PmWiki | Waylight / Divergence

Perhaps the best way to explain the mood of the setting is to highlight the differences in thinking between the Waylights setting and real life.

A visitor from the Slipstream to what to them would be the pre-Invasion world would be able to assimilate, but find a number of things very puzzling: while by their standard any industrialized country is extremely prosperous, the concept of having wireless sets that depend on a fixed infrastructure to work at all would make them uneasy, and the concept of any important piece of technology that can't be jury rigged to keep working in an emergency would downright scare them.

The scale of things in Waylights is reduced: since there are a lot fewer people in the world, endeavors must perforce be smaller in scope, but individual contributions matter more. Even an Ustrian merchant prince would find themselves easily outclassed if they had to deal with the logistics and legalities of a modern global corporation even at a middle-management level.

Cheap goods would give the impression that everyone in a first-world country is rich, or that we have achieved post-scarcity, however, things like requiring a passport to travel and using electricity that wasn't generated at home (and thus can be taken away) would seem profound human right violations to a Slipstream person. They would likely say that our society is what Tsuxia is trying to become, or return to -- which, of course, makes sense.

Overall, a Slipstream inhabitant put in a fish-out-of-water scenario in real life could probably be explained away as an Amish who recently left the farm on rumspringa and developed a strong but not obsessive interest in general aviation and survivalism.

A Slipstream inhabitant would probably find our society incredibly advanced, but brittle: on one hand, there is much greater safety and convenience in everyday life, but on the other, things like being arrested or ending up in an accident or involved in a crime scene cause much greater disruption; an equivalent might be one of us traveling to a 1960s-era sci fi utopia from a pulp magazine.

Finally, the average Streamie would find us very capable physically, with similar strength and agility and much greater endurance than he or she, but fragile -- getting shot is something that is more likely to happen in Waylights than in real life, but also much easier to survive or even walk away from.

A quirk is that due to past experiences, people in Waylights are very xenophobic, in the sci-fi sense of the word: a story like ET or even Superman would at best not be understood and at worst be seen as pro-Invader propaganda. Demigods, mutant and heroes would be part of the collective imaginary for Slipstream people as much as they are for us, but aliens have become an universal evil. It might be possible to pass Independence Day as a documentary, but not Star Trek; if Slipstreamers ever take to space they will probably do so with intent to conquer.

In conclusion, Waylights is intended to be a setting that is recognizable as a place where modern humans could live, while leaving room for heros and rogues within society rather than at the margins of it.