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

[azurelunatic]

Have you met Bujold's Vorkosigan series? Barrayar is a lovely sf political stewpot, with an ethical regent for a good portion of the series. The political plot of A Civil Campaign is very much taken up with the vote of the Council of Counts. (It's an empire; the Emperor is a member of the Council of Counts; there are certain checks and balances like the way the counts will rise up and brutally murder a really bad Emperor.)

The Bakilites are Adamantly Anti-Magic

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

One thing I've noticed is that game settings (Mythus: Ærth, GURPS Banestorm, or Monte Cook's Ptolus (tah-lus) to be be both broader in scope, and concerned with the sociology of a setting. Sometimes economics is handled, but more often in terms of the society than of economics per se.

Settings are concerned more with the people involved, than with individuals; unless said individuals can potentially play a role in the lives of the player characters. In this sense they serve as supporting class, antagonists, even extras. So characterization can be brusque, even not minimal. Though sometimes an NPC (non-player character0 can end up in a lead role of his own, and so become a GMC (game moderator character)

GURPS, as an example, is as much a game about settings as it is a game about characters, so it has numerous guidelines for fitting a PC into a world, and as numerous a set of setting rules. This making it a comprehensive set of rules indeed. Mythus on the other hand, assumes much about the world, and serves to illustrate by example than by guidelines. It helps if you have a working knowledge of 40s pulp fiction, for that is what author Gary Gygax grew up on in his boyhood in Chicago. His devouring of Amazing Stories had an impact as well.

All that said, a good world builder (Kate Elliot for example) can be a useful guide by example, showing how their worlds are built and demonstrating how such construction can be used.

BTW, for some of the best books on world building may I suggest the various GURPS sourcebooks? Whether you're talking GURPS Cabal or GURPS Cops or any of the dozens of books you're talking well researched tomes with copious guidelines for building a world.

Hope this was helpful.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Katherine Kurtz'z Deryni series is the stereotypical All Politics, All The Time fantasy, isn't it? That's nobility jostling for power. There's also some of that in Kerr's Deverry.

Oh, and I just read Scott and Barnett's Point of Dreams, where there's manoeuvring around the queen naming her successor.

There's actually quite a lot of politics in the Discworld books- the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork is the consummate politician in many ways. ("He was the Man. He had the Vote.") He's also good at diplomacy.

Zaphod Beeblebrox is President of the Galaxy, does that count? *g*

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Fantasies, in the general sense of the word, can sidestep the "you can't get there from here" problem.

It might be a bit of handwave-suggestion, but the politics of the real world may have become trapped in a local maximum. It's a closely-associated cluster of peaks, and some of the ideas of political structure of the last couple on centuries aren't in that cluster.

The current "Arab Spring" is in part about struggling across a valley.

For an example from RPGs, there is Traveller, which used an ordered nobility and the trappings of Empire to govern a vast territory affected by slow communications. It's a little like our world. before the electric telegraph.

The mechanical telegraph systems of Napoleon's time allowed the French State to centralise authority, and the emergence of the electric telegraph—not only using Morse code, though that was the vital development—gave central authority the tools it needed to dominate, whether that authority was a King or a Parliament.

The Internet doesn't really change that.

We have politics based on 18th Century models. A TV broadcast is a faster version of one of Ben Franklin's pamphlets. Even with blogs, an erratic and sometimes bewildering 2-way conversation, the core mechanism is the elected representative with a carte blanche until the next election.

At least there is the Recall Election, but why do the representatives have to go to some central place to meet and debate and decide? Maybe the Internet, through some sort of virtual world, allows something different to happen.

But can you get there from here?

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Speculative Fiction's redheaded stepchild genre, Alternate History. The best examples of the field really dive into the alternate politics and societies that arise from differing circumstances. Here's three online ones I'd recommend that I think would catch your eye:

* A World of Laughter, A World of Tears (http://alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=113866) -- When Eisenhower suffers a heart attack in 1952, a divided Republican Party decides to nominate a compromise candidate... Walt Disney. When the worse trials of the 1950s hit, including the Korean War, Civil Rights movement and Middle East issues, the kind-hearted but flawed businessman succeeds at first but is soon out of his element.

