Worldbuilding Blogfest: History of the Frederikaners

History of the Frederikaners
from 'Shepherd'

The seed colonists of the planet Niesse are a distinct nationality/ethnicity known as the Frederikaners. The main group of Frederikaners live outside the Terran Empire, and are under the authority of an alien species known as the Gray, and live on a continent on one of the Five Worlds that is owned by the Gray. This is their history.

 The Gray

They are humanoids with bulging foreheads, large eyes, and tiny noses and mouths. Their skin is a greenish-gray color and they are hairless. They are the creatures known to Terran folklore as the Gray aliens, the ones who commit alien abductions. And some of what is said about them is true.\par The Gray are what is called 'true aliens', as opposed to human aliens who are biologically humans but of non-Terran origin who can interbreed with humans. Like other true aliens, the Gray seem mentally alien to humans and it's difficult to understand and judge them.

The colony of humans they started is one example. Humans would regard the notion of collecting human beings and putting them in an isolated habitat on another world as a form of cruelty. The Gray consider that they are preserving interesting living artifacts in a sort of museum. They consider that since they took the original human stock from a world which had not yet developed interstellar travel, the humans were merely a form of clever animal with no more rights than any other animal not to be put into preserves and zoos.

The First Collection

 The first group of humans collected by the Gray to form their human colony was collected at least ten years prior to 1871, when the Second Collection--- the first successful Collection--- was made. The First Collection was composed of a group of random individuals of all racial and linguistic backgrounds, collected both from cities and from agricultural areas. It had about 15% more males than females as human social customs on Terra during that era made it less likely for women other than streetwalkers to be roaming the streets. The First Collection failed to form a viable colony due to strife.

The Second Collection

The Grays somehow got rid of the survivors of the First Collection and began on the Second, which they determined was to be a more homogeneous group. They decided on a preferred type of human--- agricultural workers that were speakers of Germanic languages such as English, German or Danish. and who were of the Nordic physical type. This collection began in 1871. The Second Collection did not pick up individuals, but small groups, mostly groups of sisters and brothers who were young enough to be adaptable. They were collected in North America among groups of mostly-immigrant farmers and ranchers, many from an American town called Fredericksburg. A notable member of this group was a professor of linguistics from a university who had created a simple international language based on Anglo-Saxon and Germanic root words. This language, Aermannske, became the basis of the Frederikaner dialect, and in addition was revived on Terra much later and became used on a number of Terran colonies with significant Germanic-ethnic populations. The Second Collection, perhaps because they were people of a pioneering spirit, made a successful colony.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth Collections

These Collections were made of small groups of the desired type, both from North America and from the European homelands. The Third Collection was to bring in people with craft skills--- blacksmiths and stonemasons, potters, weavers and the like. The Fourth Collection featured people with cultural skills--- musicians and makers of musical instruments, painters, wood-carvers, and tailors and seamstresses who were familiar with the national costume of the various European regions which were the home of those in the Collections. The Fifth Collection included a number of university professors with specialties related to Germanic history, languages, mythology and folklore, as well as Catholic and Lutheran theology professors and pastors.

The Last Collection

The Fifth Collection was complete by 1900, but the Grays continued to travel to Terra and observe humans. During the time of the Holocaust, their observation posts were near to Jewish villages in Poland which were overrun by Nazis. The Gray were sympathetic and spirited many of these rural Polish Jews out of harms way. Many of these were of the desired Nordic physical type, and they all spoke a Germanic language, Yiddish. So it is not too surprising that many of the rescued found their way to the Gray colony of humans, who by then were known as the Frederikaners. The people of the Last Collection, having experienced a few extra decades of the goings-on back on Terra, were considered rather sophisticated and clever.

 Post Collection History

The Frederikaners and their farming enterprises did very well in the years following the collection. They may not have been happy on the restrictions placed on them by the Gray but the learned to live within the restrictions. Because of the trauma of being kidnapped by the Gray at a time when humans didn't even know alien beings existed, the Frederikaners became suspicious of 'outlanders'--- anyone from outside the Frederikaner community, whether Terran or alien.\par From time to time, when troublemakers, misfits, rebels or criminals arose, the individuals involved were removed from the colony by the Gray. The only new Terrans were emissaries of the Pope, to report secretly on the state of the faith among the Frederikaners, so that the Pope would be able to appoint the appropriate Frederikaner-born priest to be the group's bishop. (So the Frederikaners knew nothing of Hiroshima or of the European Union, but knew about John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)

The population growth among the Frederikaners reached a peak just as the Terran Empire began a phase of rapid expansion, and colonists for the new worlds were a highly valuable commodity. The Gray offered a company called Grovanli Iterations a contract for a group of colonists--- all volunteers--- and Grovanli gladly paid the rather exorbitant price to get access to some of the unique Frederikaners as seed colonists for the world Niesse.

