The Variable League (zones of thought fan fiction)

The Qeng Ho believed their interstellar culture had reached its final stage of development. However, in A Deepness in the Sky we see four special technologies:

1. Pham Nuwen’s localizers
2. an improved Bussard ramjet
3. Focus
4. cavorite

These discoveries hint at something readers will know from A Fire Upon the Deep: the technological achievements of the Qeng Ho fall far short of the physical limitations imposed by the Slow Zone (although cavorite is false evidence).

Leading thinkers among the Spiders and Qeng Ho will propose the following theory:

1. Realized technology falls significantly short of possible technology (as demonstrated by items 1–4 above)
2. Most technologies are invented by stellar civilizations (not interstellar traders)
3. Advanced civilizations die by optimizing for short-term efficiency gains at the expense of stability
4. This imposes an upper bound on the total optimization power a stellar civilization may attain before its death
5. It is possible to direct more optimization power to the goals of interstellar civilization while remaining within this bound
6. Interstellar civilization wants novel technologies rather than reinventions of known technologies
7. Stellar civilizations will invent more novel technologies if their access to scientific archives is extremely lopsided

To make this happen, the OnOff star civilization will establish many colonies. This will be easier for them than for other civilizations due to their advantages at spacefaring (cavorite and improved ramjets). There will be two types of colonies: variable worlds, which have very lopsided access to Qeng Ho knowledge, and mainstream worlds, which have access to the full archives. Trade fleets will be fully resupplied at mainstream worlds in between visits to variable worlds, which cannot be expected to have reliable spaceflight.

This plan will hit a speed bump when it is discovered that cavorite decays relatively quickly away from the OnOff star. Perhaps it can be used for a single round trip, but no more. The OnOff star will remain the preferred resupply point for trade fleets, and the other mainstream worlds will be much less prominent.

Eventually, the OnOff star civilization will fail, and the Variable League will suffer greatly from this shock. However, by the time this occurs there may exist technologies that open the door to new forms of interstellar governance.

Settings within the Variable League

The Variable League is a meta-setting; many different forms of planetary or stellar civilization may exist within it, some with very idiosyncratic mixes of technologies (although limited by the Slow Zone laws). These settings will get weirder and weirder as League planners gain more experience at choosing subsets of the archives to expose growing civilizations to.

In the more distant future, these settings may even include magic, i.e. technologies that would be so difficult to produce on a mainstream world that they could never be created until long after their usefulness has been eclipsed by some other, less weird technology, at which point there is no reason to create them.