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Recursive Precursors
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Precursors are a staple of a great many Sci Fi and Fantasy settings. While precursors come in many different varieties, the defining aspect is that they existed in the time before a setting's contemporary civilization. Recursive Precursors occur when the concept of precursors is applied recursively; such beings served a similar role to precursors as they do to contemporary civilizations. In these cases, the odds are high that precursors to these precursors had even had another race that served as their own precursors, and so on, forming a long line of ancient civilizations. Of course, having a long series of precursor races carries some disturbing implications. Beyond the fact that precursors existed in the time before the setting's present civilizations, another important aspect of precursors is that they are no longer around — and the existence of a cyclic succession of such fallen empires raises uncomfortable questions about the ultimate fates of advanced civilizations, including the ones active in the story's timeframe. After all, if all those godlike empires all collapsed one after the other, what's to say that your civilization will be spared from this fate once its turn is up? Perhaps it is In Life's Nature to Destroy Itself. Perhaps they were wiped out by their creations. Bonus points if those creations went on to become precursors to another young civilization. Maybe they were wiped out by an unrelated group of Precursor Killers. Or maybe they were Sealed in Some Sort of Can. Less pessimistically, it's possible they've just ascended to a higher plane of existence, died out for mundane reasons, or simply left the immediate area for whatever reason. Naturally, this is a Sub-Trope of Precursors. When Creating Life is involved, this trope is highly compatible with Recursive Creators, but is otherwise not related to other "Recursive Tropes" such as Recursive Reality and Recursive Fanfiction. |
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Robert E. Howard's Kull series, set in an age long before his Conan the Barbarian tales, occurs in the "fading, degenerate" land of Valusia, a place "living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires", and considered so ancient that the "hills of Atlantis and Mu were isles of the sea when Valusia was young". | |
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In Homeworld, the ancient Hiigarans left their hyperspace core to be discovered by their descendants 3000 years later. But the Ancient Hiigarans never built the core, they found it. It was made by a still older race known only as the Progenitors, who, according to legend, are said to have originated from beyond the galaxy. | |
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Master of Orion has this in its backstory. An ancient precursor civilisation sent out various groups through an unstable wormhole when its star was found to be close to going supernova. The descendants of some of those became the eponymous Orions, the main precursors for the first two games. By the third game the Antarans, originally enemies of the Orions who returned in the events of the second game and canonically won, have accidentally wiped out most of their civilisation and effectively become a third tier of precursors. | |
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Throughout the Sonic the Hedgehog series, several different precursors have had an influence on the modern world, including the ancient Echidnas, and the Babylonians. However, The Ancients, mysterious beings introduced in Sonic Frontiers, are the oldest of them by far. They were the ones who originally brought the Chaos Emeralds – the plot MacGuffin that most of those precursors sought and used for their own purposes – to Earth in the first place, and one of their distant descendants eventually wiped out the ancient Echidnas. | |
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In V. Zykov's Way Home series, the oldest known civilization were the Vartags, although evidence of their physical existence is extremely scarce and mostly consists of various sealed entities. The Reptokh, Reptokhors and Log dragons were heirs to the Vartag civilization. The Reptokh learned elemental magic, the Reptokhors astral magic and the Log dragons learned dimensional magic respectively from the Vartags. These peoples are now also extinct and were succeeded by the Sunset Empire. That empire has possibly witnessed the final fate of the Vartags and was possibly involved in the destruction of the Reptokh and Reptokhors. The Sunset Empire itself fell and was succeeded by the United Colonies of Sunset, which were the last coherent state to follow the Sunset Empire's tradition. Technically, the United Colonies don't count as Precursors any more since they were ultimately defeated by light elves and the emerging Republic of Nold during relatively recent recorded history (give or take some bias about the records). K'irsan, one of the protagonists, has a very special kind of luck: he met a surviving Log dragon dimension traveler, got taught by a Reptokh data repository, escaped from possibly the last remaining Reptokhors city's ruins and had to reseal an Abyssal Harrier from a decayed Vartag seal. |