Wow, this post is long!!! If you would like to read some of the more concise entries on this blogfest, the list is at Sharon Bayliss' blog.  It's also a day late due to the early arrival yesterday of the septic tank guy who got my indoor plumbing functional again. Functional indoor toilets are cool.

Link Caritas:
TonyBreedenBooks.com: Worldbuilding: A Look at the History and Politics of Øtherworld  First, I must express my admiration for Tony's stamina in using the Ø, it is a lot of work putting in strange letters. The world seems to be a relatively near-future world. With mutants. Mutants are cool. Not as cool as functional indoor toilets, but cool. Note: I could not figure out how to link to the individual post on the blog, so just linked to the blog itself.

Icefall Studio: Worldbuilding Blogfest #2: History & Politics    Layla Lawlor blogged this without having internet at home, so her blog-stamina is greatly to be praised. Karamanda is a city in the mountains in which everyone has wings.

Worldbuilding Blogfest: Geography of Niesse

Geography and Climate of Niesse

Niesse is a world in the Terran Empire, from a WIP with the working title 'Shepherd'.

The planet Niesse is located on the Wieman Expanse, a relatively new slipstream trail with a start-point at the Star Colony Olmayo. Niesse is in the third stage of terraforming and is under control of Grovanli Iterations, an ellessee new to the enterprise of terraforming.

The view on the planet Niesse, regardless of where one chooses to land, is bleak, as is common in a terraformed world at this stage. It looks like a bleak endless sand desert--- rocky in some spots--- with no visible living things.
The presence of human technology is most easily seen in the presence of man-made towers--- the larger ones, called Regulators, regulate the atmosphere and cause the scheduled rains, and the smaller ones, called Shooters, which shoot out spores of multiple varieties of the malarit plant, a genetically engineered terraforming plant used mainly to build up a soil, and also, in time, to provide feed for the earliest life forms to be released on the world.

The sand-like material on the ground has the technical name of 'dust'--- meaning that it lacks the organic material that it would need to qualify for the term 'soil'. As the terraforming process goes on, generations of malarit plants go through their life cycles and die, and contribute that needed organic material. The seed colonists of Niesse--- along with the small number of animals they tend--- also make their contribution to the organic material needs through their excretions.

There are two human settlements on Niesse that qualify for the term 'cities', at least in a relative way. They are Amandus and Bennet, and both are headquarters for bands of terraformers and tower monkeys (the men who set up and maintain the Regulators and Shooters). In addition there are the fixed towns, such as Herford, the one nearest to the home of our main characters, and Bjarka, which is the home of the planet's only educational institute, the seminary in which priests of the various religions are trained. It is also the seat of the planet's Christian bishop.

Most of the seed colonists do not live in fixed towns, but in wandering villages located near a fixed town. The wandering village Horn is home to the main characters of the story. It is near the fixed town of Herford, as is the wandering village of Senda, which also plays a part in the story.

Because the oceans of the planet Niesse have not been fully installed, much less stocked with an ecosystem, all of the cities, villages and towns now in existance are on hilly or mountainous ground. This is to prevent the annoyance of settling valuable seed colonists someplace that will end up under water, drowning them and causing the expense of replacing them.

The seed colonists were all obtained from an old human colony on one of the Five Worlds, a lush agricultural community. They all agreed to be sent to a new world in order to obtain land. But when they arrived from their green and growing world to the harsh reality of Niesse, it was a shock. Depression, misery and apathy were common reactions. But as time goes on some of the seed colonists are recovering their ambition, and are determined to make something of their new world, if they are allowed to.

This was Part 1 of Sharon Bayliss' Worldbuilding Blogfest. In Part 2, which covers the topic 'history', we will learn the history of the seed colonists of Niesse, and a little about the aliens who formerly owned them.

Part of the fun of blogfests is visiting other blogs. Here are two that I have visited and enjoyed so far.

Writing the Other: Worldbuilding Blogfest: Geography and Climate By S. B. Stewart-Laing from Glasgow, Scotland, who writes historic fantasy.  

