Younger World Story

The Younger World Story was a theory that suggested the Great Houses were a cultural shadow of humanity.

The Story relied on certain anthropological models that were able to accurately track the progress of worlds in the Spiral Politic with the exception of Earth and the Homeworld. The Great Houses defied the models by maintaining stellar-manipulation-levels of technology for ten million years without undergoing any cultural change; humanity defied the models by abruptly stopping any progress in the early 21st century for unknown reasons.

The Story speculated that humanity's cessation of progress occurred at the exact point that they could understand all the Homeworld's technologies, and right before they could develop new methods of thinking and imagine universes unknown to the Great Houses. Believers in the Story particularly noted the similarities between the Houses and the early human descriptions of pantheistic gods, both groups being all-seeing and immortal yet reliably predictable. Though the traditional explanation for these similarities relied on race-memories of the Houses affecting human legends, many human descendents instead interpreted this to mean that the Houses were a shadow of humanity's cultural complexity.

Though there were many similar theories connecting the Houses to other lesser species, the Younger World Story was the only such theory that spread to the Homeworld itself, carried by agents of the Great Houses. The self-doubt the Story inspired may have provoked the jingoistic approach taken by the Newblood House Lolita and other militant Houses toward the War.

In the Hollywood Bowl shooting during Michael Brookhaven's Mujun: the Ghost Kingdom, the Voice said, "This is a younger world, and this is where it's born", apparently referencing the Younger World Story. (PROSE: The Book of the War)