i would like to hear your thoughts on the "You see it's quite simple: if they call the earth Gaia, it's fantasy. If they call it Terra, that's sci-fi" tie into greek and roman mythology please
Gaia is the Greek personification of the Earth, right, and Terra comes from Terra Mater (Mother Earth), the Roman version of essentially the same thing.
And I think we tend to view Ancient Greece as a kind of mythical fantasy place (this is fair, much of the culture of Ancient Greece the average person interacts with is fiction) vs. Rome, which is very real to the average imagination. When one thinks of Rome, one thinks of real events that actually happened (the Ides of March, the Great Fire, maybe the big fuckoff wall in England, etc.)
What I think is super interesting about that is that this is an effect of the primary technology of the Roman empire—colonisation—being so blisteringly effective that Roman mythology and their incredibly pervasive religion (and the 5D chess they were playing with it in order to facilitate the colonisation project) is pretty much invisible unless you sit down and look for it. Did you know the Romans had a god-personification of doorways (Forculus)? Now you do. And yet it's ALWAYS Romans In Space because we think of them as a real and serious imperial power vs. like, theatre nerds.
This is a shame for science fiction I think because other options include:
Space Peloponnesian League. Nice planet you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Have you seen our armada. Would you like to contribute to the armada, thus enlarging it, to ensure nothing unfortunate happens to your nice planet?
Space Sparta. Empire run entirely on the dominion of one single other planet with a population of perhaps 100x the legitimate citizen population. Control of said planet maintained by random acts of terrorism enacted by particularly horrible children. Bad at warfare despite putting all their time and attention into it. Deluded into thinking they're good at defence where the fact of the matter is that no one in their right mind would want their barren death planet.
Space Scythians. What home planet? Oh no they live on their ships. Yeah they just raid whatever planets they pass for supplies. They have this whole sector under an iron fist.
Space Persians. Hello new subjects we are religiously mandated to defeat chaos and also we're collecting your plants for our gardens. We have hundreds of vassal states and they're all terrified of us, for excellent reason.
Not to suggest these literally never come up in science fiction but the ratio of Romans to other possible imperial structures is way off and imho it's because Romans were such unbelievably successful colonisers that we think of them as real (and therefore reasonable fodder for science fiction) where almost all other ancient civilisations end up being used as blueprints for fantasy even though they were real too.
This isn't necessarily bad but it is an interesting pattern & the fact that it exists says a lot more than we tend to think about re: Western culture and Western cultural product as a whole.
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