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In Shadow Realms, the world of Embra has seen multiple civilizations rise to glory before annihilating themselves in various kinds of magical apocalypse (something which is made dangerously easy by Embra's magic-rich environment). The fact that the Radiant Empires didn't go down the same road is considered quite an achievement - but it didn't stop them getting attacked by an Outside-Context Problem. | |
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Lyrical Nanoha has Al-Hazard, which served as the precursors of the Ancient Belka empire after Al-hazard destroyed itself, which in turn served as the precursors of the current setting after Ancient Belka destroyed itself. | |
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Eberron has a long history of being ruled by demons, then dragons, then giants, then goblinoids (in Khorvaire), then finally the common races. Some of them are still around to some extent, from the Dragons of Argonessen to the Demon Wastes to whatever is happening in the depths of Khyber. | |
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Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: During the "Dawn of Ragnarok" DLC, the dwarves of Svartelheim are noted to have built their cities on older cities belonging to someone else. Exactly what that means is unclear, given the events of the DLC are Past-Life Memories being filtered through a Viking's perception of events. | |
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Schlock Mercenary: This trope becomes important in the later arcs. The current galactic civilization has a recorded history about 100,000 years old, but given that the Milky Way is about thirteen billion years old this leaves a lot of space for earlier civilizations. In the later arcs, the protagonists begin slowly unpacking exactly why this is, and discover that the Milky Way's history is littered with cycles of civilization. During each cycle, a number of trigger events (many of whom have already occurred in their cycle) tend to lead to all-out war and what few survivors are left retreating from galactic civilization and concealing their presence. Each cycle can be millions of years apart, and still last for thousands, sometimes millions, of years, and still leave little trace of its existence. This has been going on for so long that the characters eventually calculate that surviving precursors in their various isolated refuges collectively outnumber galactic civilization by fifteen entire orders of magnitude. | |
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In the Stargate-verse, the Goa'uld were originally thought to be the ones who had built the Stargate network, come to Earth to find slaves, and built the Pyramids to land their spaceships. SG-1 quickly discovers that while the Goa'uld were indeed the ones on Earth thousands of years ago, the Stargates were actually built by their precursors, the Ancients, millions of years ago. Stargate Universe revealed that the Ancients had found signs of their own precursors (or God), but the series ended before they could be revealed. | |
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In Endless Space 2, the Endless previously ruled most of the galaxy until they were nearly wiped themselves out in a violent civil war. However, they were preceded by a species known only as the Lost who are the actual source of Dust. Specifically, their bodies were made of organic Dust, and the Endless wiped the Lost out in order to claim it for themselves. | |
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Dungeons & Dragons: Eberron has a long history of being ruled by demons, then dragons, then giants, then goblinoids (in Khorvaire), then finally the common races. Some of them are still around to some extent, from the Dragons of Argonessen to the Demon Wastes to whatever is happening in the depths of Khyber. Forgotten Realms elves dominated Faerûn before they tore both the continent and their civilizations apart in the Crown Wars, which left them weakened and gradually displaced by human expansion, all the while dwarven and giant kingdoms still fought each other. But the elves in turn took the world from dragons' claws. That's where we switch from merely mythical era to the Time Abyss of Creator Races about whom little is known. At their height, the dragons fought the giants after knocking the birdlike aearee out of Toril's sky; the aearee in turn rose to dominance when the froglike batrachi wiped themselves out, and before their time there were the serpentine sarrukh and [[The Fair Folk fey]. Before that was "the Time of the Rauth", a prehistoric era when something was going on too, but what is completely lost by now. |
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The aliens from Escape Velocity Nova known only as Those Who Came Before merged with the universe millennia before humanity achieved space travel. The epilogues to four of the storylines mention that humanity followed in their footsteps several thousand years later, becoming precursors to another alien race. | |
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Halo's Forerunners had the preceding species Precursors, who were rumored to have exceeded technology and become transentient. By the time of the Flood invasion, most of the Forerunners believed the Precursors were no more than a legend, unaware that they had defeated the Precursors millennia before and the Flood was their revenge. Literally, as a number of Precursors broke themselves down into a dust that, millions of years later, would become the Flood. | |
