Meerkats: A Forlani Model

     In developing the Forlani, we wanted to portray a species with a strongly matriarchal structure and borrowed many traits from the lovable meerkat.  These African creatures are highly social and have strong altruistic instincts that allow them to make great sacrifices of individual interests in favor of the group.  They are led by a strong mother figure, who is normally the only female in the group that mates and produces children.   This was important to us because we wanted to have a society that was female-dominated numerically as well as in terms of power.  As you've seen if you've read Life Sentence, Forlani females outnumber males by factors as high as 100 to 1 in some cases.  In such a society, widespread female mating would rapidly produce a population explosion that would lead to extinction.  So, as in meerkats, the Forlani practice highly selective mating and reproduction.  In meerkats, this selection happens through a more or less instinctive process and is enforced by the dominant mother, but among the Forlani, it is decided by the deliberations of the matrilines, the female clans that have a more or less representative structure and use powerful ethical notions of logic and propriety, rather than outright force, to maintain the selective process. (However, we'll give you a tiny spoiler and say that this will come under strain in Book Four: Rage on Forlan, but that's all for now!)  

     So with Forlani able to produce multiple offspring at birth -- up to six, but in Entara's case, usually more like three -- families can be quite large, as in meerkat colonies.  This creates the need for communal childcare, which among meerkats includes male members of the group assuming various child-rearing functions.  The Forlani are similar in most aspects, with the institution of the mahame, or matrilineal headquarters, acting as a formal organization that provides educational, medical, and everyday support for female offspring beyond the immediate parental sphere.  Note, we say female, because Forlani males have an entirely separate structure that we will explain further in another post.  Suffice it to say that female Forlani identify strongly with the mahame and its values, just as meerkats do with their colony group.  

     There are, of course, some differences between meerkats and Forlani females.  Meerkats are full-fledged mammals, but Forlani are proto-marsupials, and there are thus considerable differences in physiology, such as the Forlani's elongate brain and double heart system.  Unlike meerkats, who mainly eat arthropods, Forlani are primarily fruit-eaters, although they also enjoy certain kinds of grilled insects.  Entara herself is a bit of an exception, since her time with Klein allowed her to develop some exotic tastes, such as a yen for crunchy toast.  Forlani, like meerkats, have tails, but they are longer and almost completely prehensile, which harks back to the species' semi-arboreal origins in the primeval forests that covered Forlan before the Times of Trouble.  The earthling Klein never realizes this until Entara takes him for a romp in the orchards on her home world and starts leaping into trees.  This origin gives Forlani some distinctive customs that vary with those that a burrowing race like the meerkats would naturally develop.  Finally, of course, the Forlani are highly adapted to tool manipulation and the development of technology, which meerkats have so far not been evolutionarily selected to exhibit.  The Forlani abilities for technology were so great that at an earlier point in their history they developed an industrial civilization that nearly destroyed the planet, until a profound reorganization set up the matriline system and restrained tech development so that they never ventured into space.   This only changed because of external forces, such as the Zetans and humans who wanted to exploit their world.  To resist, the Forlani readily accepted an alliance with the warlike and spacefaring Song Pai, who favored the Forlani because of their strong veneration for the sacredness of procreation.

     So there you have a thumbnail sketch of the similarities and differences between Forlani and meerkats, at least as far as the females are concerned.  Since the Forlani are quite sexually dimorphic, the males are another story, and we will take that up at length and talk about the Brotherhood at a future time.  For now, happy reading!