Writing about Politics in Speculative Fiction: Made Up Places and the Things They Get Up To

[attackfish]

I have this running joke about fantasy that I’m there for the politics.  I’m not all the way kidding.  It’s my field of study, and I chose it because I am a hard core policy wonk.  I was there for the politics before I even realized I was into politics.

Speculative Fiction is the perfect genre for exploring politics.  Because Speculative Fiction authors are able to make up whole worlds, they can make up whole countries, with whole political systems.  It is the genre of “what if”, so authors are free to ask “What if aliens really did invade?  What would the world’s governments do?” or “What if I had a set of small kingdoms, each trying to get he better of the others, wedged between two empires?” or “What if we try to colonize a people (human or alien) and we fail?”  Or “How would [insert influential world event here] be different with magic/lasers?”

Hands down, Speculative Fiction has the greatest potential for this, but not everybody gets their socks knocked off by this stuff.  Fantasy especially has long been accused of being retrogressive and conservative, an I have written before about the deep ties it keeps to history.  It is a genre populated with monarchies, good kings, bad kings, evil regents (are there any good regents in fantasy?) noble princes, determined princesses, and whole courts full of aristocrats.  And you Science Fiction readers shouldn’t get too smug either.  If it isn’t a world controlling totalitarian dystopia, it’s a non-specific never seen intergalactic council.  In other words, Spec Fic authors can, but don’t have to.

The Fantasy genre tends to have a love affair with royalty, and the goal of most Epic Fantasy is to either prevent the conquest of a kingdom, or free a kingdom, or put the true heir on the throne, or otherwise put or keep a Good King (or more rarely a Good Queen) defined as anyone with royal blood who was reasonably moral and of moderate intelligence, on the throne.  Some secondary world fantasies have powerful courts where the nobility jostle for power, or diplomatic relations between multiple nations, but for some reason, this sort of power play is almost always portrayed as sinister.

Urban Fantasy has it’s share of the world’s real oldest profession too.  Odds are actually better that the author will discuss the internal politics of vampires/werewolves/fae/zombies (the internal politics of zombies would be actually kind of awesome, someone should get on that) than the odds that politicking will show up in secondary world fantasy, in Urban fantasy, it is an even dirtier, more morally repugnant game.  Heroes don’t play politics.

Well, they do sometimes, but usually the books they play it in are all about the politics.

Science fiction too has a fascination with ultimate power, but their view of it is far darker.  Dystopian totalitarian states must be overthrown in exchange for a government (or lack of government) more suited to the author’s beliefs, usually democracy.  Somehow, very few Science Fiction stories ever show anybody living in a republic actually voting, or discussing politicians, or public policy.  The nitty gritty of freedom is almost unimportant.  This is partly because both genres have strong ties to epic literature, were politics was the slow stuff between wars.

These are all of course trends, not absolute realities otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be here.

Political Speculative Fiction: (Let’s build a list!)

The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner (shut up)
The Westmark Trilogy by Lloyd Alexander
Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
The Abhorsen series by Garth Nix
The Pain Merchants/The Shifter by Janice Hardy

From the comments:

The Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz
The Deverry cycle by Katharine Kerr
Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold
Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge
Swordpoint and Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
Crossover by Joel Shepherd
Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn
The Elenium and Tamuli trilogies by David and Leigh Eddings


Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic loosely from a panel at the 2011 Worldcon.

Comments

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

One of the things to remember is that a number of the countries involved in the Arab Spring previously had functioning democracies that were toppled, which strikes me less about struggling across a valley and more about climbing back up a mountain.

The reason of course that feudalism was so popular was that it made territory more easy to govern if you couldn't get people and information quickly from place to place and therefore had a difficult time extending your control, you could give most of that control over to a local landlord in exchange for protection, i.e. being able to send other nobles to your defense, so that monarchy in feudal Europe functioned more as a mutual defense treaty with the king as arbiter, which is why as government is more and more centralized, it improves communication more and more, for example Roman roads and Kublai Khan's mail system. Which is why the military is so good at developing communications devices that we civilians then co-opt. What drives me nuts is that some fantasy authors ignore communications. The story never mentions something like a sorceress can use a magic mirror to send messages, supposedly horse messengers do it, but the never seem to have a problem with lost of garbled ones.

Of course some authors make use of screwed up message systems...

Actually, I'm pretty sure the internet already is changing things. It makes it much harder for governments to control the flow of information, and has probably contributed to the increasing scorn for experts. If anybody can be heard, than anybody can be heard, in other words.