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Forgotten Realms elves dominated Faerûn before they tore both the continent and their civilizations apart in the Crown Wars, which left them weakened and gradually displaced by human expansion, all the while dwarven and giant kingdoms still fought each other. But the elves in turn took the world from dragons' claws. That's where we switch from merely mythical era to the Time Abyss of Creator Races about whom little is known. At their height, the dragons fought the giants after knocking the birdlike aearee out of Toril's sky; the aearee in turn rose to dominance when the froglike batrachi wiped themselves out, and before their time there were the serpentine sarrukh and [[The Fair Folk fey]. Before that was "the Time of the Rauth", a prehistoric era when something was going on too, but what is completely lost by now. | |
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The Mass Effect universe has a bunch of these. Of course, due to the Law of Conservation of Detail , only two of these races (the billion-or-so-year-old mechanical Reapers and the 50,000-year-old Protheans, respectively the first and last in the line of recursive precursors) are relevant to the plot. Javik reveals that the precursors to the Protheans were the Inusannon, whose ruins on Ilos were where the Prothean first discovered mass effect technology, much like humans had from the Prothean ruins on Mars. Towards the end, it is even considered that the Citadel Races might become the precursors for the next generation of galactic species. In the Extended Cut, one of the options at the end is Refusal — revolted by the Catalyst and its options for ending the war, Shepard refuses to fire the Crucible. The united fleets of the galaxy are vanquished by the Reapers and all sapient, spacefaring life in the galaxy is harvested (again). However, the epilogue shows one of Liara's time capsules (which she mentioned compiling earlier in the game) being discovered and explaining to an unknown species the cycle of extinction, the Reapers, the Crucible, and the story of Shepard's war. In the final scene, an alien speaker explains to a child how, through the help of those who came before them, they were able to defeat the threat of the Reapers. And just to top everything above, in the Extended Cut of ME3, the Catalyst reveals that the Reapers had their own precursors, who also created him as means to solve the organic-synthetic conflict. His monologue implies that said precursors looked more or less like a organic version of the Reapers and were (not entirely voluntarily) harvested into the very first Reaper (believed to be Harbinger in the lore). In the "Leviathan" DLC, Shepard can meet some of the eponymous species, which created the Catalyst (and by proxy, the Reapers). Uncounted millions of years later they're still bitter about it, but after seeing so many cycles go by, they've become too scared of the Reapers to aid the species. Shepard's goal becomes convincing them to aid the current cycle and stand up to the Reapers. They're still very much Abusive Precursors, but they understand that the Reapers can not be allowed to go unchecked anymore. |
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The Freespace series has some in-universe speculation on this. The Ancients were the precursors to the modern-day Terrans and Vasudans, but they were wiped out by a total enigma of an advanced species called the Shivans, who are now attacking the Terrans and Vasudans. One character speculates that the Shivans have been around for a really long time, and exterminating any civilization that evolves to a certain point like they did the Ancients, though there is no direct evidence that this is the case. Some Word of God statements about the never-made third game implied that the Shivans themselves are an engineered species, so that would be another Precursor race who did the engineering. | |
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The Star Trek Expanded Universe is full of these. There's all the uberpowerful noncorporeal life, and the ancient humanoid preservers, and a hundred or so other ancient powerful empires. The unexpanded universe has more than a few already, though not quite as many, and often a bit vague on timing. | |
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In The Book of Lost Tales, the pagan Anglo-Saxon mariner Eriol knows of 'the gods' (the Valar) but an Elf has to tell him about Ilúvatar, "who was not of the Gods, but made them". | |
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In the Pony POV Series: The first set of precursors was the Centaur Empire, the greatest empire of its day and well on the way to being Benevolent Precursors. They were also rather nice to the ponies before they were uplifted and became sapient. Unfortunately, Lord Tirek is the Sole Survivor of their species because he killed them all and is most certainly an example of Abusive Precursors. The G1 ponies were this to the Golden Age civilization (depicted in Tales), and were the ones to wipe out the monsters, witches, and other horrors reeking havoc on the world. The Paradise Ponies continued to safeguard the Golden Age civilizations due to the Rainbow of Light making them immortal until Discord damaged it and they eventually passed on of natural causes. The Golden Age was this, being the most advanced civilization on Equus has ever gotten. Unfortunately, the civilization was destroyed in the magical equal of a nuclear holocaust when the wish spell they tried to make a utopia with. Also Benevolent Precursors, as said wish spell created the Lost Age, which was indeed a utopia until things went horribly wrong and many members of it did everything they could to minimize the damage of the apocalypse and preserve their advances for the civilizations to come. |
