Velkaryan

Velkaryans

Major antagonists in Carson & Roberts series. Formal name is the Church of Divine Stellar Providence. They believe (or claim to) that God created the terraformed planets for His Chosen: humans. They are also a political movement.

Something of a cross between UFO cultists (like Heaven's Gate) and 1930s National Socialists (Nazis), at least in terms of methods.

Velkaryan HQ

To give some flavor to the Velkaryans, here's the description of the main conference room in their Earth headquarters, as described in The Reticuli Deception:

The main conference room in the headquarters of the Church of Divine Stellar Providence, the Velkaryans, was, like the rest of the building, nothing if not opulent. The wood panelling comprised slabs taken from trees of a dozen different planets, although all from species which closely resembled their respective distant terrestrial cousin species, framed by gleaming slices of petrified woods of Earth. The polished stone tabletop and room accents were of a type of marble in which swarmed hundreds of small fossils, mostly the spiral shells of ammonites. The fossils were more than just decorative; ammonites had gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, at the same time -- give or take a few millennia -- as various planets around some of the nearer stars were being reformed in Earth's image; terraformed. Velkaryan tenets held that this was done to make way for God's Chosen: humans. Fossils had been found on other planets, but nothing so old. The carefully quarried, shaped and polished pieces here were a way of affirming that Earth was special, and therefore so must be humans.

{{#if:Alastair Mayer |

—Alastair Mayer{{#if:The Reticuli Deception

|, The Reticuli Deception

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(More to come)