Copyright © 1986-1998 Andy Slack. All Rights Reserved.
This is how the period 2300-2350 unfolds in my 2300 AD universe. Your Mileage May Vary...
2001-2100: Age of Recovery - Fuel crisis, French Peace, Melbourne Accords.
2101-2200: Second Age of Exploration - Jerome Drive; Eclipse of France; wars exported into space.
2201-2300: Second Age of Commerce - First Contacts; decline of nationalism; rise of Germany; French Empire.
2300: Life discovered in gas giant atmosphere in Kie Yuma system.
2302: Speculation that Provolution has created 'vampires' in Tau Ceti system; life discovered in CHON bodies in Sol's cometary halo.
2303: Kafer scouting party found on Beta Canum IV.
2304: Provolutionists use nuclear weapons to destroy parts of Hong Kong.
2305: Bolivian government overthrown by a band of adventurers; Inca Republic invades Bolivia and installs puppet government.
2306: Prisoners broken out of the supposedly 'escape-proof' penal colony on Io by an unknown starship.
2307: Industrial accident on Crater; mass poisoning narrowly averted. AI hovertank recovered on Beta Canum IV.
2307-08: First Kafer War.
2308: Trilon Corporation on Kie Yuma discover an ancient STL colony ship from a previously unknown race.
2309: 'Back Door' into Kafer Space discovered; first contact with Ylii.
2320: Manned expedition to the Pleiades launched; 'first' contact with Greys.
2322-2340: Second Kafer War. Coalition formed.
2323: Pleiades expedition reaches Alcyone; first contact with AGRA Intelligence.
2324: Kafer invasion fleet reaches and bombards Earth, causing ecological collapse.
2325: Pleiades expedition returns to human space.
2347: First contact with Vilani.
The costly French victory in the Central Asian war sparked a sharp, severe recession. The resulting political unrest led to a coup by the Army in 2289, ending the 12th Republic and monopolising vital industries. The apparent recovery masked a mild but unstoppable trend of price deflation; historians compare the era to the Roaring Twenties after the First World War.
Under the monopoly system, relations between management and labour were relaxed and harmonious; the Army seemed to know what it was doing, and the economy did seem to be improving.
However, the writing was on the wall for those who knew how to read it. The Army's approach to the recession was a simple one: Print as much money as you need. Runaway hyper-inflation was the result, with 25% of France's workforce unemployed and creditors hiding from their debtors in case they were paid off in worthless paper money. Shaken, investors moved out of stocks and shares, into gold, gems, and government bonds. As if to appease an angry God, the French Empire returned to traditional values and religion; entertainment and music became quiet, sober, and refined, and hemlines fell dramatically. A new community spirit grew in towns across human space.
The army's failures in the War of German Reunification (2292-93) and the Flemish War of Independence (2293) forced it from power, and the industrialist Nicolas Ruffin was swept into office in 2294. By 2298, his reforms had produced tangible economic results, and following a plebiscite Ruffin was crowned Emperor and the Third French Empire was inaugurated. Only a few historians muttered darkly about Hitler's rise to power after the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, or Napoleon's ascendance after the troubles of the 1780s. By 2298, the worst was indeed over, although general price deflation continued until 2315.
The First Kafer War (2307-2308) had little impact on Earth economically, as for the most part it was fought far from Earth using existing fleets and armies.
By 2315 the French economy had been stable enough for long enough that investors and entrepreneurs again felt confident. Innovative ideas were again funded, forming 'sunrise industries' and fuelling a boom period of prosperity, rising prices, and inflation. Unemployment fell to less than 5% of the workforce. As the boom continued, morals relaxed and authority - both government and religious - was rejected; fraud and theft became common again, music became louder and faster, entertainment and fashions grew more risque. Business was so brisk, and the volume of trade so high, that even with increasingly sophisticated computers detecting fraud was nearly impossible - and by the time it was detected, the perpetrator had often moved to another system by stutterwarp. However, the rise of a new Kafer leader - Total Supremacy - on the Kafer homeworld was to lead to another incursion into human space, changing human politics for ever.
