Oren's Forge Volume Two: Incursion Wrap-Up, pt 2

I’d been kicking around this more in-depth “wrap-up” for Volume Two for a few months now. Since we reached the last epilogue page on the public posting side, I thought it might be worth throwing out there for anyone interested. It’s a bit all over the place, so apologies there, but perhaps added insight into my method might make sense of the madness.

What is this story about, for me?

I don’t want to police or dictate how anyone should approach this story, by any means. I think art is meant to be experienced and interpreted; some things pass through you and others stay with you.

I thought now, as Volume Two wraps up, it would be a good time to share my motivation and intention for the story for anyone interested in a deeper dive. The novel Watership Down by Richard Adams was among my original touchstones. Watership Down and Plague Dogs were both formative influences on me as a young reader (clearly). I credit them both with expanding my ability to empathize and see critically through other points of view. In interviews, Richard Adams was adamant his story about rabbits was not a metaphor or allegory— it was simply a story exploring non-human characters navigating their world on their terms.

In the same way, Oren’s Forge is not an allegory or a civilization speed-run. It’s an exploration of society and what that means in an anthro world.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the world of Oren’s Forge would ever evolve beyond an Iron Age. I think animal society, on a global or regional scale, would eventually find an equilibrium between food resource and territory. Some species would die out, some would thrive, some might integrate with others, some might wither in isolation.

Rather than becoming a bustling metropolitan world, I think evolved animal society would fit more into a Star Trek-esque planet, where the cultural norms includes mass midday naps in communal stone plazas built to hold the sun’s warmth, games that simulate the hunt and ritualized courtships/ruts— you know, the things animals like to do.

In my experience, people have a tendency to view ancient history as more tightly compressed and linear than it is.

In American grade schools, most of us learn about Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece then Ancient Rome. It gives a false sense of a particular linear development of culture, a straight line of innovation leading from the past to the recognizable present. In reality, that view is extremely oversimplified.

Like biological evolution, societal evolution is not linear but rather constantly branching and reaching and exploring and exploiting. In human society, it produces so many unique and fascinating ideologies— many we will just never know the full extent of. For instance, a mind boggling amount of neolithic, Bronze-age, and pre-colonization culture has simply been lost to time or by design, leaving us with only the rough edges. (The city of Kweneng comes to mind.)

Let me ramble for a second (I promise, it will come back around.)

The process we call agriculture began slow. Real slow. For tens of thousands of years prior, nomadic people would move through areas and selectively gather then eat (and then poop out) wild grasses. This caused these wild grasses to cluster in the places that humans traveled through. Over many, many generations, the ease of having grass closer to their camps meant people were able to be more and more selective in the grasses they ate (and then pooped out.) This roughly 4,000 year long process shaped the wild grasses into various wheats, barely, rye, chickpeas, etc— crops that were then able to be cultivated, actively tended and further domesticated in the neolithic era.

Agriculture developed independently in at least 11 places around the globe— yet not every society developed it. Many remained nomadic hunter-gathers well into the modern age (40% of Mongolians are still nomadic today; the indigenous people of Tasmania were isolated and nomadic for 8,000 years, broken into nine nations comprised of various clans with dense interpersonal wars and relationships and rules, until Europeans arrived and decimated them.)

My point here is two fold: things like agriculture or aquaculture or animal domestication take generations, and second, society can flourish even without something as “critical” as agriculture. In fact, society can flourish without writing (Inca), without pottery, without pack animals, without ships, without steel, etc. Society evolves to fulfill the needs of the people within it and will continue to change until it reaches equilibrium with the environment (or it dies out/is abandoned). Back to the indigenous Tasmanians— they survived roughly unchanged for 8000 years because their population (and thus their needs) never exceeded what the nomadic life could sustain.

I also want to talk about the Moriori people really quick. They are a Polynesian people who were the first to settle what’s now called the Chatham Islands. We don’t know a lot about them beyond scraps of oral history because they were largely wiped in a genocide in the 1800s. However, what we do know, is the inhospitable nature of the Chatham Islands drove their culture toward one of complete pacifism. War was forbidden and disputes were handled through ritual combat. For centuries (longer than the US has been around), they lived in peace and total isolation, with their own language, customs and art. Whole generations were born, grew old and died, without knowing war. I’m not suggesting that’s some ideal we should strive toward, rather, I want to highlight it as a way society developed, thrived in its time, and is utterly alien to most modern societies.

In that same note, back to Mesopotamia— for nearly a millennia the government had regular debt cancellation*, so average citizens did not owe the state indefinitely. It’s a system of government with underpinnings of modern life, similar yet… alien. (It would be like if every 12 years, every citizen could declare a no-fault bankruptcy and all your debt would just reset to zero. That system lasted for generations. Maybe crony capitalism isn’t the end-all best-we-can-do. Neat!)

(*adding to clarify that 'debt' to the state was paid back in physical labor. It would be interesting to try and design a modern system with reoccurring monetary debt forgiveness, ihmo.)

So! In an anthro world, with multiple species dependent one another in a food chain, the new ways society and culture and ideologies develop is a really fascinating thought experiment for me, and that was the impetus for this story. The Stone Hollow might be a beacon of light that “solves” some part of animal civilization; however, it might simply fail because it cannot meet the needs of its people. It might be subsumed by a better alternative; it might also be wiped off the map by competing ideology. Time will tell!

Anyway, thanks again for being on this journey with me. I appreciate you all as readers and I hope you enjoy where we go next!