Aleae Iaciens

One of the things I really, really love about TypePad is that pretty much every page on the administrative side takes variables through POST and GET.  The logical consequence of this, naturally, is that if you forget that in this particular (otherwise generally fully-featured) text editor, CMD-Left Arrow means Navigate Back instead of Home, you realize only just a moment too late that what you've done is erase the 500-word post you just wrote, because TypePad will generate the page from scratch when you hit CMD-Right Arrow to navigate forward again.

The upshot is that this post might be a little more scattered than usual, since I'm going to be prone to thinking that I've already written something in the post's first incarnation.  (I've switched over to Writely in order to write the rest of this, since I like its behavior better. It seemed silly to do so the first time, because I didn't think I was going to be writing so much.)

I have a dilemma as regards Frontier; the trick is, you see, that the problem of Icons is still bothering me, and with the timeline as I have it now, they have to start showing up during Tyrone King's presidency.  This is because - sneak preview - King's administration is the one that authorizes coal and iron mining in the eastern mountains, and since the icons are mixed in with the coal, they'll start showing up shortly after the coal mining begins in earnest.

(Speaking of Icons and icons, I really need a better name for the latter, since - as has been mentioned - they're confusing.  But what?  Relics?  Fetishes?  I'm kind of at a loss.  Please feel free to suggest something.)

So at this point I have a few options.

• I can introduce and deal with Icons now.  This is problematic because I don't know how I want to deal with them, and the rest of Frontier's history is going to be changed if they show up, so I can't write anything into the future without knowing what I'm going to do with the Icons.
     
   
• I can delay the introduction of coal mining, and therefore of Icons.  This allows me to ignore the Icon problem for a while longer, although it's going to have to come up eventually.  On the other hand, it also means that I really don't know what to do with King's presidency except a "yet another expansionist" note, and I've already got three or four of those in a row and I'd prefer to not just write off twenty years of history because each president kept doing the same damn things.  On the other hand, "President Wossname went against his predecessors' policies and stopped government expansion" is just as boring.  So I'm kind of stuck; I need King to do something besides be blindly expansionist.
     
   
• I can delay the introduction of Icons past the introduction of coal mining.  They don't have to show up right away, but then I'd have to explain that, which might be difficult.  (Maybe the surface veins don't contain any?)
     
   
• I can remove Icons entirely from the setting.  I really don't like this option; on the other hand, this has - as I've said - developed into rather a harder setting than I'd planned, and Icons are pretty much magic, even if I call them "psions".

Any thoughts?  Perhaps during this break (a week, for Thanksgiving) I'll sit down and just figure out what place Icons have in Frontier. They are pretty rare, after all (which means, of course, that every party will have at least one); I can, at least, probably handwave their influence on history until after the Federales leave, at least.

Posted by Chris Anthony at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've turned off the "only post excerpts" option, and returned to a full-text RSS feed.  It was a good idea, I think, but I ended up getting fewer clickthroughs, which I suspect means that people wasn't realizing that there was more article on the site itself!  Anyway, RSS aggregators should pick up the full text of posts again.

Posted by Chris Anthony at 05:25 PM | Permalink

I've been doing some thinking on Icons recently -- you may remember them from the distant past of this weblog, ten months ago -- specifically about how and when I should introduce them, and, more importantly, whether I should introduce them.
 

See, it occurs to me that Frontier as a setting is moving farther away from a space-opera feel and more toward a hard science-fiction feel, especially with all the defining and setting down that I've been doing, and I'm wondering if a system of magic, however limited, even fits into the paradigm anymore.

Of course, the flip side of this argument is that I've been doing a hell of a lot of social setting-down, but I've barely touched the technology!  So all of you are reading this and thinking "what's he talking about?  For all we know, technology is powered by little fairies in boxes!"  (I assure you that it's not.)

On the gripping hand, I could take Icons and turn them into a sort of soi-disant psionics, especially if -- as I've been positing -- the icons (man, I really do need some more vocabulary) are actually the remnants of an ancient race who inhabited FFC1079 eons ago and were wiped out.

