this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
4 points (100.0% liked)

Science Fiction

13567 readers
98 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It's a common trope in sci-fi that Earth has a World Government and similarly the Aliens have only one government as well.

But in historical First Contact scenarios like the discovery of the New World the fact that the groups involved were not unified played a major role - think Cortes using the other groups to overthrow the Aztecs, or the various alliances that North American tribes had with different European powers.

Are there any books that deal with this scenario? Like I imagine that if First Contact happened at the height of the Cold War, there would be incredible fear about the other side being able to leverage the aliens for an advantage.

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Star Trek has a bit of that here and there. Klingons are basically at a constant state of cold war between different clans and the Romulans are actually Vulcans that have split off from the Vulcans after a civil war. And of course there is a lot of political infighting within the Romulan Empire as well.

[–] 6368_39162@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Not directly related, but you might be interested by Family tree by Sheree S Tepper. The aliens aren’t actually. Kinda.

Lem's Fiasco is one of these. Can't tell more without spoilers, though