Space stations, spaceships, Benjamin Constant and two types of liberty

In CJ Cherryh’s novel Downbelow Station the characters live on a space station orbiting the world Pell, that itself circles a sun far distant from Earth. In Becky Chamber’s novel The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, the characters live on a ship that travels from place to place building wormholes to make intergalactic travel easier. 

There are many differences between these two novels. Chamber’s novel has more aliens and types of aliens than Cherryh’s does. It’s also set on a ship that visits many places rather than a station that orbits one world.

Philosophically and politically, I see another crucial difference between these two novels in how the characters experience liberty. Liberty is not the theme of either of these novels, but the characters’ of both books are free, to a degree, to pursue their lives as they want to live them and this degree is where a lot of the drama in both novels comes from. The thing is, the characters of these books are free in different ways.

From outer space to the French Revolution

To understand the different types of liberty a society might have, we need to travel from the future into the past to look at the work of Swiss-French writer, activist and political theorist Benjamin Constant.

Constant lived during interesting times. He lived in France and in his life he saw the French Revolution, The Terror, the Rise of Napoleon, the rise of the First French Empire, Napoleon's armies rolling across Europe, Napoleon's eventual defeat, the Bourbon Restoration and he lived just long enough to experience the July Revolution.

These were the awkward teenage years of modern democracy, where it was figuring out what it wanted to be and had frequent outbursts of volatility. Revolutions, tyrants, utopian hopes and blood baths were a feature of Constant’s life. During this time Constant wrote and lectured on the big political topics of his time: democracy and liberty.

Ancient liberty and modern liberty

Today, Constant is best remembered for delivering a speech that was turned into an essay called The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, as well as writing a Romantic novel with the unfortunate title of Adolphe. In this lecture he outlined two different types of liberty, which are the types enjoyed by the people of Downbelow and the Wayfarer. Brace yourself, the comparisons will be coming thick and fast from this point.

Ancient liberty and Downbelow Station

The first type of liberty that Constant described is Ancient Liberty. Constant contrasted ancient liberty, which existed mainly in Ancient Greece, with how liberty was thought of in France in 1819 when he gave the lecture, a few years after the final defeat of Napoleon.

Constant described Ancient Liberty as collective, something a group of people (living in a city or kingdom) enjoyed. If your state was free then you were free. If your state was not free, usually because it lost a war, then you were not free. This connects to the Ancient Greek idea of the Argo, or public square, where discussion was held and your freedom was expressed.

Although there are many societies in science fiction and fantasy inspired by Ancient Greece, this idea reminded me of Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, orbiting around Pell or “Downbelow” as the characters refer to it.

Military rule

The citizens of the Downbelow Station enjoy freedoms similar to the ones we enjoy (I am assuming that you are reading this in a liberal democracy). They have freedom of expression, freedom of religion, they can start a business and are free to congregate as they please. The station is run more like a corporation than state and is dominated by one family: the Konstantins, but for the purposes of this analogy it functions like a free state.

In the novel, the station suddenly finds itself on the frontline of an interplanetary conflict  between the Company, who built the station, and a breakaway group of humans called The Union. The station is then occupied, first by the Company’s military forces then the Union’s.

Lack of ancient liberty

What happened under military rule is similar to Constant’s idea of when ancient liberty is taken away. It is a collective lack of freedom that the station experiences, the identity of the station was that they were free and it is replaced by repression under the military.

This is the essence of what Constant thought was different about ancient liberty. The collective, city or state, being free or not free. The citizens express their freedom publicly when the station is not under military rule. When the military invades from outside of the Pell system and takes over, the people of Downbelow Station are not free anymore.

Modern liberty and the Long Way To A Small Angry Planet

Constant said that liberty in the modern world was different from what it meant in ancient times and what I have described on Downbelow Station. Rather than liberty being something we experience as a collective, it has become something that we experience as individuals. Liberty for moderns is the freedom to choose, to be different, to do things that other people don’t approve of. Modern liberty means the freedom of religion or political beliefs. These are things we can do in private.

A sci-fi novel that explores this form of liberty is Becky Chamber’s novel The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. It’s also space based, but it follows a group of humans and other species who all live and work on a ship called the Wayfarer.

The Wayfarer flies around the galaxy building tunnels through space to improve intergalactic transportation connections. The crew are a diverse bunch of different humans and aliens, from different worlds and of different species. Different chapters of the novel focus on different characters, exploring their individual personalities and dramatising their conflicts with other characters.

Modern liberty in a spaceship

The crew of the Wayfarer are all different, even different species, but there is tolerance of their differences. They all live together, privately living their lives according to how they want to live, based on their biology, culture or religion. They have the freedom to be themselves, but it is individual and not collective.

Constant’s idea of Modern Liberty is so inclusive that it applies to a group of humans and aliens living in a ship together. We have Modern Liberty (again I’m assuming you live in a liberal democracy and that you aren’t reading this from Myanmar) and it’s not difficult for us moderns to imagine the same idea applied to aliens. Ancient Liberty is harder for us to intuitively understand.

From liberty to tyranny

One of the key points that Constant made is that you cannot force one type of liberty onto the other civilization. He believed that the French Revolution failed because it tried to create Ancient Liberty in a modern society. Modern societies are much bigger and more diverse than they were in the ancient world. The only way to make Ancient Liberty work in a modern society is to make everyone the same, which is a fast route to tyranny.