Hm.  I really could run with this.  Psionics are a time-honored tradition of science fiction, after all, and they provide me with a way to get "magic" into the setting without it tracking fantasy all over my nice clean carpet.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Chris Anthony at 06:03 PM | Permalink

If the councillors from Duligne and Madera had angered the council, the ratification of Underwood's constitution made them utterly livid.  The constitution established several states, each built around one of the cities of FFC1079; it also abolished the colonial council and created a Senate, to which each state's population directly elected representatives, of a number in proportion to the number of residents of that state.  It also established, separate from the Senate, a Colonial President, who served as the Federation's satrap on FFC1079. Perhaps more offensive to the councillors was the provision for term limits on both the President and the Senators; a President was elected to four-year terms with a limit of two terms, and the Senators to two-year terms with a limit of three.

The constitution prevented the council from either altering or abolishing it, but some councillors attempted to do both anyway.  Most of the councillors angrily denounced the document and called for another vote, accusing Underwood again of either vote fraud or bribery, but their words fell largely on deaf ears, especially when a Federal audit found no evidence to back up the councillors' accusations.  J. James Underwood was elected to the Presidency at the end of LY40, and he took the oath of office and loyalty to the Federation along with the Senators and the Supreme Court justices on a snowy New Year's Day.

The snow was to be Underwood's downfall; just after he had been sworn in, an assassin hiding in a nearby snowbank shot the new President through the head.  At roughly the same time, the Federal Police came across several men who were preparing to destroy the new Senate with explosives.  The assassin and saboteurs, all of them councillors who had not been re-elected, were jailed, brought before the newly-created Colonial Supreme Court, and summarily executed for treason.  This served as a deterrent to the remainder of the ex-councillors, who refrained from taking further action against a government which they viewed as usurpers for the rest of their lives.

With the death of President Underwood, his Lieutenant President, Thomas Webster, stepped into the position.  President Webster's agenda was similar to Underwood's; now that the population had equal representation, the next step was to continue expanding.  In his first term as President, Underwood saw two new cities formed within existing states, as well as an additional state to the far southwest, where the grain fields began to turn to desert.

Webster's policies did not end with expansion, however.  Where Underwood had taken a laissez-faire approach to economic growth, Webster was taking great pains to better the economy, including granting tax breaks for small producers and retailers and increasing the government subsidy of certain imported products (notably paper goods).  To balance this, however, he convinced the Senate to increase the existing tax rate slightly across the board, which allowed the government to operate without going into the red.

One area in which Webster had a particular interest was the arts. Webster's mother had been an artisan, and he wanted to stimulate the production not only of crafted goods for export but of art and beauty in general.  In order to accomplish this he set aside half of his salary as President and used it to establish the Webster Endowment for the Arts in LY44, a private charity which supported artists both financially and administratively, helping them to set up exhibits and to sell their work.  He also worked to encourage government support of local artists and artisans, in addition to the generous assistance which the Federal government already provided on a much more diffuse scale.

Webster was re-elected to the Presidency at the end of LY44, but he merely continued on the same course and offered no new policies or changes in his second term.  In LY49 he was succeeded by Patricia Hatfield, a former Senator from Madera who continued much as Webster had; when she retired after a single term and Gustav Schluter was elected, he continued the trend.  It was not, in fact, until LY61, with Schluter's retirement and the election of Tyrone King, that the politics of FFC1079 changed significantly.

Posted by Chris Anthony at 05:38 PM | Permalink

Some of you have probably noticed that I've changed the way the RSS feed works - it now lists only the first 200 words or the Introduction, whichever ends first.  Is that working for you guys?  Do you prefer the full-text RSS feed?

(I note that I've made the change for purely selfish reasons - with a full-text RSS feed, people don't have to click through to the article itself unless they want to comment, so I don't get as accurate a view of who's actually seeing the articles.  So I'm not horribly averse to changing back.)

Posted by Chris Anthony at 08:24 AM | Permalink

(See this post for the history leading up to this point.)

Council President Marratt was the youngest member of the council when he was elected.  He had arrived on Frontier as a child, and had inherited his position on the council after the death of his father, so many of the councillors had distrusted him at first.  However, his natural charisma and progressive attitudes had won him friends among the council, and when he was elected to the position of council president, his primary aim was to expand the colony beyond Dodge City and Madera, the only official cities on FFC1079's map.

