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

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

The simplest answer is usually the truth. Its silly though, it just blocks then from thinking in another direction and maybe discovering something more applicable.

Oh my god, I'm so jealous! What languages do you speak?

Yeah, a lot of people just reject things which aren't empirical, which, if anything makes them worse scientists. Being able to think about supposedly impossible things and thinking about people is what leads to inovation. There's this whole other world of learning that's just as vital to being any sort of human being and a whole bunch of people (including my country's government, at the moment) are writing it of as irrelevant because we're in recession, or a war, or we need more scientific progress.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And it's very unscientific.

English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. My dad speaks English, Italian, and German.

It's maddening. In universities, you can see the privileging of hard sciences over other fields (which I think is partly responsible for the soft sciences' failed attempts to be more scientific) you can see it in the public schools, where there is a huge emphasis on the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) at the expense of history and literature (because if you can write technical paper and read an instruction book, that's all we really need out of you readers). You see it in the scorn scientists and doctors feel free to level on equally knowledgeable intelligent people... Arg.

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how you do it, considering how different they all are, from each other and English. The only way I can do French is to match the similarities from English (which is an awful way to do it, I know).

Oh, I know! Even amoung arts, social sciences (I've noticed) are mocked, particularly psychology and sociology are mocked as easy degrees. I think it's because people think they don't have good job prospects and judge them solely on that, ignoring that fact that the majority of graduate level jobs are non-degree specific. It's like being able to understand and emphathise are becoming "usless" skills because they can't be easily marked on an exam paper.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Hebrew and Arabic are really close, which is bad because you really really don't want to mix them up, and Russian and Arabic have some really bizarre cognates. But as different as Arabic and Russian are, first day of college Russian, after I had taken years of it, and a year of Arabic, I opened my mouth, and both came out. With my mother's German syntax.

It's interesting to note that in the US, the majority of hard science degrees go to men, and the one science where there are a significant proportion of women, biology, is considered the least prestigious. Art, music, theater, etc. degrees are awarded to men and women about evenly, but soft sciences and history degrees go to women in similar proportions as the hard science degrees go to men. Think this might have anything to do with it?

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

Oooh, wouldn't like to see the fallout if that actually happened. It's interesting about the Arabic and Russian, maybe they have some sort of shared ancestry? I know very little about the orgins of any languages other than European, but it's fascinating. And with german syntax? Considering how confusing that can be I'd be very interested to hear that :)

It always does. Things only become valid and serious once it becomes populated with men, as if doing humanities or not having a Y chromosone made you less intelligent. In Britan, there is a big push to get more girls into science degrees, but that still doesn't change the fact that attitudes and preconceptions are still against them, and against supposedly "less prestigous" degrees. Sorry, bit of a rant, but anyone who claims we're living in a world or societies without need of feminism is completely blind.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Me neither. Russian and Arabic aren't related at all. It's more closely related to English, because they're both Indo-European, whereas Arabic is Semitic and descended almost certainly from languages from Kenya and the horn of Africa. However, Arabic, like English likes to pick up and incorporate words from other languages, and given trade and just how close Muslim conquest came to the Russian speaking world, I would guess that's what happened.

And once men leave, they stop being valid and serious, so if women did dominate the sciences as women do medicine in Russia, all of a sudden, hard sciences would be seen as puff degrees and we'd be back where we started. Grrr.

Yes, this exactly. So long as what is perceived as feminine is devalued, women are still devalued, even if the laws say we're equal. It's better than it was, but society is still rife with sexism, and we need feminism as much as we ever did.

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

English is a sort of go-around-taking-other-people's-words-for-it-it's-not-steal language isn't it? I'm actually quite suprised there aren't more Arabic links on some European languages, partiularly Spanish and Portugese.

Exactly! It's really frustrating when you try to say this to other people, even other women, because they like to stick there head in the sands and act like everything is rosy and any complaint is because we're just not working hard enough to match up with me. Nobody acknowledges that many women don;t have to change, it's the system itself.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Actually, there are a lot of Arabic words in Spanish. Wikipedia has a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_influence_on_the_Spanish_language Also, Arabic took words from Spanish and other Romance languages (and google is a weird verb to conjugate in Arabic, let me tell you) so...

It's like they don't even see that the rules are different. Like if women are expected to take maternity leave and have a job that accommodates their families, and move when their spouses do and men aren't, and those are all things that delay raises and promotions and can derail careers, then women are still at an institutional disadvantage. But no, it's her own fault for having a baby/moving with her spouse/staying home with her sick kid so much. Many of the women who say "If we just worked harder" want so badly to be part of the boys club that they're willing to step on other women to get there. Because they're as good as the boys, but the rest of us aren't.

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

Wow, I never knew that. Shows how much I know about languages and history, which is actually a bit shaming considering I used to be a massive history nerd :) That's really interesting, thanks. People talk about how the world is getting smaller, but there's always been discourse, its never been that large when you think about it.

And you never hear anyone saying, maybe if men started talking a fairer share of housework and childcare. But no. A lot of women are still expected to work two jobs, one at home and one at work, yet when a man is expected to do the same, its unreasonable and he's a hero. Maternity leave in Britain is reasonably good, but it still causes a bias against mothers; for every month over the 6th taken on maternity leave, women lose chances of promotion and after having a child, the chances of a pay rise are halfed or something ridiculous like that.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. There are blond ethnic Mongolians to attest to the fact that we talk, travel, trade, and conquer and have been doing this since the dawn of civilization and beyond.

You have no idea how many times I find myself compelled to explain to people that a guy isn't babysitting if it's his own kids, damn it.

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago I read about a chinese girl born with blonde hair because of 16th century European settlers. It always happened, it just happens a little quicker now.

That's shocking. Its like how people react to learning my sister's husband agreed to move for her career - I wonder if anyone would be amazed if it were the other way round.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

And some of our most reliable sources on Norse culture at the time of the Vikings were Arab traders.

In the states, if a woman moves to follow her husband or long term boyfriend's career, yeah, expected, so what? A man moves to do the same thing, oh wow, he's a saint, and isn't she just such a bitch for making him move? (Dunno about queer couples...)

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

Oh, I shouldn't worry, according to most of those folk, gay couples just don't count. How anything but a hetronormative couple be happy and committed and want to move around the country with each other?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh of course! It all makes sense now!