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A Place Called Firstworld

First edition cover
Author	Jamie Woosley
Cover artist	John Schoenherr
Country	Template:Country data Estmere
Language	Estmerish
Series	Firstworld
Genre	science fiction
Published	August 1967
Publisher	Broadleaf Publishing
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)
Pages	341
Followed by	The Nearest End

A Place Called Firstworld is a science fiction novel by Estmerish writer Jamie Woosley. Published in 1967, it became immensely popular and won numerous literary awards, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of Estmerish fantasy. It is the first major installment of the Firstworld, a series of novels and short stories by Woosley. Much of the setting was described in previous works and are extensively referenced throughout the novel.

The story is set on the fictional world of Ekua and centers on a young civil servant named Jed, who is sent as a delegate on behalf of his community to an interplanetary polity. The story follows Jed’s attempts to navigate the complexities of interacting with various peoples with widely different cultures. The novel revolves around the multilayered intertwining of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion during the period of state-building.

The novel is widely considered to be a classic example of "soft" science fiction, and is one of the most famous examinations of anthropology and political science in the genre. The major theme of the novel is the effects of culture on politics and society, explored in particular through the accelerating decline of the society the characters live in. The novel also explores the interactions Jed has with people, the struggle between duty and morality, and the richness of cultural diversity. Although the structure of the story is similar to that of a traditional epic, it subverts many traditional tropes of the genre, such as the hero's journey.

Firstworld has been reprinted numerous times, translated into over a dozen languages, and received high praise from critics. It has won numerous literary awards such as X and X. It is considered one of the best fantasy books ever written and continues to be widely influential in the genre. It achieved a degree of literary recognition due to its exploration of themes not usually found in fantasy, such as democracy and revolutionary societies, capitalism, colonialism, and individualism and collectivism.

Background

Woosley was born in 1921 in a multicultural district of Morwall, Estmere. Jamie Woosley's father, John Edward Woolsey was an anthropologist and her mother, Julie Suryanto Woolsey was a political activist in Kingsport; both of her parents' experiences would influence all of her works. The protagonists of many of Jamie Woosley's works are anthropologists or outsiders of some kind, who have to navigate through unfamiliar societies and cultures. The stories of the Firstworld Cycle frequently explore the effects of differing social and political systems in a complex world and her characters are interested and open minded in exploring them. When she was eight years old, Morwall fell to Gaullican forces during the Great War. The occupation of Estmere and the chaos and hardship that followed left a great impression on her life. Themes revolving around great societal changes and the coming of age are often featured in Woosley’s works, especially the Firstworld series.

The early concepts for the Firstworld setting were developed in a short story in the form of a fictional historical chronicle after she was inspired after reading about the Solarian Empire. Although she developed the concept of the series early on, at first it was a series of disjointed short stories without a specific setting or timeline. During her education at the University of Morwall, she published additional short stories that established the world of Firstworld and its important concepts.

Setting

Firstworld is set in the Khani cycle universe in the year 10243 CE. By this time humanity is spread across a region almost two thousand light years wide, centered around the core region and Earth. However humanity was never able to breach the lightspeed barrier; the most advanced propulsion drives can only reach up to 99.9995 percent of the speed of light. Woosley does not establish the entire history of the universe in a single story, instead letting readers piece it together from various works.

Without faster than light travel, it takes years or even decades to travel between solar systems, although the journey is shortened for travelers onboard due to relativistic time dilation. Interstellar travel is rare and is largely limited to periodic contact between systems or colonization expeditions to unexplored systems. The physical distance ensures that societies and the people are almost completely isolated from even their nearest neighbors. Socially and technologically, societies develop and progress as determined by local factors and can even regress due to some catastrophic event. Thus there is a massive range of development, from hunter gatherer tribes to extremely advanced planet-spanning states. Furthermore planets habitable for human life are extremely rare and are almost always very different from Earth; thus through evolution and genetic engineering humans have adapted to fit their local environmental conditions. This led to an incredible level of biological diversity between the stars and even between planets, although they are still recognizably human.

Ekua is an Earth-like planet but with subtle differences; compared to Earth, Ekua is cooler with more extreme temperatures, thinner air, and lower gravity. As a result, Ekuans are generally tall and hardy people adapted for rapid changes in temperature. Ekua is dominated by one contiguous landmass that straddles the equator known as Sarhel. It is largely covered in deserts, mountains, shrublands, and savannah, broken up by several shallow salty seas and fully surrounded by a massive ocean. The world is inhabited by both humans, which include sorcerers or wizards. Aside from the single continent, the only other notable landmass is the Eisat in the north, with a much cooler climate.

The setting of Firstworld has been described as late modern but before widespread industrialization. The continent is diverse with many different peoples who are dark to olive-skinned. The northern island of Eisat is populated by the white-skinned Eisan people, who see the rest of the world as evil sorcerers: the Eisans, in turn, are viewed by the rest of the world as barbarians. For over 500 years, Ekua was united under an empire simply known as the Firstworld, that brought a long period of peace and prosperity to the planet. However over the past century, the empire has been in decline which has rapidly accelerated by the time the novel takes place.