Stamping out Modern Liberty and replacing it with Ancient Liberty is where Constant thought the French Revolution failed. You can see this pattern of failure in revolutions that promise utopia and end in tyranny; the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia is the ur- example of this. If you try to make everyone the same, to create Ancient Liberty, you get tyranny and ultimately bloodshed.

The collective life of the people on the Downbelow Station, where everyone is human and part of the same culture (leaving aside the Hisas, a stone age civilization that is native to Downbelow) would not work imposed on the people of the Wayfarer. They’re too different from each other. They need their private freedoms to live their lives.

Keeping an eye on those in power

Constant believed that you needed both Ancient and Modern Liberty for a healthy society. You need Modern Liberty because we are all different and want to live different, individual lives. Modern Liberty protects us from tyrants, from Maximilien Robespierre to Joseph Stalin. However Constant said we also need Ancient Liberty, because we need to protect ourselves from subtle tyrants.

Constant was wary of us disappearing into our private lives and losing the civic engagement of ancient societies. If we all live our separate, private lives then we cannot keep an eye on our leaders or governments, which means we won’t know that they’re subtly transforming into tyrants before it’s too late. We need Ancient Liberty with its public civic engagement to keep a check on those with power.

Critic of Leviathan

Constant was a critic of Thomas Hobbes’s ideas about the state, which he outlined in Levitahan (and I discussed here.) He thought that Ancient Liberty would prevent the Sovereign from becoming an unaccountable tyrant. On the Wayfarer the captain’s benevolent authority is never challenged, but in a larger society, we need to keep a check on those who wield the awesome power of a modern state, aka a Levithan.

These novels show that there are different ways for societies to exist in fiction or in our world, and different ideas of liberty for different societies. What we need in our world is the best of both, to safeguard our freedoms and our right to live our own individual lives.

Thank you to David Runciman for his lecture on Benjamin Constant in his podcast Talking Politics: A History of Ideas, which inspired me to write this post and which I drew heavily on for my understanding of Constant’s ideas.

What links Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, The State and Utopia?

The Terra Ignota novels by Ada Palmer are among my favourite books because they unite my interests in science fiction and political philosophy. The world of the 25th century that Palmer depicts in her books is informed by the philosophy of many different thinkers - most notably great names of the 18th century such as Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade. 

Recently, I was indulging my love of political philosophy by listening to an episode of the second series of David Runciman’s podcast, Talking Politics: History of Ideas, about the 20th century Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. As Runciman outlined Nozick’s ideas, something in my mind clicked and I was transported to the world of Terra Ignota.

20th century thinking in the 25th century

I’m not sure if Nozick is one of the thinkers that Palmer drew on for the books. One of the interesting things about the novels is that there is almost no reference to the 20th century in them. The world of the 25th century looks on the 20th century as those in the 18th century looked on the Medieval period: barbaric and violent. The people in Palmer’s novels idealise the more civilised (in their view) 18th century, in the same way that those in the 18th century idealised the ancient world.

One way that the books signal the insignificance of the 20th century to the lives of the people of the 25th century, is that a key figure in the history of Terra Ignota is Adolf Riktor Brill. The name subtly says to the reader, in the 25th century the most famous Adolf in history is not the one you’re thinking of, because enough time has passed that the associations of the 20th century are not what people immediately reach for. What has power for us has receded into history. Hitler is as well-known as Edward I.

All this is to say that the connection between Nozick writing and Palmer’s novels may be deliberate, or maybe an inference that I have drawn. I think it’s worth exploring as reading Terra Ignota helped me understand Nozick’s ideas, and vice versa.

Anarchy, The State and Utopia

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who taught at Harvard University and wrote many famous philosophical books in the 1970s and 80s. Probably his most famous books is Anarchy, The State and Utopia, which was written as a response to his Harvard colleague John Rawls's 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Anarchy, The State and Utopia is a response to Rawls’s ideas of how to arrive at the ideal state and offers an alternative to Rawls Theories. (Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is a book I intend to blog about in the future.)

When laying out his ideal state, Nozick begins with the idea that all humans have natural rights that cannot be violated. He draws on the work of John Locke to outline what these natural rights are, most notably that no one should harm another person or their property, even for the good of society. Locke also said that if you mixed your labour with something then you own the product of that Labour. If you own the product then it’s a violation of your natural rights for anyone to take it.

Nozick says that there is no justification for breaking someone’s natural rights. You cannot take the property of another person without their permission or harm them. From this, he argues that there is no justification for a modern state that taxes people (i.e. takes their property) and uses violence to enforce this. This is where the anarchism in the book’s title comes in: the state cannot be justified because it breaks our natural rights.

Minimal states

Nozick said that protection co-ops are justified. Many individuals cannot protect themselves from the aggression or greed of others, so to stop their natural rights being violated they could exchange their labour for protection from others. Protection co-ops would evolve over time, developing methods of settling disputes between members, getting stronger and thus being better at protecting their clients. As the protection co-ops evolved they would eventually become what Nozick referred to as “minimal states”.

Minimal states offer protection against your natural rights being violated and nothing else. Nozick thought that minimal states are the only type of state that can be justified. Any state that does more than this, for example a state that redistributes people’s wealth in the name of equality or fairness, is violating people’s natural rights.

Nozick's statement that the only justifiable state is a minimal state that does not redistribute has made his book a favourite amongst libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. I’ll come back to what I think of minimal states and a world where the state only guarantees the protection of your natural rights. For now, I want to dwell on how much Nozick’s ideas reminded me of Palmer’s Terra Ignota books.

