HumanSpace

This document describes the unique "personality" of each of the regions of human space by describing what your experience would be like as a child growing up in that region.

The Core

You grew up in a crowded workers' barracks; your parents were both mill or factory workers, or perhaps miners on one of the frontier worlds. For as long as you can remember, your parents have been talking about getting free of debt and moving someplace else, perhaps a farmstead on a Dirt Belt world where they can be their own masters. You were in school until the age of 13 or 14, but now you work alongside your parents. Your parents are quietly religious, but are ashamed of expressing their faith too openly (even to their children) because most people here regard religious faith as a mark of a backwards or uneducated person. If you are a girl, from a very early age you have been made to feel intellectually inferior to men.

The Deep

Your parents most likely are engineers or scientists or doctors, and you were raised to believe that there is no question or problem that science cannot answer. And yet, on certain nights each year your family sets out a saucer of milk or some special sweet bread on your doorstep as an offering to the "elves." You know that the Deep is the safest and most advanced region of human space, and have little desire to live elsewhere. When you visit the spaceport and meet outsiders, they are far too loud and boisterous for your tastes. You take it for granted that you will pursue higher education, which your planetary government provides for free to all citizens.

The Paradise Worlds

You have never gone hungry. Along with your parents and several brothers and sisters, you live in a single-family home with a well-manicured lawn. If your parents were particularly wealthy, you may have a maid, a cook, or a nanny. The kids at school all come from families nearly identical to your own. As far as you know, you have never met a gay couple. Your world is safe, and comfortable, and you expect to grow up to be just like your parents. Some kids at school who did not fit in were bullied mercilessly, and talk about leaving this planet behind as soon as they reach adulthood.

--or--

You grew up in a stifling third-floor apartment, sharing a bedroom with two other siblings. Your mother is a maid or a cook; your father, if you have one, works a blue-collar job. Your life is comfortable, in some ways: there is almost always food on the table, and your world lives without any fear of piracy or natural disasters. But, you learned at a very young age how to make yourself as invisible as possible to those who are considered your "betters." When your parents are too old to work, they will not be able to afford to live here, and will probably move to Earth, where the cities are crowded and crime-ridden.

The Dirt Belt

Milking cows and baling hay leaves you little time to think about the mysteries of the galaxy beyond your own world. Your family is not rich, but neither is anyone else in your village. Your parents have worked hard to ensure that you will live a life more comfortable than your own, and they taught you that if you try hard enough, you can do anything. Your family most likely believes in a personal God who takes an individual interest in each one of you; you are probably Christian or Jewish, or perhaps Mormon. People in your village warn you about the corruption and poverty of the "big city," which is a nearby settlement with a staggeringly large population (nearly sixty thousand!), most of whom work in dimly lit factories.

The Rim

You grew up in a comfortable apartment in a medium-sized spaceport city. Like nearly everyone else you encounter from day to day, you are fair-skinned, of European descent. Your home planet is a comfortable place, but you dream of leaving it behind one day to travel the galaxy and seek out adventure. A few times during your childhood, your planet was attacked by pirates seeking to steal ships from the spaceport or to dominate the planetary government and extract a ransom. You stood out on the porch and watched the bright flashes in the night sky as pirate and militia ships exploded overhead.

The Pirate Worlds

Your parents are dead. You have never seen the inside of a school or a doctor's office. The only way to get off the streets was to serve as a crew member on a pirate ship. You are little more than a slave, and you know that if you try to escape to more civilized parts of human space, you can be arrested and tried as a criminal, an enemy of humanity. But if you stay on this ship and fight well enough and impress the right people, you may become captain of your own ship one day. If you live long enough, that is.

Earth

Your apartment had windows, but the nearby buildings are so tall and the streets so narrow that the windows almost never let in direct sunlight. You have been told that the one city block you inhabit contains more people than entire worlds elsewhere in human space. You go to school, but in a dirty, dismal building, not much better than the factories where your parents work. Your family is quietly religious: most likely Buddhist, or else adhering to a form of Sufi Islam. Although this advice is seldom spoken out loud, growing up you have always known one thing: if you ever find any possible way to leave this planet, you should do so.