The fun of designing Glorianna is designing a completely different society, wildly successful, yet distinct and nothing like what has gone before. The basis is Cultural Emulation, which is a concept that the Slowboats which came to the Cluster from Earth used to keep their people functional during the long (1200-1800) year journey from Earth.
The following is from Sweet Chariot:
The first slowboats packed a mixed colonist/crew from various ethnic and national backgrounds and assumed that they would work out any differences over the long voyage. This worked well for the first interplanetary colonies, and even for the Alpha Centauri colony, which was only a 40 year voyage at
0.1c speeds. When the colony ships left for more distant systems, however, there were several ugly incidents ranging from tensions between groups to bloody ethnic violence.
It appeared that under the pressure of very long voyages, the societies of
the ships were fracturing. Two factors seemed to be working against the colonists. The first was standard factionalism between non-homogeneous societies, each attempting to preserve as much of its own social processes as possible in the evolving shipboard standard culture. The second factor was
the evolving shipboard culture itself, which caused social trauma to those who were joining or rejoining the culture from decades in cold sleep. During the time they had been sleeping, their entire culture had been radically altered by those awake.
The most commonly used solution was proposed by Dr. Danielle Otukwe of the University of Padua. Dr. Otukwe was a sociologist, and she proposed that the shipboard culture be an artificial one, chosen by the crew from past cultures rather than living ones. This addressed the fractioning factors in several
ways:
• The cultures were equally alien to all the people, lessening the pressures between the Earth cultures present.
• The artificial cultures were intended to be nearly static, drastically lessening the culture shock to a community most of who’s members were in cold sleep at any given time.
• The massive effort to learn a new language, new idioms, and new aesthetics served to unite the people of the ship in a common cause.
• Once in place, the artificial culture worked like a natural culture to keep the people united by shared commonalities.
Not all colony ships used the Cultural Emulation method. It was, however, quite commonly used, particularly on those ships with a culturally/ethnically diverse group of colonists, as tended to be the case with the UN launched ships. It seemed to be quite successful, and inspired a number of variants, such as Watch-based emulation rather than Ship-based emulation, where the watches were kept separate rather than blended, and each watch maintained its own cultural emulation.
Back to live typing!
So, in effect, a ship-bourne culture might be Meiji Japanese, or 21st century French, or 18th century British, or whatever, no mater what the passenger's ethnicity. It might also be a combination of several different cultures, which didn't interact much - the Watches, which are those people who are awake at one time. A ship might have had rotating Watches, where the composition of the ship was continually changing as people were put into and taken out of Cold Sleep, or static Watches, where the people were changed in batches after a decade of life awake. Ships with rotating watched used a single ship-wide cultural emulation model, whereas each static Watch could have its own culture.
Glorianna was settled by two slowboats which arrived in the Gloria system nearly simultaneously. While braking, they decided to join together and create a society, because they would have twice the recources, virtually guaranteeing a successful colony.
The ships were the HMS Royal George, owned by the British Royal Family. It carried 20,000 settlers from the UK, who had rotating Watches and a single cultural emulation model - Elizabethan England - and the UN ship Ostfriesland,
carrying 10,000 German, Argentinian, and French settlers, whose cultural emulation models were Frederick the Great's Prussia, Phillip I's Spain, and France under the Sun King, Louis XIV, respectively.
That's the background of Glorianna. I'll be posting more!
-clash