Marratt's first act toward this goal was, unsurprisingly, to authorize the colonization of Duligne, the Separatist town south of Dodge City. To that end he also authorized the construction of a railroad between Dodge City and Duligne, and convinced the council to agree to sell parcels of the land around Duligne to anyone willing to move to the area and farm the land.  Marratt's aim was to get colonists to move to the area being settled, and so the sale was actually slightly more complicated than that; it was actually a lease for four years' tenancy of the land, paid in advance, with the requirement that the lessee reside primarily on the leased property for the duration of the lease. If the lessee satisfied this condition for the full four years, the land was transferred into his or her name with no further fees paid, and the colonist assumed full ownership.  (Property in Duligne itself, by contrast, was sold outright.)

By the middle of FY614, Duligne had a population of about 3,000 people, with another 1,500 in the surrounding land, and Marratt began turning his eye to further colonization.  He continued to push bills through the council to encourage emigration, and by the end of his term, at the end of FY617, two new cities had been incorporated west of Dodge City, and the capital's population had dwindled to half of the population it had possessed at the end of James Dodge's life.  Although Marratt wanted to continue his expansionist policies, this was enough for the people of FFC1079, and in FY617 Peter Marratt failed in his re-election bid and was replaced by Langford Keats.  The presidency of Keats was remarkably uneventfull; the four major cities of FFC1079 prospered under his administration, and another - a fishing town on the southwestern coast - was established by Peter Marratt and some of his followers, but for the most part there was no notable growth or activity of any sort during Keats' tenure.  In FY621 he was re-elected by a complacent populace, and followed roughly the same pattern.  His primary contribution to the history of the colony was to sign the bill, passed in FY625, that changed the council president's term from four Federal years to four local years.  (It was, in the grand scheme of things, incidental that this extended his term by nearly three months; the last day of FY625 came around in the beginning of the tenth month of Local Year 35, but Keats did nothing with his extra time but prepare to leave office.)

The first day of LY36 saw the inauguration of the first council president born on FFC1079: Jonathan James Underwood.  Underwood was the 32-year-old son of colonists who had purchased land around Duligne during Peter Marratt's administration, and followed in Marratt's expansionist footsteps.  Underwood was more moderate about his goals than Marratt had been; he intended to establish only one city in his time in office.  He also maintained an aim of reforming the government of FFC1079.  He was distinguished from his predecessors also by being the first council president to have not been a councillor before his presidency; he had been a dark horse in the election race, but his platform of reforms and expansion caught the attention of the public, who were beginning to feel crowded and under-represented.

Underwood met significant resistance to his ideas about restructuring the government from the more conservative councillors, but he had support from the general populace of FFC1079, particularly those from the smaller cities.  The people felt that the council had become too entrenched, and that Dodge City should not be the only city to have a council - or, at least, that the council members should not all come from Dodge City.  They viewed Underwood's election as a good first step, but by and large, they wanted more.

While Underwood hadn't anticipated the council's resistance, he knew that he could exercise influence in other ways.  For the time being he abandoned his goal of founding another northern city, and spent much of his first term as council president traveling to the various cities of FFC1079, giving speeches, and talking with representatives of the people.  In LY39, the council was just about ready to get rid of Underwood, but he was beloved by the people, and was overwhelmingly re-elected to the presidency.  This election was notable not only in that Underwood garnered such a vast majority of the vote - over 85% of the votes cast - but for the political aftermath of the scandal that accompanied it.  The Federal Police revealed, shortly after the election, that two of the council-members had tried to fix the vote against Underwood.  The councillors were summarily removed from their positions, and before the people whom the two councillors had represented convened to vote in new representatives, Underwood spoke to them and managed to convince them to elect one councillor each from Duligne and Madera.  This infuriated most of the rest of the council, who accused Underwood of having bribed the populace to get the result that he wanted.  These charges were never proven, although it was the first time since Spader that a council president had come under such scrutiny.

With councillors from outside Dodge City in place, Underwood's position was suddenly much more tenable, and within months he and the councillors from Madera and Duligne, along with three other councillors sympathetic to their cause, had written the first draft of a new colonial constitution.  Instead of visiting the cities individually, Underwood called representatives of the outlying cities - and of the Federal Police - to Seaside, Peter Marratt's fishing town, and asked them to look at the document; after several drafts, the convention had what they felt was a working and valid constitution.  With the support of the Federal Police, Underwood called for a colony-wide vote to ratify the new constitution after a two-week examination period; when the constitution went up for ratification, more than two thirds of the voters weighed in favorably.

Posted by Chris Anthony at 06:24 PM | Permalink