For your orientation, again, there are three distinct periods in the Voidpunk universe: the Artifact Age one billion years ago, the Federation Age ten thousand years ago, and the Entrarchic Age as its current period. About the Federation Age, I haven’t blogged a lot—only some historical basics and one or two technological details.

The human civilization of the Entrarchic Age doesn’t have a very detailed picture of the human civilization of the Federation Age, which provides peculiarities that are not easily resolved.

Perhaps the most important peculiarity is the disparity between the enormous number of extant Federation Age sources on the one hand, and the relative scarcity of detailed information in vital areas of interest on the other. These areas, notably, include details about the exoentity invasion, how it was fought back in the course of a mere two thousand years, and how the Federation Age civilization eventually collapsed in the aftermath. (The Artifact Age’s non-human civilizations, in contrast, fought for a million years; and when they finally drove the exoentities back, these civilizations not merely collapsed but went right out extinct.) And this scarcity does not stem from Federation Age sources being unreadable or indecipherable. The language is basically the same, and a Federation Age visitor would find it no more difficult to communicate with residents of the Entrarchic Age than, say, a Texan communicating with blue collar workers in Toronto.

Which obviously opens up another peculiarity, which I will save for another post: why do people who live ten thousand years apart still speak the same language? Among my various exam topics back in the days were the characteristics of dialects, ethnolects, sociolects, and similar on the horizontal axis, and language change on the vertical axis. So indeed, I know this is highly unlikely from a linguistic perspective and virtually impossible in practice—good luck with reading, for example, Beowulf in the English language of its time, and from one of its extant manuscripts to boot. And that’s after about one thousand years, not ten thousand!

But of course, there are reasons why the language spoken by humans in the Voidpunk universe has neither developed into successor languages like, for example, Latin did, nor barely changed from the Federation Age to the Entrarchic Age. It won’t be a tell-all because some aspects are part of the plot, but to the less plotty bits I will come back.