The minimal state of the Universal Free Alliance

One of the distinguishing features of Palmer’s future is that humanity now lives in hives, not nations. Hives have some things in common with states, in that they have citizens, leaders, languages and all sorts of complicated rules, some of which are customs and some of which are laws. Hives differ by ideology or outlook on life. The Mitsubishi hive is a corporation, the Cousins are a family, the Utopians are dedicated to the future. Unlike states or nations, membership in hives is voluntary. You can choose the hive you like, or have none at all, and you can leave when you like.

The seven hives in the books exist together, along with the three types of hiveless people, in a larger structure called the Universal Free Alliance. The Universal Free Alliance is a minimal state, similar to what Nozick described. The Universal Free Alliance has Seven Universal Laws that all citizens, regardless of their hive, must obey. Even the Blacklaw Hiveless, who have renounced all laws and associations, must live under the Seven Universal Laws of the Universal Free Alliance. The Universal Free Alliance makes sure that no one has their rights provided by the Seven Universal Laws violated.

The rights given under the Seven Universal Laws are not the same as those of Nozick’s minimal state and the Universal Free Alliance has a legal code, institutions and powers that go beyond what Nozick argues says is a justifiable minimal state to protect natural rights. However, the Universal Free Alliance conforms to the same idea that all people have basic rights that must be protected against those who would violate them by a state. Beyond that you are free to do as you like.

Communes and hives

So, what does Nozick or the Universal Free Alliance think you should do with your freedom now that your natural rights are protected? Join communes or hives. If you want. In Anarchy, The State and Utopia, Nozick said that communes would arise within the minimal state and that people would be free to join. These could offer citizens more than what the minimal state does.

A commune might levy taxes on its members to build roads or schools or because they think an equal distribution of wealth is fairer. A commune might follow an ideology like social democracy or communism. Crucially, membership in a commune is voluntary, you can leave at any point you want, which prevents them abusing their members.

This system is very similar to the hives of the Universal Free Alliance. Everyone who lives in the Universal Free Alliance must obey the Seven Universal Laws, but they are free to join hives according to what they believe is right. You can become Mitsubishi if you believe in corporatism or you can be a Cousin, or a Mason or an Utopian, if you identify with the philosophy behind these hives. You are also free to leave a hive whenever you want.

The freedom to not live under capitalism

Nozick’s book is often held up as an Anarchist Capitalist manifesto, or a call for society where the state only protects property rights and doesn’t intervene in markets or tax its citizens. I am in favour of a state that does much more than Nozick’s minimal state. A state that redistributes wealth to account for the unfairness in society. A state that prevents the accumulation of wealth and power by individuals to the point where they can influence society as a whole. A state that taxes its citizens to collectively pay for schools and hospitals.

You might think that I would strongly oppose Nozick’s ideas, but I can see the appeal of them for one simple reason. In Nozick’s world, you can opt out of capitalism by joining a non-capitalist commune. Everyone is given that freedom.

Many people, usually wealthy Westerners, have told me, at length, about how great capitalism is. How it’s fair. How it creates wealth and the material comforts we all enjoy. I usually respond to this with a list of the problems of capitalism. How it’s unfair. How it wastes resources. How it’s destroying the natural environment. One of the key problems with capitalism is that we don’t have a choice about whether we want to live under capitalism or not (unless you want to defect to North Korea). Nozick’s system gives us the choice.

Choosing to live under capitalism

Nozick’s minimal state gives us the freedom to be capitalists or communists if we want. No one is forced to live under an ideology they don’t agree with. If you don’t like the low wages and insecurity of capitalism then you move to a commune run according to social democracy, or communism or libertarian socialism. If these systems fail then people move to other communes, rather than being trapped by an authoritarian government that has complete control over their life.

How would capitalism or neoliberalism work if the poorest paid workers could choose to live under communism or social democracy? Would it be stable? Would capitalism find people to work on assembly lines for pennies a day or look after sick old people for a handful of dollars, whilst a few billionaires hoard a huge chunk of society’s wealth, if the poor had a choice about which system they lived under?

This choice would make capitalism fair. Maybe people would choose to be poor in a capitalist commune for the chance, theoretically, to become one of the wealthy few. However, with the freedoms offered by the minimal state, people wouldn’t be forced to live under capitalism’s exploitative economic system. Maybe they would trade the freedom of capitalism for the security of socialism. It would be interesting to find out.

Freedom of choice

This choice of how you want to live your life is one of the defining features of Palmer’s novels. They’re set in a world where you can choose your state, your family or choose to have none of the above. Freedom from coercion is something we can all believe in. The state that Nozick describes offers any amount of freedom or any amount of security that anyone would want. This choice is what links Palmer’s world and Nozick’s writing, and makes both different to our world.

What can The Tethered Mage teach us about the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft?

Melissa Caruso’s novel The Tethered Mage is set in a world that resembles the past of our world, but is different in several crucial ways. One of the most striking things about the world of the novel is not that it contains characters who can create fire, or lightning, or magical weapons - although these are present - but that it’s set in a version of the past where men and women were equal. 

In the world of The Tethered Mage, there is no distinction between the roles that society has created for men and women. Women still wear corsets and live in nuclear families with men, but there is no gendering of roles in government, the military, science or the arts. The novel features women generals, politicians, scientists and leaders. There is more gender equality in the novel than in 21st century Britain and it’s set in a society that has yet to invent the steam engine or universal suffrage.