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Outsider: Several ancient empires rose and fell over the history of local space, impacting its development to various degrees. They are discussed in the side blog at some length. The earliest know civilization was active sixteen million years ago, and is known only from a large number of worlds bearing extensive cratering and having undergone mass extinctions at that time. Modern scholars believe this to be the testament of a devastating war between otherwise unknown powers, but nothing's known for sure. The Fenrias civilization arose long after these conflicts, but still over a million years back. It spread through local space and either subjugated or ignored the primitive ancestors of the modern sapient species. The Fenrias split into multiple factions early on and warred extensively against each other, eventually diverging into numerous distinct breeds. Two modern-day species, the Delrias and Morat, are descended from Fenrias populations that survived the fall of their empires. The Dreiman were small — lapdog-sized — but highly advanced aliens that arrived about a million years in the past from outside of local space and quickly wiped out the Fenrias nations, although a few fringe groups held on on the edges of their territory. They rarely settled planets and mostly remained in orbital stations, but engaged in extensive planetary and biological engineering — they seeded and terraformed multiple worlds, many of which remain habitable into the present, and seemingly uplifted many of the local pre-sapient species. Around 500,000 years back, the Dreiman suddenly vanished and the remnant Fenrias nations all collapsed, to be replaced by the Soia. They were more advanced than the Dreiman and, like them, seem to have come from outside known space. They traveled in massive and heavily armed artificial moons that they used to enforce their rule and created numerous genetically engineered species, referred to as the Soia-Liron species; most were hyper-efficient food plants and animals, which are still found on multiple worlds, but at least five sapient species are known from Soia sites and may also have been created in this manner — the ancestors of the modern Barsam, Neridi and Loroi and two now-extinct species. The Soia are thus believed to have been a multi-species civilization, although whether these species were naturally occurring ones from a single world, artificially created or a mix of both, as well as whether any of these were the "true" Soia, isn't really clear. The Soia empire collapsed 275,000 years ago, seemingly in a devastating conflict that subjected every settled planet to devastating orbital bombardment and caused every sapient species to regress to the stone ages — galactic civilization is technically still climbing out of this dark age. |
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In the Perry Rhodan series, a million years ago the Barkonids settled the galaxy as their planet was shot out of it. New colonies weren't given a lot of technology to prevent them from becoming decadent, which led most of them to become low tech. Over 50,000 years age the 'First Mankind', the Lemurians, settled the galaxy again, but they were wiped away in an interstellar war and fled to Andromeda galaxy. Then at least 20,000 thousand years ago we get the Akonids, who spread out but become really isolationist after a colonial war of independence with the Arkonids, who are currently becoming decadent, the next step will probably be humanity. | |
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Warhammer 40,000: In the distant past, the galaxy was ruled by the immense and powerful empire of the Eldar, until it — and all other advanced societies, including the ancient human interstellar civilization — were destroyed during the Fall of the Eldar. The Eldar's history stretches millions of years before that, but they themselves were originally simply one of the many creations of the godlike Old Ones, thought to have been the first species to develop sapience. The Old Ones ruled the galaxy uncontested for ages, until being destroyed in a war against the Necrontyr and the C'tan Star Gods. | |
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In Doctor Who, we have the Eternals, some of which were apparently the seldom mentioned gods of Gallifrey; precursors to the Time Lords who are themselves (sometimes) cited as the reason for there being so many races of Human Aliens, Rubber-Forehead Aliens, and Humanoid Aliens in the Whoniverse. | |
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In Planet of Adventure, the humans of Tschai are broken down into groups based on which alien species they are associated with. Each group regards their masters as the "real" precursors, although an outsider can tell that this is ultimately not true. | |
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The Dead Space games have an almost identical overarching scenario: The Brethren Moons scattered Markers throughout the galaxy. When a civilization finds one, the artifact will compel them into worshiping it or attempting to replicate it (since it's a source of unlimited energy). The Marker triggers a Necromorph outbreak which eventually culminates with Convergence, the creation, of a new Brethren Moon out of countless Necromorphs. This is what happened to the natives of Tau Volantis, it's currently happening to humanity, and it's probably why space is dead. | |
