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]

It's a seductive idea, and part of the reason I think that both Totalitarianism and Libertarianism have been so popular now and formerly. Totalitarianism tends to come from this idea that if we just give this one person the power to fix all these problems... and Libertatianism says the best person will rise to the top, and most libertarians somewhere think that person's going to be them, and they really could just fix everything if they had the money.

The thing is, if you have one person or a small group of people with all the political agency, no one else has any at all, and I can always see myself as one of the powerless before I can see myself as one of the powerful.

Pfft. It's only boring to people with no vision. a well crafted democracy is like making jewelry. The fact that it works is part of its beauty (sorry, jeweler here and it's not too interesting, but not at all boring).

In my own novel, I've been having difficulty showing democracy as a good thing from the point of view of a good monarch who is watching her power slip away. It's so manifestly against the interests of my main character. It's strange going.

[sholio]

Libertatianism says the best person will rise to the top, and most libertarians somewhere think that person's going to be them, and they really could just fix everything if they had the money.

Somewhat OT threadjack here, but this isn't really the impression I get from the Libertarians I know -- most Libertarians seem to be more of the mindset that any government is going to inevitably become corrupt and abusive, and the best thing you can do with it is give it as little power as possible, to limit the amount of fucking up it can do when it gets out of control.

Ironically I think most Libertarians hold a more optimistic view of human nature than I can bring myself to subscribe to -- the idea that humans, if left to their own devices without a government holding them in check, will treat each other well and make sensible decisions. History does not seem to bear this out.

More on topic, this whole discussion has reminded me all over again of the lack of democracies in spec fic, especially fantasy, and reminded me that I want to write one, someday.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

There are multiple strains of Libertarian thought. Anarchist Libertarians for the most part are as you described, (though I did meet one who was kinda convinced that he was going to rule the world... strange man) and I feel about the the way I feel abou Marxists. It would be a great idea if people could function without police and laws/have a centrally planned economy where there was no incentive system, but if we were able to do that, we wouldn't need the theories. Randian Libertarians, however, are under the strange misapprehension that the poor are oppressing the rich, and only the people at the top of the economic pyramid are really contributing anything, an everybody else is leaching off of them. They want to see governmental control done away with, because it's the tool by which the poor oppress their superiors. This is the Libertarianism of trendy college kids. Then there's the mass of baby boomer tea partiers. They're not libertarians so much as people who A) don't want to pay for what they get from the government or don't realize how much our taxes do and are under the illusion that most of it goes to welfare and the unemployed, and B) are seeing the privileges that come from being white middle class straight Christian or culturally Christian, able-bodied, etc. slipping away, and because they've been taught by society for so long that they really are the best and deserved those privileges, they believe that without all that busybody government stuff, they would climb to the top of the heap. This is the Libertarianism that is becoming popular right now.

[sholio]

Yeah, I'm mostly going off personal anecdata here -- most of the Libertarians I know are of the well-meaning, "if the government would just get out of our business everybody would do their own thing and the world would be great" sort (I live in Alaska, so a vague distrust of the guv'mint is practically a lifestyle up here). I think the comparison to Marxists is spot-on; it's exactly the same sort of idealistic thing that would work great if people would just ... stop being people. But it's fundamentally idealistic.

Randian Libertarians are more like what most people seem to mean when they speak of Libertarians, except they don't seem especially representative of Libertarians in general, at least in my experience; they're mostly either assholes to begin with, and would be assholes no matter what their political philosophy, or new converts who haven't actually done the mental legwork necessary to figure out the dark underbelly of their shiny new philosophy yet ...

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

At the elected level, a lot of the Libertarians in power are Randian, which is why they come to mind, and outside of Libertarian heartlands like Alaska, the tea party mentality rules. Demographically, the tea party is above average in socioeconomic status, very white, and almost exclusively baby boomers. When you suggest cutting anything that benefits them right now (farm subsidies, which are the opposite of Libertarian, or science spending for the ones who work in defense, things like that) all of a sudden the shoe is on the other foot. The root of their ideology, as best I've been able to tell, is that yes, they really should be getting all the benefits of society, and those government types, poor people, and immigrents are sealing it from the real Americans like them. If the government were gone, there would be none of this "forced equality" (i.e. socialist fascism, what?) and they (already well off white people) would naturally rise to the top. In Alaska, the long term anti-government feelings make the discussion entirely different than it is here in the bottom forty-eight. And your Libertarianism is much purer and gentler for it.

The thing that gets me about Alaska is that the state government is heavily subsidized by the state's oil, which means that everybody is benefiting from that resource. If it were in private hands, all those benefits would go away.

[sholio]

The thing that gets me about Alaska is that the state government is heavily subsidized by the state's oil, which means that everybody is benefiting from that resource. If it were in private hands, all those benefits would go away.

True, and on top of that, the government is the biggest employer up here, especially in rural areas, which means that most of the Libertarians I know are employed by the government. Which is either sad or hilarious depending on how you look at it; maybe a little of both ...

It's also probably true that I'm not getting an accurate picture of national politics due to my perspective being skewed by our local political landscape, which has a fairly distinctive character.

By the way, I realized in retrospect that it kinda looks like I waded into your LJ just to argue with you, and I really hope it doesn't come across that way! I've actually been lurking for awhile (after reading some of your A:tLA and White Collar fic) and had been enjoying your Bittercon posts and meaning to comment on them; unfortunately this happened to be the one that I delurked on.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I think it's a little of both. At least that's what I tell myself as I try not to laugh. Which is mean.

If I didn't study politics, my views would be heavily skewed by living in a state that prides itself as not being Texas. They live next door, and during the Civil War, they invaded. many have not quite forgiven them

No worries. Rittercon posts are posts where you're supposed to come in and argue. Now if you were arguing with me about disability, then you would have to die.

[sholio]

Now if you were arguing with me about disability, then you would have to die.

Oh, no chance of that, since I agree with you completely! (Well, the posts of yours that I've read on the topic, I totally agreed.)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I consider myself pretty moderate, but nothing makes me more annoyed than disability!fail, and I say this as a queer Jewish woman. Okay, exploiting or denying the Holocaust comes close. And I get really really really annoyed at liberal Christians calling different christian fundamentalist groups' teaching the group's Talmud, as a way to call it legalistic and therefore wrong, because what's your criticism of the fundamentalists of your faith without taking a jab at the traditions of a frequently oppressed people? for some reason, right now, this type of fail is pretty acceptable in polite society.