It’s difficult to be precise about what historic period The Tethered Mage evokes for its fantasy world. It bears many similarities to Europe of the 18th Century. There are cannons and muskets, scientists investigate the properties of nature using something close to the scientific method and power is held by hereditary rulers, but held in check by a civil society as represented by a body of wealthy landowners and merchants.

Falcons and Falconers

Despite this being a vision of the 18th Century with equality between the genders, there are other hierarchies present. The wealthy hold power over the poor and those born to privilege have power over those born to humble circumstances. This seems familiar to our understanding of the 18th Century, but the world of the novel has another crucial divide not present in our world, a divide between those who can wield magic and those who can't.

The magic system of the novel has an interesting twist. Mages - those who can control fire, or the weather, or create rare elixirs, or weave the flesh of humans or animals - are controlled via a magical item known as a jess. A jess binds the mage to a non-magical guardian who controls when they can use their powers. In this relationship the magical party is called a Falcon and the non-magical party is called a Falconer (presumably because they remove the cap and release the Falcon’s power).

Like all other divisions in society, this divide is wrapped up in power. To understand this division between the Falcon and Falconer, we can look at a thinker from our world’s 18th Century.

Mary Wollstonecraft and The Enlightenment

Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th century British writer, feminist and radical thinker. She led a radical life by the standard of any age. She went to France shortly after the French Revolution, at great personal risk to herself, to witness the birth of liberty but ended up witnessing The Terror first hand. She wrote many books, including A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she critiques the roles that 18th Century society had given women.

Wollstonecraft believed the relations between men and women were a symptom of a wider problem, that one half of society controlled the faculty of reason and the other half had the domain of feeling. Wollstonecraft was writing during the Enlightenment when reason was considered the highest virtue.

Most of the Enlightenment's most prominent figures were men and believed that reason was the domain of men, and the feelings and emotions were the domain of women. Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlighted this division in his book Emile, which Wollstonecraft was a fierce critic of.

The domain of reason

Wollstonecraft linked this relationship to that of a tyrant and his court. One person has all the power and the others have to use what they are left with to protect themselves. This unequal relationship corrupts everyone involved in it. Wollstonecraft described life in the 18th Century, where men had power over women (and in The Enlightenment power meant the domain of reason) and women used what was left to them (the domain of feeling) to defend themselves from the power of men.

In the world of The Tethered Mage, reason is not considered gendered as it was in our 18th Century, as in this society reason has not been claimed by one gender. However, reason is the domain of the non-magical Falconers, who hold power over the magical, whereas feeling is the domain of the Falcons, who take what is left to them and use it to protect themselves from the power of the Falcons.

Zaira is a Falcon who can control fire. At several points in the novel, she is told that her fire can easily get out of hand and destroy entire cities. In the opening chapter, she is bonded to Amalia, daughter of a powerful noble and the novel’s protagonist. Amalia now has control over when Zaira can use her fire. Zaira believes that this control of her life is unfair. Amalia and other Falconers try to convince Zaira why being tethered is in everyone’s best interest, including her own.

Wollstonecraft and Hobbes

What’s interesting about these scenes, is that Amalia uses reason to appeal to Zaira: it’s in the best interest of everyone that we isolate the magical and send them to a place known as The Mews, where they live in what could be considered comfortable for a life in the 18th Century. Whereas Zaira uses emotion in her counter argument: this is an unfair restriction on her life. Amalia has all the power and uses reason. The domain of emotion is all that’s left to Zaira.

This argument relates back to the previous article in this series, which discussed Thomas Hobbes’s idea of The Sovereign. Wollstonecraft argued the division between the domain of reason and the domain of emotion corrupts Sovereigns, just as it corrupts relations between men and women, as Sovereigns still have human relationships.

Hobbes’s idea of The Sovereign limited the spread of politics to as few aspects of life as possible. In Hobbes’s time, during the English Civil War and the 30 Years War, political disagreements were a matter of routine and horrific violence, so limiting politics made sense. By giving The Sovereign say over some aspects of life, it leaves us free to enjoy every other aspect of it.

Sovereigns and Falcons

Wollstonecraft was critical of this idea. She believed that you cannot keep politics out of every aspect of life. If you are a woman living under the dominion of a man or a child living under the dominion of parents, then the aspects of your life that are and aren't political are not up to you. The limiting power of The Sovereign only affects some people.

We saw how this worked in Days of Hate by Aleš Kot, Danijel Žeželj and Jordie Bellaire. When a Sovereign in a future American riven by civil war politicises race, immigration status and sexual orientation this touches every aspect of the characters’ lives and thus their life becomes entirely political. In the American civil war of Days of Hate, this is as deadly as it was during the English Civil war.

Wollstonecraft’s argument about women in the 18th Century applies to Falcons in The Tethered Mage. A Falcon cannot choose the aspects of their life they have control over. They are forced to live in The Mews and serve their military masters. Falcons have more freedom than slaves, but so did women in the 18th Century. Both lack the right to make decisions about their lives.

Wollstonecraft and revolution

Part of Amalia’s argument is that this is the way things have always been done in her country. The Falcons are tethered, but they’re kept well and then serve the country when it’s needed - including Zaira unleashing her fire against their enemies. This debate over tradition mirrors arguments about tradition that Wollstonecraft had in her time.

