CoDominium
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The fictional CoDominium universe is a future history (now alternate history) setting for the books in the CoDominium Series by Jerry Pournelle.
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The CoDominium series
- A Spaceship for the King (1973) (later expanded as King David's Spaceship)
- West of Honor (1976)
- The Mercenary (1977)
- The Prince
- Go Tell the Spartans
- The Mote in God's Eye (1975, with Larry Niven)
- The Gripping Hand (1993, with Larry Niven) (also titled The Moat around Murcheson's Eye)
- Several collaborative works entitled War World
A History of the CoDominium Universe
The point of departure of Pournelle's history is the establishment of the CoDominium, a political alliance and union between the United States of America and a revitalized USSR. This union, achieved in the name of planetary stability, reigns over the Earth for over a hundred years. In that time, it achieves peace of a sort, as well as interstellar colonization, but at the price of a complete halt in research, development, and political evolution.
Corruption and social decay force the CoDominium's BuReloc (Bureau of Relocation) to forcibly transport people from Earth to offworld colonies. This mass expulsion is made possible by the Alderson Drive, a device that allows instantaneous travel across distances of light-years. The starlanes are patrolled by the CoDominium Armed Forces, an elite fighting force created from the French Foreign Legion. The Navy, in particular, sees what the politicians and common people of Earth do not: that Earth is headed for disaster, and their primary mission is to remove as many people from Earth as possible before the holocaust.
In due time, the CoDominium collapses under mounting nationalism worldwide. The United States and Soviet Union each regain their desire for world supremacy; the nations of the Third World chafe after years of CoDominium oppression. The inevitable result is the Great Patriotic Wars, the long-delayed Third World War that begins and ends with massive nuclear exchanges. Much of Earth is devastated; civilization collapses there, and much of the surface is rendered temporarily uninhabitable.
Before the end, the CoDominium Fleet evacuated their families and children from Earth; they plant them at the colonies of Sparta (for the American and European families) and St. Ekaterina (for the Russian and Asian families). Within a few years, the Fleet has sworn allegiance to King Lysander I of Sparta. Sparta and the Fleet soon begin the Formation Wars, taking advantage of the political, economic, and technological vacuum caused by the collapse of Earth to weld the human colonies into a unified government under Sparta's rule -- the Empire of Man.
For several hundred years, the Empire is the sole government of humanity. It is overthrown by the forces of the planet Sauron, who secretly engage in massive genetic engineering to create a race of perfect soldiers -- the Sauron supermen. The Saurons are defeated in their aim of conquering the Empire, but the strain separates the Empire into many polities. Interstellar trade and travel decline.
In the thirtieth century, Lysander IV of Sparta proclaims a Second Empire, and begins negotiating or fighting to unify the human worlds once more. Many worlds quickly accept; others, known as outies, continue to resist the Empire's hegemony. Against this backdrop of renewal and conflict, humanity makes its first contact with another intelligent, spacefaring species -- the Moties. After initial difficulties, the contact between the two species would have dramatic impacts on both the Empire and Motie civilization.
Mote Prime
Mote Prime, in the Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle novels The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, is the only habitable planet orbiting the star known to the Empire of Man as the Mote. It is the origin of the whole Motie species, but at the time of the CoDominium chronicles is only one place of many within Mote System inhabited by various Motie groupings. It is a land-and-water planet similar to Earth, but shows evidence of severe environmental damage in the past. Many wars have been fought on Mote Prime, and as some at least were fought using asteroids as weapons - they were dropped onto areas inhabited by a rival social group - the planet from space appears to be all circular land structures as a result of the craters the asteroids created.
At the time of the visit to Mote System by MacArthur and Lenin the planet is in an advanced-industrial phase, with the resulting industrial pollution dimming the sunlight and making necessary the wearing of atmosphere filters by the expedition from MacArthur. However, reports from the Human archaeological teams working on the planet show that wherever they dig and however far they dig down, they never find native rock structures: they always find debris from artificial constructs of some sort, with primitive above - and hence more recent than - complex. They fail to draw from these observations any conclusions on what their findings imply for the history of Mote Prime until much later when back in Human space.
By the time of the second visit to Mote System as a result of the events described in The Gripping Hand, access to Mote Prime is impossible. The Humans are told that in the 25 Earth years since the previous visit, the civilisation on Mote Prime has collapsed; their current condition is vividly described as having "bombed themselves back to the invention of the brick."
See also
- Alderson drive
- Langston field
- Moties
- Jerry Pournelle's Future History (http://www.chronology.org/pournelle/)