOSTS OF COMFORT:
The curiously named
Ghosts of Comfort came to power in a chaotic era with no stable power. They were descended from many diverse tribes united by a common political philosophy. They reintroduced democracy to an area of the planet which had seen it only briefly several hudnred years earlier. However, theirs was a one-party democracy, in which only Ghosts who had been approved by the party leaders could run for office, and non-Ghosts were exlcuded from both officeholding and voting. Most commoners cared little about politics, and signed up as Ghosts regardless of their personal beliefs, since there was no monetary requirement for party membership. However, in order to run for any government office, they had to be approved by the Ghost party leaders at the national level. This was intended to prevent the rise of any resistance movements in which local party leaders agreed to band together in defense of a typically non-Ghost philosophy and therefore approve as members new recruits who did not embrace the traditional Ghost ideology.
Originally, the Ghosts rejected the idea of a national constitution, saying that the entire structure of government was open for change, and that the Ghost party retained the right to allow other parties to stand for election, and that the Ghost party could even vote to abolish itself if enough party leaders changed their minds. However, as hteir military power grew, the rank and file of the Ghost leadership became more open to embracing liberal ideas, and the old guard perversely wished for war so that the younger, more liberal members would close ranks in defense of their neighbors and therefore allow the original Ghost philosophy to survive unchanged for future generations. Instead, however, the Ghost leaders voted to enact a constitution limitign the power of the Ghosts to modify themselves and their government. The Ghosts forswore many powers in this new constitution, but all of what they were giving up were powers that they feared would soon be used against them by the liberals members within their party.
With the new constitution, the liberals were locked out of power, and the Ghosts began a purge of all of the dissenters, depriving them of their party membership in order to deprive them of the right to vote. To pacify the rejected members, the Ghost leaders improted a large number of slaves from nearby weaker nations, and gave them mostly to non-Ghosts so that the children of the slaves would grow up thinking of non-Ghosts (who soon came to call themselves
Dreamers) as their primary enemy.