(April Fool) Review: A World of our Own

Amish! In space!

This post was originally posted on April 1 2025. It is an April Fool: No such series as A World of Our Own exists.¹

Birthrates are in free fall. In the most recent data available, the UK’s total fertility rate - a measure of how many children, on average, each woman will have in her lifetime - fell to 1.44, the lowest on record, and well below the 2.1 needed to maintain population levels.

Nor is this solely a UK issue, or even a Western or developed world issue. Birthrates are in decline in social democratic Scandinavia, with gender equality and abundant childcare (Norway 1.5, Sweden 1.65), in capitalist America (1.66), in theocratic Iran, where women are oppressed (1.69), in traditionally valued Japan (1.30), in Catholic Italy (1.28), in poverty-stricken Bangladesh (1.98) - and pretty well everywhere else you can think of. In South Korea it has reached 0.72: a mildly terrifying statistic that means for every 100 Koreans alive today, there will be fewer than 5 great-children.

While it is perhaps not the most immediate reason to worry about this, one consequence of collapsing birthrates is that it throws up a lot of problems for the classic science fiction space colonisation scenario.² Even if we got instant travel via some kind of hyperspace, warp drive, inertialess drive or wormholes,³ it’s hard to see a mass exodus to other worlds, particularly if living conditions were hard (birthrates are well below replacement level in countries with plenty of unused space, such as Canada and Russia). And as for the long-term hibernation ship colony: do we really imagine that the elite crew of such a ship - men and women selected for their scientific skills, high intelligence and advanced engineering knowledge - are going to want to settle down and breed?

Any space colony our current society founds is likely to die out within a few generations, purely through lack of the inclination to reproduce itself.

A World of our Own, the new Netflix sci-fi drama that begins streaming today, is the first work of science fiction I’ve seen - book or screen - that attempts to grapple with this issue, and it does so in a sensitive and interesting way. I was fortunate enough, along with various others, to be invited to a preview of the first two episodes last week,⁴ on the proviso that I wrote a review of it today. I should add I have received no payment or compensation of any form for this, beyond getting to see the two episodes in advance.

Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the galaxy…

A World of our Own opens eight years after landing on the colony world of Salvation, an earth-like planet orbiting Sirius. We are not told how long the voyage to get there took, but it is implied to be several decades long, with most of the passengers spending the time in hibernation. The colony ship remains in orbit around the planet.

The colonising mission, however, is split into two halves:

• 250 scientists, engineers and other technical roles, who navigated the ship⁵ and who run the technology of the colony.

• 3,000 Amish settlers, who do the majority of the farming and other physical labour - as well as providing the birthrate needed for future expansion.

Much of the dynamics of the show comes from the interactions and tensions between the two communities. In the tradition of TV series such as Babylon V, Terranova and others, we follow a small main cast of characters split evenly between the Amish and the scientists - the Chief Agronomist, the Amish Mayor, the colony’s Director of Security, and others - with others in supporting roles.

In an interview for Vanity Fair, the Executive Producer Ms Kalb said:

We wanted to present both the Amish and the scientists fairly and sympathetically,⁶ with both good people, the well-intentioned and jerks on both sides. The colony needs both communities not just to thrive, but to survive - but the values and assumptions that each side brings to the table are very, very different.

The first episodes focused on internal matters - an accident in the colony’s rudimentary iron mine, a clash over genetic engineering, various inter-character dramas - but at the end of the second there is a suggestion that there may be more to the world than we know of. Two characters had a lengthy conversation about cicadas which was either the most pointless script-writing ever or a Chekov’s gun for the biologically informed and, at the end of the episode, an Amish farmer was found savaged by what looked like some kind of animal in what was meant to be safe territory⁷. No doubt we will see!

In the beginning, the earth was without form, and void…

The show was originally conceived as a reality-TV show; however, this idea was quickly abandoned as impractical⁸ and reconstituted as a standard drama. The name, A World of Our Own, was actually alighted upon during an earlier iteration of the concept, in which the ‘high birthrate society’ was going to be Haredi Jews; the Amish were later swapped in as they were felt to be more ‘relatable’ to the primary US audience, but the name stuck.

The producers cite Ben Bova’s The Winds of Altair as one of the influences to have a split-society colony,⁹ with the birthrate issue then presenting them with the plausible reason as why they would do this. They also mention taking inspiration from Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and Larry Niven’s The Legacy of Heorot.¹⁰

For my readers who care about this sort of thing, the scientists are explicitly international and were cast using colour-blind (and gender-blind) casting; the Amish, obviously, are all white, but we see strong representation of both men and women amongst the main cast. One of those we follow is an 18 year old girl on her ‘Rumspringa’, undertaking what seems to be some sort of extended internship among the scientists,¹¹ and deciding whether or not she wishes to stay with them or return to the Amish community. The Amish were consulted heavily during the production and are supposedly reasonably happy with it.¹²

But is it any good?

Pleasingly, yes! I liked the main characters and by the end of the second episode had begun to feel invested in them - always essential for this kind of thing. Where there is conflict between them, it mainly comes from either clashes of values or from people having different priorities, rather than people just being idiots. And they are shown working together, caring about each other and about the future of the colony in a way which makes us care too.

The overall society feels basically plausible. They create a proper sense of scale¹³ so the colony feels like a full place of over 3,000 people, and the technology feels both advanced and plausible. We see families and relationships - both of the main cast and in passing - that makes it feel a lived in place.

The depiction of the two societies at the heart of the show is also very well done. The Amish have clearly made some compromises with technology to get on the hibernation ship in the first place, but we see them using the essential technology required to survive on the new world, while clearly rejecting most of it and living as a distinct society. Their faith is portrayed as meaningful and important to them. The scientists are also depicted as real and distinct people who have come on the expedition for a variety of reasons, and whose attitude towards the Amish varies realistically.

Summary: 8/10. Intelligent, well-written sci-fi drama with complex and likeable characters and a lot of potential. Definitely worth watching.

A World of Our Own is available for streaming on Netflix from today, 1 April 2025.

1. The birthrate stats are, however, correct.

2. In addition to the lack of faster than light travel, lack of planets known to be able to support human life and other such minor and easily overcome problems.

3. Science fiction writers are inventive.

4. Thank you, reader who works for Netflix! I doubt my subscriber numbers alone would have qualified to get me in.

5. Presumably in shifts.

6. I think that they mainly achieve this, though the decision to play ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s Amish Paradise over the end credits was a bit of a bum move.

7. Cicadas have a lifecycle in which they emerge every certain number of years - typically 13 or 17 years. An alien species - presumably much larger and fiercer than a cicada - with a similar lifecycle would explain why no-one has spotted it eight years in.

8. Presumably the producers were unwilling to put up with the long lead time required.

9. Though in that book, the scientists are, on earth, a barely tolerated minority caste in a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.

10. The last being something that also makes me think that ‘outside the perimeter, the nightmare is beginning to chatter…’

11. Which gives the show-writers a great excuse to have her pop up in all sorts of places.

12. Would we know if the Amish were unhappy about it? Kicking off because a TV show was ‘culturally insensitive’ feels a pretty woke thing to do, and the Amish are more or less the antithesis of woke.

13. In the way that Rings of Power, for example, utterly failed to do.