Trope-a-Day: Adam and Eve Plot

Adam and Eve Plot: The colonization of Valiár (Thirteen Colonies), in which the catastrophic failure that destroyed the majority of the colonists in cryostasis aboard the Swiftrunner left a first-in team half-a-dozen strong as the only people around – and it’s not like in subluminal colonization you get to turn around and go home. You colonize or you die.

Subverted inasmuch as they knew perfectly well that their genetic pool was in no way up to the job, even for such fine examples of genefixed Eldrae anthalis as they were. As such, after maximizing the genetic diversity that was available, it was time to send in the clones [1]; and Valiár today remains almost entirely populated by serially cloned descendants of the original set of archetypes.


[1] Yes, they could handle this differently NOW, but they could not THEN, and NOW NOW is based on THEN THEN.

2 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: Adam and Eve Plot

    • Sure, if there was one. (And, indeed, when the Reunification happened about a thousand years later, that actually happened, technically.) But Valiár was one of the original Thirteen Colonies, colonized by the old-fashioned technique of stacking hundreds of billions of esteyn worth of triply-redundant prefabricated colony supplies atop tens of billions of esteyn of primitive, one-shot fusion torch, adding frozen colonists, and lighting the blue touchpaper. It’s not like there was a planned sequence of follow-ups – just one colonization mission, with any follow-up to come long after they’d built a colony, developed an industrial base, fabricated an interstellar communications laser, regained contact with the homeworld…

      …or else waited enough centuries to be pretty sure that none of that was going to happen because everyone’s dead and someone else can have a go.

      Not like anyone was expecting FTL travel to come along in only one more millennium, after all.

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