* Superpower Empire: China 1912 (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=86560) -- When Yuan Shikai dies four years prematurely, the leadership change ushers in a government that manages to prevent the rise of warlordism and civil war. Incredibly detailed. Has a spin-off series of short stories (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=68510) set inside the universe; try Sodom and Gomorrah Send Their Regards (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=55310) as an example of how differently things can turn out.

* All Along the Watchtower (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=172453) -- Richard Nixon beats JFK in the 1960 Presidential Election, ushering in the "Shrieking Sixties" and ripples that affect the entire world. Makes for lively reading, but I'd recommend keeping two tabs open to read the footnotes without scrolling.

[amyraine.livejournal.com]

It's become so trite to quote Monty Python anymore, but I couldn't help this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI (Didn't want to embed in case anyone reading has a slow connection)

"I thought we were an autonomous collective."

I would love to see this played serious in a novel.

[vynessia361.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is the level of technology we tend to see in fantasy novels. Depending on how common magic-use is and if it substitutes at all for technological development, it can either equalize or exacerbate existing class structures. (In the historical periods most fantasy uses as a template, there already tends to be a significant divide between those with power and those without.)

For example, in The Wheel of Time, we see magic users going off and becoming powerful people in their own right, but that ability is so rare that it just adds another group of people to the "those who have power" group, rather than significantly altering the dynamic of "royals and peasants."

Um, books for the list:

Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge has some interesting political bits. (I think, anyway. I'm not sure if we're using the same definition of politics.)

There used to be a king but that ends before the book begins. ("He meant very well, and ruled very badly, and in the end they cut off his head, and melted down his crown to make coins.") Instead there's a Parliament ("The Parliament's leader ruled very like a king, but no one called him a 'king,' because names are important.") And the Realm has various Royalist factions and ruling guilds, and people discuss politics and radicalism. It's fun!

Ellen Kushner has a couple books (The titles are Swordspoint and Privilege of the Sword) that take place in a city (well, country, but we almost only see the city) ruled by nobles after they deposed the rule of kings. There's a faint undercurrent of "if the kings' divine right to rule is bullshit, what gives the nobles that power?" that I thought was rather interesting. More noticably, there's lots of maneuvering for power that is (for the most part) not portrayed as sinister. (There's also an interesting aspect of legalized assassination.)

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I've heard Spec Fic described as "fantasy of political agency", in that it lets us imagine a world where a hero is capable of single-handedly fixing a country's problems (either by chopping off someone's head or personally rewriting the legal code). See also the Appeal of the Lawless Elite (http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/304273.html).

OTOH, democracy is really hard, both to do and to show. And when done right, it's boring; that's arguably one of its main goals after diluting political agency.

A couple recommendations: Joel Shepherd's Crossover and Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Goes to Washington. In both of these a democracy is shown (not just claimed) to be a good thing, even when the majority believes the heroine is a monster.

[gamiel.livejournal.com]

Have you read any of the Sparhawk book series (the Elenium and the Tamuli) by David and Leigh Eddings? National politics are important parts of the series

[theironchocho.livejournal.com]

Wicked by Gregory Maguire was the first fantasy book I read, in which I fully understood it was about politics while I read it. It was also the book that made me realize I love reading political stories. It surprised me again and again when I'd recommend the book to customers when I worked at Borders because they said they loved the musical, to which they'd reply, "No thanks, I heard it's very political" or "I tried to read it, but it's too political." Both of these phrases now translate to "I tried to read it, but it was just to interesting" for me, though that's me being mean. I'm a specfic reader not for escapist fun, but for escapist getting-something-done.

[abricot-vert.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is kind of amazing! I wish I could put together such thought out, analytical, meaningful essays about fantasy.

This is completely what I love about SF and fantasy too, and I think that Abhorsen is what really got be into it. Seeing the politics of that world, even just vaguely drawn out, intertwinned with the magic and the power of the story just gave it so much more meaning to me. I wish more books were about the intricate power plays of politics between this clan of werewolves and that coven of vampires, rather than which of them is getting off, really (although, yeah, let's get rid of them all together and go with zombies - I think they must have a bit of a hive mind and swarm attack motive).

Basically, this makes me sad I gave up Philosophy, Economics and Politics to do English.
Sorry for the random rambly comment, I just think this is awesome . Is it alright if I add you as a friend?