Wollstonecraft was critical of the writing of Edmund Burke, who was a philosopher, author and MP, as well as having the dubious honour of being the founder of modern Conservatism. Burke wrote against The French Revolution and for a society based on sentiment and tradition. He claimed he wanted people to be free to follow their hearts.

Wollstonecraft attacked this idea for being unjust. She argued that it was unjust because it left many people without control of their lives and subject to the whims of others. Wollstonecraft thought that we needed a revolution against this. When the French Revolution occurred, she supported it and headed over to France to see a new society be built around the values of liberty and rationality. This was an incredibly brave thing to do and she soon found herself caught up in the violence and bloodshed that followed the revolution, known as The Terror. Wollstonecraft was more than someone who wrote about revolution, she lived her principles. 

Falcons and education

Wollstonecraft wrote against the society based on tradition and sentiment that Burke defended. She wanted to change society into something that was better for women and for children, the people who were subjected to the power of others. This mirrors the argument that Zaira has with Amalia, when Zaira argues that she as a Falcon shouldn’t be subjected to power of the Falconers and Amalia defends the tradition of her society.

Wollstonecraft had many ideas about how to improve society to aid the relations between men and women (or those with the power over reason and those with the power over feeling). She believed the solution lay in better education. Wollstonecraft was an educator herself and set up a school in Stoke Newington (now a part of London). This controversial statue “for” Mary Wollstonecraft stands near where her school was.

The Falcons in The Tethered Mage are certainly educated - one of them is a scientist - however we don’t know if their education extends to aspects not related to being a Falcon. This is akin to how women in Wollstonecraft’s time where only taught needle work and dancing, all that they needed to find a husband - i.e. their role in society.

Perhaps more education, for both Falcons and Falconers would change the society of The Tethered Mage, just as Wollstonecraft thought that reforming education of girls and boys would change our society, by helping everyone escape from the traditions that Burke defended and Wollstonecraft believed were so damaging. Maybe it would one day lead to a world where Falcons don’t need to be controlled by jesses, as Falconers can appeal to their reason.

Wollstonecraft exposed the problem with fundamentally unequal relationships in society. Any society where one group holds power over another group, or where one group claims the power of reason and the other is left only with the fiery tempers of emotion. We can see this dynamic in our history and in novels that show a world with equality between the genders, which still have big divides in society. 

I want to say thank you to David Runciman for his lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft in the podcast Talking: Politics History of Ideas, which describes her life, philosophy and writing that I drew on heavily for this article.

Tupac, Days of Hate, Thomas Hobbes and the power of The Sovereign

You might think that the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the rapper Tupac Shakur have very little in common, but there are some striking similarities. They both had a gift for using language and the medium of their time to illuminate the conflicts that defined the societies they lived in. They also explored similar topics, albeit centuries apart. 

Tupac’s music helped me understand a crucial concept in Hobbes’s writing. In 2002 Tupac posthumously released a song called Never Be Peace in which he says: “And I know there never be peace/That's why I keep my pistol when I walk the streets/Cause there can never be peace.” When I first heard this song, stoned out of my mind in an Amsterdam coffee shop, I thought “peace” is an odd word to use. Peace, the absence of war, is something that exists between nations. Tupac was describing a conflict between individuals in the lawless American slums where he lived. 

What Tupac meant by peace is living in a place that is harmonious, a place where you don’t have to fear that the next person you meet is likely to shoot you, a place where you can pursue activities other than those focused on your personal survival. Tupac didn’t live in such a society, which is why he had to carry his pistol with him.

What is peace?

This idea of peace has little to do with conflicts between nations. During Tupac’s life no nation was realistically threatening to land troops on American shores. Hobbes also referred to peace in his writing. He wasn’t thinking of the American slums that Tupac wrote about, but he would have understood that absence of peace meant living under the constant threat of violence from other people.

The peace that Tupac says will never be possible is crucial to understanding Hobbes’s writing. Its absence is what Hobbes describes as humanity's natural state; what he called the “ceaseless war of all against all”. I don’t know if Tupac read Hobbes - he was certainly smarter than his public image would have us believe - but if he did, Tupac would have understood Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a war of all against all. It’s what he describes in his music.

Hobbes said that life in the state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short”. A life that is nasty, brutish and short is what Tupac describes in Never Be Peace. The end of the song mentions various violent acts that Tupac has witnessed, including children being thrown off buildings.

Life in a sci-fi dystopia

When Hobbes wrote that the state of nature was: “nasty, brutish, and short,” as well as describing the life that Tupac wrote about, he could have been describing life in almost all sci-fi dystopias. Life in Oceania in 1984, or life outside the capital in The Hunger Games, or life in The Road, or life in Mad Max may not be described as living in a state of nature (some of these societies have advanced technology), but they do show a brutalised existence, closer to the constant violence that Tupac rapped about.

These novels and films are filled with characters who are mistreated, brutalised or killed by people who have power over them. Winston Smith in 1984 is subjected to his worst nightmare in Room 101. In Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is tortured to death by Jack Linkt (Michael Palin). In Mad Max every second is a constant fight against bandits looking to murder or enslave anyone weaker than them.

Cheese-Rolling and civil war

Hobbes would have recognised something in these violent societies. He lived through the English Civil War and the 30 Years War, two incredibly violent conflicts where families, communities and countries were divided by seemingly irreconcilable disagreements over religion and government.