The Second Kafer War (2322-2340) differed greatly from the First in its intensity, duration and extent. Intermittent skirmishes had continued since 2308, but almost as if by agreement Kafers and humans each kept to their own side of Arcturus. In 2322, Total Supremacy led a coalition of Kafer groups up the French Arm, into a human space grown complacent in its prosperity. Kafer warcraft entered the Solar System in numbers for the first time in 2324, and the resulting carnage involved ships of all the spacefaring Terran nations. Throwing the Kafers back from human space took a generation, and cost over 200 million lives in battle-related deaths alone - not counting many more killed indirectly by famine and disease.
Almost unnoticed in the background was the Bayern mission's first contact with the Greys, and the evidence of a great (and perhaps ongoing) war between advanced ancient civilisations.
The tremendous losses of the Second Kafer War, both in personnel and materiel, triggered a both a sharp, severe recession, and a general feeling throughout humanity of "never again". The war had served to clarify and prioritise the central problem of the day: How was humanity to survive in a potentially hostile universe? Victory had required humanity to organise on an interstellar level, forming a coalition of states with the necessary multi-national military and administrative structures. As the major starfaring powers, America, France and Manchuria were the most powerful members of the Coalition; America gradually took the lead, while France slowly fell into third place in the inner circle - some historians speculate that after the military junta and the Third Empire, for nearly 60 years France had not had the multiple internal parties which would have given her leaders practice in Coalition politics, whereas on the other hand American politicians were particularly accomplished at making inter-party deals to reach their goals.
Four factors now combined to nudge the infant interstellar state towards an Imperial form:
Firstly, the Kafer bombardments during the late 2320s had left Earth with a shattered ecology, and a landscape of ruins. The smouldering scars where proud cities had once stood were visible from the Moon. The need to co-ordinate the reconstruction on a global level forced the Coalition more and more into the role of a world government. By the early 2340s, industrialisation, bombardment and tailored plagues had damaged Earth's ecology to the point that it was no longer self-sustaining, so that only constant human intervention using Pentapod constructs kept the planet habitable; and the retreating Kafers had left small war bands behind, throughout the Solar System and the French Arm.
Secondly, pre-starflight Earth had enjoyed direct sea and air routes by which any city could reach any other. The Coalition had essentially linear communications and trade routes - the three Arms of human space - much like the Silk Road or Roman sea routes of ancient times.
Thirdly, Earth's previous four-layer political structure (global, regional, national and local) was now obsolete. The anagathic drugs first introduced in 2264 had now been in use for nearly a hundred years by some of Earth's richest citizens. Power and wealth were becoming concentrated in the hands of a few virtual immortals; the political arena was reverting to a two-layer structure - the normal-lifespan 'Ephemerals' on the one hand, and the anagathic-using 'Immortals' on the other, matching the division of the ancient world into the village peasants, and nobility in the towns. Immortal influence gradually slowed technical progress and made society ever more conservative in its outlook.
Finally, contact with the Vilani Ziru Ssirka ('Grand Imperium of Stars') made it clear to the Coalition that they were trapped between hostile Kafers on one side, and a huge and ancient empire on the other. To a generation raised and trained for war, it was clear that Terran humanity would be exterminated by the Kafers, absorbed and enslaved by the Vilani, or become strong enough to fight both and win. They chose to be strong, and Coalition policies began leaning towards expansion and outright fascism. A massive military buildup and an equally huge exploration and colonisation effort made it seem that humanity was playing Go on an interstellar scale, with colonies as the pieces and local space as the board.
The combination of these factors made it gradually apparent that the nation-states and democratic processes which had served Earth's people well for centuries were no longer relevant in an interstellar age. Although it would be nearly a century before the term was used, historians date the beginning of the Terran Empire from 2350, by which point these trends were shaping human interstellar government into a militaristic, feudal aristocracy dominated by wealthy Immortals.