ADAHGA 33 - Ancillary Documentation / Guttergangs

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Cord Hurn
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ADAHGA 33 - Ancillary Documentation / Guttergangs

Post by Cord Hurn »

The way SRD discusses the history of guttergangs sounds plausible, believable, got me thinking things really could progress that way given the described circumstances. That said, it is usually the case that an Ancillary Documentation chapter deals with a subject that will play a part in the plot later in the story. THIS Ancillary Documentation only looks back, to the kind of character Milos Taverner once was. I think it would have been more effective if placed earlier in the story, before Milos deserts Angus to go snitch to the Amnion.

Until humankind came in contact with the Amnion, it was easy to believe that guttergangs would eventually rule the Earth.

In one sense, their roots were old as crime. "The poor you have with you always," said Christ, not inaptly. However, he might have gone on to observe that poverty had no meaning in the absence of wealth: where all have nothing, all are equal--and none poor. From the moment when human evolution first stumbled on the concept of having, some individuals or tribes or people had more while others had less. Predictably the disparity bred tension. In due course that tension led to violence--the taking away from those who had by those who had not.

As in all human endeavor, concerted action proved more effective than individual effort: groups could take more.

Gangs of one kind or another became inevitable as soon as having was invented.

In another sense, however, guttergangs were more recent. They were a product of modern mechanization and urbanization. More specifically, they were a symptom of as well as a reaction against the slow collapse of Earth's social infrastructures.

Because the services of well-meaning but overtaxed communities could no longer feed or care for their young adequately; because educational systems tried harder to control than to excite their students; because transitional lifestyles and intense technological changes eroded the ability of families to provide stability for their children; because humankind's rush to exploit the planet and consume its resources led to a rising tide of poverty which no one could stem; because the fiscal policies of governments were designed primarily to defend the comfort of the few against the hunger of the many; and because, finally, no one could pay for enough police to combat crime: for all these reasons and more, guttergangs flourished throughout Earth's sprawling urban structures with a vigor unprecedented in human history.

The gangs were starving, loveless, abused, despised, cornered: therefore they fought back. And they were able to fight back successfully because they wrested their survival from the same crumbling infrastructure which had created the conditions for their existence--there by, of course hastening the decline of that infrastructure; worsening the state of people who loved within rather than against Earth's social compacts; encouraging the growth of more guttergangs.

Weath was accumulated at the top of society, and people lost jobs due to technological advancements, and no one seemed to care until the poorer people all banded together. They became parasites as part of the guttergangs; acting out from an inner well of selfishness and rapacity. But parasites normally starve when their host dies, yet the guttergangs were too welded into society to be removed by anything less than a cataclysmic event or utter tyranny.

The invention and application of the gap drive actually bolstered the guttergangs, because it brought to Earth new resources from previously-unexplored space. This shored up infrastructure and thus gave the guttergangs more upon which to survive and thrive. No wonder it seemed likely to many societal observers that guttergangs would eventually rule the Earth.
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A Dark & Hungry God Arises 33 - AD / Guttergangs

Post by Cord Hurn »

The discovery of the Amnion and the threat they posed altered the upward ascendancy of the guttergangs on planet Earth. Even though the struggle between humanity and these new and dangerous extraterrestrials looked likely to take place many light-years across the galaxy, and would be fought by forces of the infrastructure like corporations, smaller comapanies, independent ships, and of course the UMCP. So the gutterrgangs and society in general on Earth would seem to have little incentive to change, going by the previous rules of parasitism. Yet the discovery of the external Amnion threat did much to diminish the guttergangs.

Besides peering into the roots of Milos' life, this ADAHGA chapter also looks back in another way. It also looks back to the former importance of these guttergangs, as genophobia put them in decline. I feel the latter half of this chapter effectively explains how that could happen.

They [the guttergangs] did not suddenly discover patriotism, of course. They did not put aside their clenched internecine attack on all social structures outside their own for the sake of humanity's greater good. Nevertheless they were human beings--genophobic to the core. Like patriots and religionists, environmentalists and native Earthers, nations and corporations, politicians and cops, they could not stifle the visceral frisson of their revulsion against imperialism by mutation.

By degrees too small to be measured, too small even to be noticed in the short term, the guttergangs began to erode.

This process took any number of forms. As one crude example: thanks to the Amnion, the appetite of the UMCP for young bodies was as intense as, and inherently more comfortable than, the guttergangs'. Active recruitment by the police gave the hungry youth of Earth a choice distinct from the more passive, as well as more brutal, accretion of the guttergangs.

Or a more subtle instance: hating and fearing the Amnion, the ordinary people of Earth--the natural prey of the guttergangs--had less hatred and fear to spare for those gangs. Therefore in complex, almost indefinable ways the guttergangs began to lose their mystique, their attraction for the lost and disenfranchised of the planet. In comparison to the Amnion, the gangs were perceived as more bearable, more manageable, more normal; therefore less threatening to humankind--and less appealing to humankind's downtrodden. Over time, no human enterprise could oppose--or remain unchanged by--this kind of perceptual shift.

Slowly across the decades, genophobia united humanity against its common foe.

Prejudice becomes a survival instinct in this scenario, the last survival instinct humanity posseses , so say some cynics in this chapter's conclusion. The remark that the less cynical societal observers/commentators didn't know "whether to be grateful or terrified" is interesting in its odd way. "It's a relief that we humans have a survival instinct strong enough to counter the Amnion, but it's demoralizing that it's linked to prejudice", is what I got of their outlook.
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