From
this Sawyer interview:
JS: Personally, I take a lot of inspiration from history. Because Project Eternity is set during an era of exploration and colonization, I’m looking at the interactions, violent and otherwise, between colonizing and colonized cultures. I’m interested in exploring daily friction and the difficulties that people run into when they try to live in the area between two (or more) cultures. There are famous “great men of history” examples like T.E. Lawrence, but I’m more interested in figures of lesser notoriety like the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci or Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. Also, I find some of the more contemporary “reverse” colonization trends like the French Congo’s La SAPE movement fascinating. I’m also starting to look in more detail at the state of epistemology and metaphysics in the medieval world prior to the rise of humanist thought, mostly exemplified by writers like Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. The printing press doesn’t exist yet in the world of Project Eternity and academic disciplines still tend to be elitist and exclusionary. Popular movements, on the rare occasion that they do occur, tend to be driven by passion and basic human needs rather than any sort of widespread philosophical movement.
