Description

From the nightmarish technologies and bloody extremism of the later 21st century to a risky leap into the interstellar unknown, these songs are a sequence of snapshots taken of a future history. It begins about fifty years from now, during the rise of a rapacious plutocracy: Rogue corporations package highly controlled workers (called “stats”) like equipment and ship them from project to project in old jets; the minds of long-frozen magnates (whose disguised fortunes have grown for decades) take on a glamorous and decadent new life in the commandeered bodies of would-be outlaws; power blocs armed with tactical nuclear weapons, struggle for corporate dominance by triggering jihads. One oppressive pseudo-theocracy emerges victorious in the ruins of Earth, and eventually must initiate space industry to generate new resources. Century by century, using industrial spacecraft propelled by the pressure of sunlight, indentured cyborgs bring back raw materials from across the Solar System.

As cryonics and lightsail space travel slowly improve, some industrial pilots become the first Explorer’s Guild, establishing themselves as indispensable while aiding some groups in a grandiose, sometimes heretical, venture (that is, for some, a desperate escape): the conversion of old industrial craft into the Lightships. These — some village-like, some fitted out as giant libraries, some offering a means of exodus for dissident cults — will accelerate to relativistic speed, carrying city-size frozen crews to colonize planets around other stars.

The people who go will never again see the people who stay. Centuries pass. Some Lightships establish extensions of the old society and its bloody legacy; other craft, some aging, crippled, or lost in legend, sail on blindly into the void — and an increasingly remote future. They are humanity’s long shot to start a whole other sequence of cultural evolution — and perhaps a different human history.