Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

One of the things I need to figure out for my world is how cultures will change once people have been in space for 300 years.

The way it's set up has each space station populated mostly by people from one vaguely geographical region (but mostly politico-economic associations a la the EU and ASEAN). After a hundred years, will people consider themselves, for example, German or English or Japanese or Indian or Nigerian, or Centauri/Eridani? That's the hard question.

One set of protagonists in The Novel are from Central European Federation space (Centauri 5, Eridani 1 & 2). The CEF resulted from the breakup of the EU after a land grab at Epsilon Eridani, in which a German-led coalition ... well, I haven't exactly worked this out yet, but it involves mining rights on the planet there. The other half of the EU became the Western European Alliance.

The CEF is basically Germany south to Italy (minus Switzerland) and east to Ukraine, including Turkey. (I'm optimistic, k?) So the CEF stations are initially populated by varying proportions of Germans, Turks, Poles, other Slavs, and the like. Based on actual human populations over the last 300 years, I'm assuming that initially, you'll get Little Istanbul, Little Berlin, Little Warsaw, etc, growing up as people settle in, then over time the enclaves won't be quite so enclavey, and you'll get some great fusion cuisine [of course I think of food first].

Then as time passes, the people think of themselves less as being from this geographic place 5 or 10 light years away, where they're highly unlikely to ever go, and more from the place they were born. The cultures will change in the process, obviously. They'll blend together some.

I don't know how realistic that is.

When I look at my experience (as a 3rd/4th generation German-American, depending on how you count), I see that we dropped pretty much everything German. The only remotely German tradition we have is opening presents on Christmas Eve, and my mom's generation got the last batch of srs German names (Paul, Karl, and Kurt).

But then, Great-great Grandma and Grandpa Heinrich came here with their son in 1908, and they moved to Pennsylvania, where there were a bunch of Germans. Then there was that little war that started in 1914, and that other one in 1939, so they didn't really want to advertise their German-ness (though with the names Max, August, and Bertha Heinrich, you're not really fooling anyone).

Then there's the Turks living in Germany. It's been about 50 years since the first Gastarbeiter were allowed in, and there's a raging integration debate -- on both sides. Witness the treatment Turks and German Turks gave Mesut Özil for picking the German national side, and the praise Hamit and Halil Altintop and Nuri Sahin got for picking Turkey. After the match on Friday, people left nastygrams on Mesut's fb wall -- you're a traitor, you're not a real Turk, we hate you now.

There's also a lot of discussion in Germany about the low proportion [DE] [EN] of "students with migration backgrounds" getting the Abitur and going on to college, and sometimes even finishing school at all. (The German education system is rather different than the US system, and too complicated to get into here.)

Since CEF space is going to look a lot like Berlin (at the outset, anyway), I can't imagine it without a lot of Turks. I don't know, and I'm certainly unqualified to guess, how the integration debate is going to work out. I can look at the trends -- Özil and Sami Khedira saying they feel German, yet still having ties with their ancestral homelands, Cem Özdemir as the first Turkish-German party leader (Greens) -- and project, but I don't want to [be accused of] cultural imperialism.

So, I don't know. Flist/dwircle, you're all smart people. Discuss. What am I not thinking of here?