This very bloody period in European history informed Hobbes’s writing. David Runciman, Cambridge University politics professor, said that Hobbes thought of people as constantly in motion through life trying to stay alive in a dangerous world. Runciman has greatly studied Hobbes and much of my understanding of Hobbes comes from this accessible podcast lecture Runciman recorded.

Runciman employees the metaphor of the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake to explain how Hobbes saw human life: a chaotic scramble down a steep slope, with people bumping into each other, falling down, scrambling to get back up, colliding again. We are all trying to get what we want, but due to the chaos that is life other people get in our way. This led Hobbes to the conclusion that life would be better if we collided less.

Defining peace

Hobbes said that we should seek peace, by which he meant limiting the number of collisions. I don’t know if Tupac would have thought of life as a race down a steep slope after a wheel of cheese, but he probably would have agreed that life would be better if we collided less. Maybe then he wouldn't need his pistol and we could be closer to the peace that Tupac thought was impossible for people like him.

To create peace we need an agreed definition of what peace is and someone or something that enforces this definition. This enforcement is necessary, according to Hobbes, so that we don’t resort to the violent state of nature. Your definition of peace is likely to be different to mine, so we’ll need some means of deciding on a collective vision of peace before it is enforced.

To achieve this Hobbes said that we all hand over our ability to decide on a definition of peace to one entity (a group or a person) that has the power to decide on what peace is and then to force everyone to conform to that definition. This person is the Sovereign. The Sovereign decides on what peace is, and then and forces us all to accept it. If we disagree with the Sovereign’s definition, then they use their power over everyone else to make them pull us into line.

Days of Hate

Hobbes would have also understood the nasty, brutish and short lives of the protagonists of Aleš Kot, Danijel Žeželj and Jordie Bellaire’s graphic novel Days of Hate. The novel follows characters fighting a guerrilla war against a tyrannical President in a future America riven by civil war. Violence, brutality and early deaths are common occurrences in this dark and unforgiving world.

In Days of Hate, America has become so divided between its blue and red tribes that violence is the only solution. The fight in the novel, shown through bombings and assassinations, is violent and destructive. It tears families apart and ruins lives. Hobbes would have understood this. He lived through the English Civil War and the 30 Years War.

Much of the novel takes place during the interrogation of Huian Xing who has been arrested for her role in the underground resistance. In Days of Hate the Sovereign, an unnamed tyrannical right-wing president beloved by white supremacists, has decided on what peace for this society is and Xing has rejected this. She is attempting to break away from this state, whose definition of peace is something she cannot live with. Agent Peter Freeman, the interrogator, is trying to pull her back into line.

Days of Hate is not an easy read because the process of being pulled back into line by society is painful, violent and cruel. It hurts not only the person attempting to break with the Sovereign's definition of peace, but their friends and family as well. The state has no regard for the people being pulled into line or the people around them. It simply enforces the Sovereign’s definition of peace.

Limiting the spread of politics

The state is like the Leviathan, the metaphor that Hobbes uses, a Biblical sea monster, reaching out with tentacles to roughly grab anyone who is diverting from the Sovereign's definition of peace. Hobbes thought the state, or the Leviathan, functioned better if the Sovereign was one person, although he said it could be a Parliament or a group of people. Hobbes was writing during the English Civil War and, to a degree, he was hedging his bets on whether the Sovereign could be a king or a parliament.

Hobbes believed we, everyone who is not the Sovereign, didn’t have a choice in who or what the Sovereign was. If the Sovereign can create their definition of peace then they have absolute power and no obligation to us, their subjects. Days of Hate show how dangerous a proposition this is when the Sovereign is a tyrannical white supremacist.

This system for organising the state seems far from ideal and there are many criticisms of it. The point, for Hobbes, was to limit the spread of politics. The Sovereign makes the decision about anything they want, but they cannot make a decision about everything. This means that for The Sovereign’s subjects, they are free to live most aspects of their lives as they wish. They have the Sovereign making sure that peace isn’t violated, but beyond that they are free, as politics has been safely limited to the domain of the Sovereign.

The appeal of Hobbes’s Sovereign

Writing during the English Civil War and the 30 Years War, I can see how this would be appealing. This was a time when conflict over religion and government had consumed all aspects of life and ultimately led to bloody fighting. Hobbes wanted to limit the spread of politics, as anything that politics touched in his life became a violent contest.

We might think this sounds appealing. I’m sure that many people think that politics has spread too far and touches too many aspects of our lives. Even the brands we buy are seen as indicative of our politics. Would it be good if the Sovereign made the difficult decisions over some aspects of our lives and the rest was free of politics? 

Days of Hate shows the problem with this. The Sovereign in the novel has not limited the spread of politics to all aspects of some subject’s lives, crucially the subjects who don’t support him. The Sovereign has chosen to extend politics (or their decision-making power) to aspects of people’s identity that the Sovereign and his supporters find objectionable. Thus, politics is not limited for these people.

The definition of peace and identity

If you are (to use some examples of things that have been politicised in Days of Hate) from an immigrant family, Asian, or a member of the LGBTQ+ community, as Xing is in the novel, this touches every aspect of your life. So, when the Sovereign decides to make these things political, politics (and violent conflict) spread through her entire life. You cannot be LGBTQ+ or Asian or any number of other identities without it being political. Not in the USA of Days of Hate - or in the USA of our world.

The Sovereign is limiting the spread of politics for some people, but for others it’s making every aspect of their lives political. When the Sovereign decides to use his or its power against you and members of your community then it’s not a matter of whether you accept their definition of peace or not. You cannot accept their definition of peace when this peace excludes you.