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In Strata, archaeology has uncovered several layers of precursors that died off for various reasons (including one race that died of shock on discovering that they had precursors). At the end of the book, the heroine meets a representative of the first ever precursors, who reveals that they are actually the only precursors, and they planted all the archaeological evidence of other precursors to give the universe more of a sense of history. | |
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Battlestar Galactica: The People of Kobol were precursors to the 13 Colonies and the People of the 13 Colonies are our Precursors, but there was presumably no one before them unless you count whatever "It" is that doesn't like being called "God" and the Head People. | |
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Stellaris has at least six generations of precursors, though generally only one generation's history is explored in a given playthrough. From oldest to newest, they are as follows: The Vultaum Star Assembly was a race of four-meter long worms who existed twelve million years ago. They believed the universe was a vast virtual reality simulation and attempted to escape by committing mass suicide. The few who refused weren't enough to form a self-sustaining society and they died out. The Baol Organism, Grunur, and Zroni all existed more or less contemporaneously about seven million years ago. The Baol were a Hive Mind of planet-spanning forests who turned the worlds they lived on into paradises. The Grunur waged a campaign of genocide against the Baol that either killed or reduced to pre-sapience the entire species. A lone Baol survived the Grunur as a sapient entity, but joins the rest of its species soon after learning their fate. The Zroni were the first known psionic species and gained access to, and shaped, the Shroud. The Zroni split into two factions, the Divine who sought to consume the whole galaxy to conquer the Shroud, and the Saviors who opposed this. The Saviors eventually won by telepathically erasing all Zroni of both factions. With the Nemesis expansion, the player may attempt to follow the Divine Zroni's path by becoming the crisis, building up Menace, feeding an Aetherophasic Engine, and destroying the entire galaxy. The Yuht Empire died out six million years ago. The Yuht became technologically and culturally stagnant after achieving space travel and never developed Faster-Than-Light Travel and instead depended on sleeper ships for their entire two million year reign. They never encountered any aliens for nearly their entire history, and dismissed what artifacts they found of their own precursors as hoaxes. They attempted to exterminate the first alien species they met, the Jabbardeeni, who advanced rapidly and wiped out the Yuht within ten years. The First League existed about two million years ago. It was a multi-species republic that eventually fell apart due to rising inter-species tensions. The Irassian Concordat existed about a million years ago. The Irassians were a powerful conquering empire that was done in by a plague called the Javorian Pox introduced by one of their client species who was immune to the disease. The Pox spread rapidly and despite quarantine methods including bombarding their own homeworld into a lifeless husk, the Irassians were completely wiped out. The most recent precursors are the Cybrex, having existed as recently as 600,000 years ago. The Cybrex were a race of sapient machines who turned against their creators and then continued to attempt to purge all organic life. The Cybrex eventually had some sort of epiphany and realized that they were in the wrong and disappeared to a hidden ring world, but when some of their former victims found the Cybrex ringworld, they wiped out the Cybrex, who didn't even try to defend themselves. The Cybrex actually still exist and may come to try to save the younger species of the galaxy from the Contingency crises, after which they depart the galaxy for good. |
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In the Star Control series, the first Precursors we know of is the race that left behind the massive battleship that the Ur-Quan use, who themselves Turned Against their Dnyarri slavemasters, who themselves had killed their own precursors, the Sentient Milieu. The reason for the original Precursors not being around anymore was eventually revealed in (the often-ignored) Star Control III ; they were wiped out by an Even More Advanced race, possibly their own Recursive Precursors. | |
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Babylon 5: Lorien and the rest of his kind were this to the other First Ones, like the Vorlons and the Shadows before moving beyond the Rim. Humans and other species of the Alliance are to take over the cycle for the next group of species to evolve, before they too move beyond the rim. | |
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In Gall Force: Eternal Story, the Solnoids are the precursors of humanity; in Gall Force: Stardust War it's also revealed that the Solnoids also have precursors. Finally, in Gall Force: New Era, it's revealed that due to a Stable Time Loop, all the races in the story are each other's precursors. | |
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