[Editor’s note: this timeline started out as notes I was keeping when writing Evelyn’s Story.]

How it comes about: some future history

2020 CE to 2050 CE

The Great Dying: approximately 60% of the Earth’s human population dies in a series of wars, plagues and natural disasters. Most deaths from starvation occur among poorer populations; richer people tend to be killed in conflicts over property. The biosphere is badly damaged but the reduction in human population is swift enough to avert a total collapse. Learning, love and hope survive: demographic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries CE have dispersed enough of society to enable it to survive the collapse of the cities.

2050 CE to 2100 CE

This is the phase of most overt technology development on Earth.

Intelligent machines appear.

There is a synthesis of ecological and technological cultures.

Flowering of nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetics, robotics.

Start of restoration of damaged ecologies.

Initial space colonization (Low Earth Orbit, Luna, Mars, the Belt).

First popular reliable ecological ethic.

Personal transformation becomes common. It is common for people to extend their abilities and increase their intelligence… but there are often disastrous results unless those transformed have undergone an equally far-reaching spiritual transformation.

2100 CE to 2110 CE

A period of very rapid change.

People of ecological persuasion are torn. Those who do not abandon their technologies and flee to the Old Ways take advantage of a hundred cunning techniques to extend their lives, alter their appearances and integrate themselves into the worldwide communications Net… but their love for Earth is too great for them to tear themselves away and head out into the Endless Deeps as their more technophilic cousins do. They turn their backs on space and embrace Earth with a hundred million arms and vow never again to let it come to harm. They come to be known as the Green.

The people who head into space bring life to a thousand barren rocks. They eat rock with fusion flames, spread magnetic sails to catch the solar winds, and start the first really permanent settlements. They look outwards at a billion lightyears of space waiting to feel the touch of Life, and they come to be known as the Chrome.

Both these groups are advanced information-based cultures, and they keep in touch, sharing data and the occasional traveller… but they face in opposite directions, and slowly grow apart.

The people who renounced advanced transformational technologies in a wish to ‘stop the clock’ and return to a simpler time come to be known as the Brown. They live in a placid world of close horizons and are reluctant to tolerate eccentricity or nonconformists.

These people start to use the term ‘Grey’ to refer to those people still operating under the paradigm of unbounded greed and deceit that led to so much trouble earlier.

After 2110 CE

The emergence of ‘Gaia’: the merging of the Earth computer/communications web with intelligent machines, humans and the biosphere.

On Earth the great sprawling cities are dismantled and the many scars in the land begin to heal.

The Green culture merges with the biosphere, leaving behind the Brown, who now call themselves Traditionalists and start to regard themselves as the only true remaining humans. Their numbers are small. Many who would have been part of this group perished during the Great Dying, when only intelligence, ingenuity, and a willingness to adapt quickly enabled many people to survive.

The Chrome move out across the solar system and turn their attention towards the stars. Colonies take hold from close solar orbit all the way out to the Oort Cloud. A web of communications spreads across space; great observatories probe the depths in every direction and the first expeditions leave for the nearer stars.

The Grey, as is always their style in times unfriendly to naked greed, fade back under cover and are slowly forgotten.

The World of the Woolly Mountain Incident

By 2400 CE the situation on Earth has stabilized. In the California area the vast suburbs and most of the old cities are gone. Los Angeles has returned to a scrubby plain dotted with villages, but from above the traces of ancient streets can be seen. The tawny hills of San Francisco have shed their houses, and the San Joaquin Valley is once again a realm of oak forests and foxes.

The Gaian culture is mostly invisible to the Traditionalists who live in California. Ranchers operate in the hills, small farms and settlements can be found along the rivers, and wagon trains cross the passes to distant valleys.

Gaia makes herself known, though… taboos exist that have no counterpart in the ancient societies that the traditionalists revere. Troublemakers (the smart, the unusual, the freaky) are left at ‘meeting places’ outside the villages for the Gaian ‘witches’ to pick up. Experimenting with high technology is forbidden; any tinkering with steam engines or electricity will bring mysterious ills upon a whole village.

The Gaians are the rulers of Earth. Their human forms have been subsumed into the endless variety of the biosphere and the Net, and they can appear in almost any shape. Nanotechnology, genetics, memetics and advanced informatics have given them godlike powers and they dance across the world in a thousand changing forms. They hold the safety of the Earth sacred above all. They communicate with the Chrome living in the solar system, on the watch for possible threats to Earth.

They spread themselves out over the lands and seas, each linked to and caring for a stretch of land or sea, alert through complex networks of spies for potential problems.

The Traditionalists’ custom of placing ‘different’ children outside at meeting places provides new blood and new perspectives for the Gaians. Children with a thirst for learning and a disdain for the quiet settled Old Ways find a universe to explore, vastly larger than anything they could find at home. They cease to trouble their drowsy birthplaces… but the most farsighted of the Traditionalist elders are beginning to be concerned about the loss of long-term vitality.

The Traditionalists live in a world of magic and wonder. The biotechnology of the Gaians has resulted in wondrous and fearsome additions to the ecosystem. New animals roam the hills, new fish swim in the sea, new birds fill the skies and new plants grow on the land. Half-forgotten mythical creatures live again.

This magic extends to spells. Many parts of the Gaian ecology can respond to instructions, and some parts are intelligent: a persistent Traditionalist can acquire the knowledge to command plants, animals or apparently inanimate objects to do his bidding… if he is lucky.

Most Traditionalists don’t dare to do this; they are content to follow the Old Ways. They live in a world ruled by the seasons; they trade simple items across the mountains and valleys, they have a rich musical culture, and they name their children after ancient heroes.

Always, however, they are aware in the back of their minds that the world is wide, and strange things indeed live beyond their village walls…

The Chrome culture, the descendant of the technophilic peoples who migrated to space at the time of the Split, are spreading outwards across the nearby galaxy. Their most distant explorers have pushed themselves close to the speed of light, and relativity has given them lifespans beyond the dreams of Earth. Others have constructed vast palaces in space, realms of crystal and light, and live lives of leisure while ten thousand machines tend to their desires. Still others have ‘taken the plunge’ and entered the virtual world of the computer to live countless lifetimes in the span of one, sculpting dreams in the infinitely malleable world of information. Mighty engineering works exist in the solar system, and great ships sail between the planets.

But sometimes they are curious and even a little homesick for the Mother World, and they drop down toward the fringes of the atmosphere in hesitant curiosity…