The limiting power of the Sovereign has only ever been for some people and not all people. This is what Days of Hate shows. In this novel many characters cannot accept the definition of peace because it subjects them to violent repression because of their identity. Days of Hate is a work of fiction, but it’s core lesson - that the Sovereign’s power to limit the spread of politics and create a form of peace is only desirable for people who are like the Sovereign - is an important lesson for our world.

The City We Became turns liberal New York into a weapon against interdimensional evil

A new series of novels from N.K. Jemisin comes with a lot of anticipation. Her last trilogy, the Broken Earth series, was the first series to win the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel for all three volumes. Jemisin was also the first African American to win the Hugo Award for best novel for The Fifth Season in 2016.

There was a lot of excitement building up to the release of The City We Became, the first novel in her new Great Cities series. When appraising the novel, I tried to put aside the enthusiasm for new writing from a great author and focus on the content of this new book itself.

What I found was that this book is an engaging read, the plot is tense and the novel is populated by complex characters with rich personal histories. However, what is most interesting about this book is how it uses aspects of the fantasy genre to illuminate the politics of our world.

Self-aware cities

The City We Became is set in contemporary New York in a world like ours, but with one crucial difference: when cities reach a certain size and vibrancy, they become self-aware entities. This has happened throughout human history, to cities from Alexandra to Hong Kong, and now New York is on the verge of achieving sentience.

However, at the moment of birth there is interference by a malevolent, oddly tentacled force from another dimension. Instead of the whole city awakening to sentience, New York’s consciousness is split between its five boroughs each with their own very different personalities.

Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels sit somewhere on the border between far future science fiction and epic fantasy, but this novel fits well into the sub-genre of urban fantasy, which shows Jemisin’s range as a writer. Like a lot of urban fantasy, it weaves history and culture together to form a fantastical mythos for the novel’s urban setting. In The City We Became, Jemisin uses the history and culture of New York to make an argument about contemporary politics.

American culture war

The culture war that has gripped America is weaved into the story of the characters and the fantasy plot. The strange tentacles from another dimension take control of the political enemies of the protagonists to destroy them.

A group of alt-right provocateur artists attempt to get the Bronx Art Centre, run by the avatar of the newly created self-aware Bronx borough, shut down. The avatar of sentient Staten Island is a xenophobe and her xenophobia is inherited from her over protective and bigoted cop father. This xenophobia is used by the interdimensional tentacled enemy to divide her from the other, non-white, avatars of New York.

Lovecraft and racism

The book draws on many horror and urban fantasy references, specifically HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft lived in New York, and his fear of the racial diversity he encountered there caused him to have a mental breakdown. This led to him imagining a New England that is filled with strange cults and monstrous tentacled interdimensional beings, which crop up in his writing.

Lovecraft’s writing - which has had a wide influence on the horror, fantasy and sci-fi genres, from Stephen King to the Alex Garland film Annihilation - is extraordinarily racist. Jemisin addresses this by making the Lovecraftian horrors in her novel the racist enemies (from this dimension and others) of the novel’s protagonists: a diverse group of New Yorkers who are avatars of the five boroughs. This subverts the racism of Lovecraft's writing.

This is a similar approach to another recent SSF story inspired by Lovecraft: the HBO adaptation of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, which tells the story of a group of African Americans during the Civil Rights period having to deal with ancient evil cults, other dimensional beings and racist cops.

Fantasy story. Contemporary politics

The book marries a fantasy story about the avatars of each of the boroughs coming together to fight the mysterious tentacled interdimensional monster that is trying to destroy New York, with a story rooted in contemporary American politics. This is via the novel’s protagonists, the characters who suddenly become the avatars of the boroughs, and their connections to politics.

The avatar of Brooklyn was a rapper with politically charged lyrics who now sits on the city council and is engaged in the fight against gentrification. The avatar of the Bronx is an artist with native American heritage, who runs a community arts centre. The avatar of Queens is a recent immigrant from India, whereas the avatar of Staten Island is the daughter of a cop.

The novel doesn’t use these characters to directly comment on contemporary big P politics, in a way that would date obviously. Donald Trump or Make America Great Again are not mentioned. Instead, the novel dives into small P political issues that are an inescapable part of peoples’ lives; issues such as police brutality and gentrification.

Gentrification is the weapon of the enemy

Setting part of the novel in the liberal dominated New York arts scene allies the characters who are artists with the protagonists of the novel and in opposition to the otherworldly invaders. This changes familiar aspects of the politics of our world into aspects of the battle for the soul of New York.

Art centres are safe spaces for the heroes. Gentrification is the weapon of the enemy as it closes community art centres. The same goes for spaces that embrace diversity, such as those that are tolerant of immigrants, POC and queer people. The space dominated by cops and conservatives are allied with the other worldly enemy. The cultural conflict over space in New York becomes part of the drama of the novel.

Liberal New York will save us

This aligning of the inclusive, diverse aspects of New York with the protagonists fighting to save the city from destruction is a defence of the liberal aspects of New York. A city of over eight million people, with all the diversity of wealth, race, power and culture that New York has, cannot stand for a single aspect of politics. The politics of the Bronx art centre are different to that of Wall Street and both are different to that of cops living in Staten Island suburbia. However, the abstracted world of the novel, advances the idea of New York as a liberal, inclusive place as something that is inherent to its character and will save it from destruction.

