Tevun-Krus #57 - Colonisation SF

Colonisation: Choose Your Style - An Article by @angerbda

People are leaving their place of birth, cutting their roots to settle in an empty land... they are colons.

Colonisation (British)/ Colonization (American), n.: the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area.

As far as you look like, in the History of Mankind, Colonisation had been a constant. No doubt that, once Man will master space travel, he will also tries his hands at colonising the stars.

But what would bring him to do so?

If we dig in the long forgotten Memories of Humanity, we can define few patterns for the colonisation endeavours. The common point, usually being that any settlement had been preceded by an exploration.

Let's start at the beginning.

The sequence is almost the same. First, a dominant, warring, some would say arrogant, or a rich nation sends a group of explorer to an unknown destination. What are they looking for? This question will be answered later.

After the exploration, settlers come in the newly discovered territory, often with the army, to secure it and subdue the indigenous population when required. Sometimes, those settlements thrive and prosper, other times, they just collapse.

Once the settlements are secure, colons can start to arrive and develop the local economy, bringing with them a foreign culture within a population that could do without it.

Why would a country, a nation, a central system of power—as defined in Wikipedia— would try and dominate their surrounding lands and its components?

A new colony can provide many interesting advantages. The first would be space. In the case of a growing nation, overpopulation can be answered by colonisation. Imagine these many lands available for those people that can not remain on the mainland... Easy solution solving.

Another reason why the space would be of interest could be the need to relocate, purely and simply. Consider the possibility of the former habitat destructed, people need to find a new place to live... This scenario is mostly found in Science Fiction plot, but can also probably be found in the fog of humankind past.

Sometimes, the extra population to redirect to new land is the undesired one, the scum of the gentle society that shall be maintained hidden and in closed quarters. What better solution than to evacuates those undesirables outside, far away from the mother land? Penal colonies are numerous in our history, killing two birds at a time by getting the problematic population out of the mainland and providing cheap labour to produce resources in the new land.

Resource exploitation is the second reason why a colony would be created upon. Not only the natural resources of a new land would easily answer to the need of more raw material to sustain the existing population in the motherland, in case of overpopulation for example, but they would create opportunities for new markets and new product, and, ultimately, bringing riches to the mainland. There is no need to look far to find many example of the mercantile interest in colonising.

Though the History provides many example of the reason for colonisation, being needing extra space or exploiting resources, natural and human, how does this translate in a Science Fiction plot?

Many reasons would lead to a colonisation plot. The Earth is overpopulated or well in the way to destruction, the human population disappearing, or simply for exploration and commercial reason. All these have been exploited in the Science Fiction literature and filmography.

Though the exploration gives a vast possibility of discovery, civilisation, resources, cultures... it does not delve in detail in the constraints and organisation required for a settlement. Those aspects usually derive from the social structures in place on Earth at the time of the colonisation.

The colonisation plot can take a romantic or a more realistic aspect. The romantic aspect usually focuses on harmony and adaptation between the human and the alien population involved. The realistic path presents a more cynical approach of the colony, with conflict, dominance, power struggle and death. This later type of colonization plot dives in the human nature and its darker sides.

In itself, the need of extra space as an excuse to colonise new planets, providing land for the people, is found in many of the classical of Science Fiction. In the Darkover series, for instance, Zimmer Bradley depicts the beginning and the evolution of a somehow forced colony on an unknown planet when one of the colony ships sent by Earth crash-lands on Darkover. The resulting isolation if the survivors leads them to colonize their surroundings.

The interesting point on this series is that it poses the question of the future of the colony. What happens when human settles on an unknown planet and interacts with their surroundings? How the colonisation forges the next generations? Another example of the 'after colonisation' questions is Luna, the penal colonies of Henley in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The results of the forced colonisation of the moon underground by Earth, sending over there the reproved, criminals, political exiles, and all their descendants, is an explosive situation.

Although Earth sends many colony ships in many of the Science Fiction genre, some stories show other sentient species settling and controlling the humans. The Catteni, on Earth, do not like human troublemakers. They round them up and sent them in potential colonies in other systems. McCaffrey's Freedom series presents the different aspects of the colonisation, the penal colonies, the settlements, and their evolutions.

The main interest in a colonisation plot, in my opinion, remains in the harsh depiction of the human nature and its shortcomings. As a conclusion, I would like to open with the following list, found on , of the most popular colonisation Science Fiction books:

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. Humans migrate to other worlds as a result of the Earth becoming uninhabitable.

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. This a story of brutality--exploitation, slavery, genocide even--that mimics Earth's pattern of colonization and exploration, but on an alien planet.

Of the Fall by PaulJ. McAuley. Explores the uneasy relationship between Earth and its colonies.

Orbit Unlimited by Poul Anderson. A collection of short stories in the Hard Sci Fi sub-genre about a band of people fleeing an oppressive Earth.

Search the Sky by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. A satirical novel where six colonies are setup on worlds devoid of life.

Rim World by A. Bertram Chandler. An example of Colonization Sci Fi where the colonies are not isolated, but rather a part of an extended chain of remote colonies.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. One of the great colonization science fictions out there that deals with terraforming an entire planet. A trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.

Dune by Frank Herbert. The whole series over time shows the colonization and taming of the wild planet Dune over thousands of years.