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December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
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I'm always looking for media featuring aliens, especially multiple races. Came across this on TvTropes. Seems to dismiss the first book and say its unneeded. Anyone here enjoy/hate this one? Any starting point you'd recommend? Most importantly how prominent are the aliens?
I think the rank was that indentured were newly uplifted and served their patron race for a number of generations. When a race you uplifted became a patron race by uplifting another race you're race became a senior patron race. Senior patron races had the most power and respect.
Humanity either not having a patron or having been abandon by it's patron would have been made a indentured race to a patron. Except we had uplifted chimps and dolphins putting us into patron status as soon as we entered galactic society.
This line jumping made us disliked by most other races. We also tended to be more like partners with or uplifted races instead of treating them like inferiors. Which made a lot of other races nervous their indentured races might start wanting the same.
Client species are indentured for 100,000 years, in exchange for being uplifted; they used hyperspace shunts as a sort of testing ground for sentience; with the ministry of uplift or whatever it was overseeing things.
If patron species were able to be embarrassed or abused the client species, they could be freed from that (which was the motivations of the Pring in sub diver; discrediting the Pila meant being able to get freedom,)
Humans didn’t have that rule or mindset when they uplifted dolphins and chimps; since it was still before contact with galactic society; it wasn’t until space flight that we found out about any of that.
It’s also important to note that humans were odd and contrary to galactic norms; being Wolfings, we bootstrapped our selves into space.
Which was a defining technology for GalCic- unlike literally any other species, we sought to understand what we used and tended to avoid using things we didn’t understand.
A central belief is that everything has already been invented; so why bother. This meant everything was recycled tech; with races finding ancient tech in the library and using that instead of designing new.
This made humans unpredictable, in a society that highly valued order.
Having 2 clients as well, meant a 3rd would give an incredibly young, utterly unpredictable race highly influential standing politically and socially. (It’s probably best to consider patron/clients as a cast system;)
Humans- and earthclan in general- were not liked simply because the galaxy did not like change. It had been stagnant for hundreds of thousands of millennia.