The world where Science Fiction and Fantasy try desperately to tear each other's throat's out.
These Humans developed more peaceful technologies too, but each new science spawned, or was spawned by, weapons of war. Even the First World's Colonies were created as outposts and or suppliers for various quarrelsome factions that left their homes on the ground to fight in space. The Technology nearest and dearest to the hearts of Takælans was genetic engineering. Developed first to fight diseases both microbial and hereditary, it was promptly adopted by militarists to create war germs and super soldiers. But while the weapons and venues of war grew larger and more complex, peacetime got weird too. More people had more time on their hands and turned to more unusual types of entertainment. And, more and more, entertainments were only improvable with genetic engineering.
At first, stars of music, drama, and sports improved themselves with special effects, surgery, and drugs. But they quickly reached the point where these became impractical and even dangerous and the public grew jaded. So the producers, promoters, agents, and managers steered their super stars toward the gengineers for genetic retro-enhancements. But even that came to a dead end. The next step came with this reasoning, if you can call it that; "Your body is as changed as it can get without just replacing the whole thing. The only way to improve a person more is by changing them as they're developing, you know, a kid."
So they started artificially mutating their children at younger and younger ages, but never so young they couldn't get consent from the child. Then a smaller group, those who became artimus to become closer to nature, developed themselves a self-replicating complex of mutant genes. This didn't cause any changes in the parent, but their children would be whatever the parents were trying to become the old way.
So the look of the First World changed. Along the way, they cured hereditary diseases, created some bizarre pets, and discovered the genes that controlled psionic ability. But the poor, downtrodden populace, read "normals", finally got fed up. Too many freaks, mental and physical, paraded around, already "better" than "normal" people, demanding special priveledges, education, tax exemptions, facilities, homelands. Homelands! For people that had created themselves just the other day, as it were.
It was this plea for tracts of land, other peoples' ancestral lands, that got them kicked out. Right off the planet. All physical Artimus, most of the mental ones, and the vast majority of Gengineers, too. They, and a few groups of "sympathisers", were packed into a "ship" and sent to a far off nebula that some drunken explorer said had a star cluster in the middle.
The Species based on First World mythologies banded together and took Takæla for themselves. They were joined by a few small groups of "Normals" who wanted to try a few radical sociological experiments. The Firstcomers deliberately set up their society, complete with an infrastructure, and then deliberately forgot whatever Technologies they thought would serve them ill.
They set up two groups that would serve to keep the world in a relative stasis, the Technologists and the Anti-Technologists. The Technologists were to remember Technologies that the world might need after all. The Anti-Technologists were to keep those Technologies from becoming tools of war, even wiping them out if necessary. Today the Anti-Technologists are commonly known as the Psage Guild , and the Technologists as the Cult. It is the tensions between these two groups and their pawns that provides most of the excitement on the planet today.
To this end, they created two groups, the Technologists and the Anti-Technologists. The Technologists were chartered with the task of preserving all sciences and developing ways to use that knowledge to benefit all the people of the planet. Their mandate specifically forbid them to release harmful technologies to the public, but said nothing about not developing them as research.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, they did not die, they had constructed several 'cloaking' devices, to make the satellites ignore them. While under this cloak of deception, they built a great many more ships than had been initially allotted to them, and spread out. They began thieving first on the schools of fish and mats of crop-weed seeded for the Mer, and, when their numbers were great enough, and there was shipping to prey upon, they pounced on the outside world.
As the Psage Guild and the Church began to find the ways of magic, so did the Pirates. Although they were never able to successfully infiltrate the Guild after y564, they learned enough to grow their own hedge sorcerers, psychics, and clerics of Scodark. With this armament, they found ways to cloak themselves from these new 'forces of good' just like they had hidden from the technology of the home world.
The Pirates are one of the three groups that never forgot their science, and have always been chummy with the Cult of Technology. They have sailed the oceans for the last 6,000+ years, taking what they can, making only what they can't steal. Occasionally, a Pirate King will get it into his head that his business would be so much easier on land, but they have never had a force large enough, well organized enough, or sneaky enough to avoid being kicked out by the nearest two or three armies.
Recently, the Pirates have inexplicably begun to vanish once again, apparently ceasing their attacks on shipping lanes the world over. The Guild caught one of their floating cities near its Castle and destroyed it. They subsequently boasted that they had destroyed the race for good, but some inside sources aren't so sure...