Rebekah Loper, Writer: Worldbuilding Blogfest Day 1: The World of Catalyst  By Rebekah Loper, a self-described 'cat wrangler and urban farmer', possibly from Oklahoma, and has a husband who re-draws her maps.

Worldbuilding Blogfest starts Monday!!!

Sharon Bayliss is hosting a Worldbuilding Blogfest which starts this Monday. There are post suggestions for each day of the blogfest.

I've found such events are a chance to visit other blogs and to be visited by them, so I am participating. Hope you will consider doing so as well.

Here is the Blogfest list:

Origins Blogfest: O Rose, thou art sick.....

When I was about 13 (about 1971), a learned doctor told me he could cure me of my extreme mental illness--- my fantasy life. I lived a good deal of the time in the worlds of my imagination where I had adventures with Batman and Robin, the crew of the starship Enterprise, and the gang at Stalag 13 from the TV show Hogan's Heroes. Sometimes the adventures mixed character-groups, as when the Enterprise was thrown back in time and a couple of crewmembers were beamed down to Stalag 13, a mythical magical place where anyone who combed his hair right and put on a fake mustache could successfully impersonate Adolf Hitler.

But this was a sickness. Experts had said so. My parents continued to send me to the therapist. I never actually tried to give up making up fantasy stories or my other odd behaviors such as obsessively reading the Bible and the Star Trek by James Blish, and obsessively re-watching television shows that fed my fantasy worlds. But, then again, the therapist never asked me to.

At some point I read the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott--- not as a school assignment, I rarely read books assigned to me, but because I was weird enough to like old books like that. The character Jo was like me--- she made up stories--- but unlike me she wrote them down and considered herself a writer.

I liked the identity of being a writer better than that of being a mental patient. So I began to think of myself as at least a potential writer. But actually writing down stories was hard. If they stay in your head, they cannot be harshly judged and made into a subject for mockery. I had enough mockery. The neighbor kids called me Retardo as it was locally rumored that in spite of my high IQ I was mentally retarded. And my sweet loving younger brother called me Pigface.

In one of the four high schools I attended, I somehow ended up in a creative writing class. Our assignment: write an opening paragraph for a story. This is what I wrote:

"In the beginning, John created the heavens and the earth. At least, that was John's opinion. It was for that arrogance that I vowed he must die."

The teacher started the next class day reading what I had written as an example of an excellent beginning. The first confirmation that my self-identity as a writer was more than mental illness at work. I tried hard to finish that story but got stuck. Maybe if the teacher had ever talked to me as an individual, he could have helped. But none of my high school teachers ever did.

In the subsequent years my fantasy life continued. My writing-things-down life continued to be unsuccessful. Some years after college I began writing weird poems. The first kind of writing that I could finish. I sent a few of them out to publishers. My first acceptance came from a Stalinist/Communist magazine called 'Struggle'. Since I was in my Youthful Marxist phase at the time that worked out well. I got more publications but gave up sending work out in time because of the high cost of postage and of sample copies of poetry magazines.

Recently I found out that my 'mental illness' was actually undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome. I also found out that my difficulty in finishing novels and other long writing projects was not due to my essential badness/laziness, but because I have Attention Deficit Disorder.

With this knowledge, I am working on my writing in new ways. I have started writing poetry again. I've self-published a poetry book, 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows', and started a poetry blog, Opium Cactus Poetry Immersion.

In today's writing world, poetry is pretty useless--- as useless as I often feel since I had to go on disability. But I've heard some nice things about some of my poems. I gave my current therapist a copy of my poetry book and he was impressed by it. Here is a poem from the book (with audio):

jump-rope-song of the apocalypse

fallout's fallingout
allaround myhouse
nuclear missals
commonerthan thistles
radiation ratkiller
firestormthe stormcellar
radiation sickness
reallymakes adiff'rence
bodiesinthe driveway
peopledying allday
fallout's fallingout
allaround myhouse

(c) 1989-2010 Nissa Annakindt

My novel-writing I am revising to make use of the things that have worked in my poetry--- mainly writing things in shorter sections which I can handle rather than the paralyzing largeness of saying 'now I am sitting down to write A WHOLE NOVEL!!!' Will it work? I don't know. But still, I make up stories. And I write.

This blog post is part of the Origins blogfest. Please go there to visit some other participants.

A Fortnight of Mustard: Origins Blogfest: How I Decided Writing Was the Best Form of Self-Flagellation