I always thought the Battletech line of novels and games was interesting - it was a huge, and wonderfully cohesive shared science fiction setting with lots of great authors and ideas, before the publishing company's management made them go all defunct (shades of Farscape...). Anyway, so flipping through some old books, I get to thinking.

      To discuss in generalized terms, the setting begins with a Roman Empire-analogue - once great, united humanity has degenerated into a decadent, backsliding mess of 'Successor States,' each supposedly warring for the basis of being the leader of a new, united humanity, but not really, they're just warring. Then the barbarian analogues come along, smashing and grabbing everything in their path, yadda yadda yawn, but: it ain't so simple. The barbarians consider themselves much more civilized than those they are invading, and even twist that into their vaguely-religious rationale for the same. They're not just from 'somewhere else,' but rather are the return of the old, united humanity's equivalent of the UN peacekeeping forces, who exiled themselves, only to return with advanced technology and a mission to restore the old united front - on their new cultural terms, though, rather than trying to recreate the Golden Age.

      These barbarian-analogues have even more interesting twists. Though they consider themselves more civilized than their invade-ees, they seem to have instead reverted to a tribal/clan culture, with caste systems dominated by the military caste (but: semiotic apart warrior caste as they call it, vs it actually being a military..eh? eh?), and history partly recounted in epic poetry. They're badass, but not rape and pillage-wise, but rather skill and honor-system/duels/etc-wise. Instead of class issues, they have genetically-engineered, born-in-a-metal-womb versus normally born issues. Flip everything around, and those opposing them, when looked at closely, are close analogues of modern nations and/or cultures.

      So, I'm not sure what semantic-structure might pop out of this upon a closer reading, but I do think it makes for interesting questions concerning what actually constitutes civilized or not, or perhaps just as a sociological scenario, especially as I haven't gone into the myriad details of each of the different factions which each provided their own little twists. Or, in a broader sense, say take conflict of the 'barbarian' angle of creating a new unity on new terms, versus the pre-invasion false-pretense/impossibility of trying to return to a Golden Age. And just thinking of/realizing this right before I press the post button, from the way they kind of ended before the company went under, most interestingly of all, it turned out that the closest they come to unity is not quite entirely new, but not exactly a return to the old, either - a mix of semi-idealistic nostalgia reawakened and revitalized by the stress of a new threat, and a changed-past that seems new, returned after a self-exile from the breakdown of the original unity.