This novel is a defence of the liberal aspects of New York. The arts scenes, the tolerance of immigration and diversity, the inclusivity, the city that welcomes all people. This novel shows the aspects of New York that make it great and turns them into a weapon in an interdimensional war against an ancient city-killing evil.

This equating New York with the protagonists in a fantasy struggle tells a story that says New York is something inherently good. This is in opposition to the narrative that New York is a place filled with self-satisfied liberals who are out of touch with the rest of America. The things that make New York different from the rest of the America, the diversity, the tolerance, are not some elitist fad, they are what will save us from destruction.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis shows that collective action is needed to tackle a pandemic

We can see how society collectively imagines pandemics by how they are represented in fiction. In many novels, pandemics are presented as the end of the world. In Stephen King’s The Stand a deadly disease called Captain Trips wipes out almost everyone and causes the collapse of civilisation. The survivors band together to form two communities, who engage in a good vs evil struggle for survival.

In I Am Legend, written by Richard Matheson, only one human survives, patrolling an empty world. In M R Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts a mutation in the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis causes it to take over humans and turn them into mindless “hungries” who bite other people to spread the fungus. London has been abandoned and a few survivors cling together in an authoritarian community called Beacon.

Many of these stories show the complete collapse of society because of some freak of nature or accident of science. In many stories, a few individuals survive and must band together to prevent the end of humanity. These people are now free of the rules and structures that govern our society.

Ayn Rand’s hellscape

In theory the post-outbreak world should be a libertarian paradise: a world where governments are gone and people are free to seize the limitless potential of the individual unconstrained by social pressures or commitments to other people. However, the stories about the post-outbreak world more often show a violent hellscape where the only thing that is unconstrained is people’s capacity for violence. It’s more Thomas Hobbes than Ayn Rand. 

Lots of these stories (especially zombie stories) show a world where humans are worse than the disease. Individuals liberated from the constraints of society are free to indulge in the worst aspects of human nature.

This isn’t a fictional apocalypse

The pandemic we are currently living through is nothing like this. It’s not the apocalypse of the Girl With All The Gifts or The Stand. In the words of writer Laurie Penny “This is not the apocalypse you were looking for”.

The closest representation in fiction I have found to what we are currently living through is The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Despite the dramatic title, it’s not about the end of the world but about a virus outbreak in near future Oxford.

The plot has two main threads. The one which concerns us, follows a mysterious disease outbreak in Oxford that starts at the University and then spreads through the population. The characters in this are the doctors, healthcare workers, University administrators and members of the public who are all caught up in the response to the outbreak.

What The Doomsday Book got right

The book was published in 1992 (and is set in 2054) and manages to predict a lot about the present. Oxford is put under quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus. The description of the town being locked-down over Christmas is uncannily accurate to what we just went through in Britain. One Oxford college administrator is perpetually worried about toilet paper supplies. Mask wearing is mandated in public. There are worries about shortages of EPG (Emergency Protective Gear).

There are other analogies to the present. Misinformation spreads about the virus originating in one of the Oxford labs. Immigration and the EC (European Community) are blamed for the spread of the virus. People try and live their lives as best as they can and enjoy Christmas as much as possible, given the circumstances.

The novel mainly follows doctors and college staff as they tackle the disease outbreak. It dramatises them finding spare beds for patients, conducting research into the virus, allocating the scarce resources of food and toilet paper. The protagonists are a motley crew thrown together by circumstances, including a group of American church bell ringers, whose tour of the UK has been delayed by the Oxford lockdown, and a teenaged boy visiting his great aunt at the University for Christmas.

The Pandemic in The Doomsday Book

Willis finds humour, tension and warmth in the small human moments of fighting a disease. The characters are under the pressure of competing demands, lack of resources, not enough sleep and the spread of the virus. It’s a slow quiet struggle where the biggest enemy is depression and the not the sudden collapse of civilisation.

The world of The Doomsday Book has an event called The Pandemic in its past. Little is said about it, but we are told that a deadly disease ravaged the world and it casts a long shadow in the minds of the protagonists. This disease killed huge numbers of Americans because they refused to have their freedom curtailed in any way, even to protect lives during a pandemic.

Toxic individualism

The Doomsday Book subtly makes the point that a free individual, unconstrained by the state or social pressures, is a threat to safety during a pandemic. This echoes the point made by Carolina Miranda in a recent LA Times comment piece about how American individualism is toxic and lethal during the Covid-19 pandemic.

American-style individualism is toxic during a pandemic, whereas European-style collectivism may just save us. In both the Doomsday book and our world, deference to authority and love of the NHS have helped us put measures in place to protect us during the pandemic. Whereas America’s emphasis on the free individual, unconstrained by society, has led to a tragic and unnecessary amount of death.

People working together is what will save us

The Doomsday Book doesn’t focus on brave heroic individuals fighting to save humanity in the ruins of society, it focuses on the people in society who protect us from threats to the human race: doctors, nurses, public sector administrators and ordinary people pitching in to do their part.

These people are part of the state and our existing social structures. The free individual, liberated from all state control, isn’t part of the solution. Given the choice between Mad Max and the doctors and college staff of The Doomsday Book, I know who I would rely on to save humanity.

What the Doomsday book gets right is that saving the world during a pandemic is more about administration than individual heroics. It’s worth remembering what will save us from the Covid-19 Pandemic is people working together within a social structure, not people working alone.

The Psychology of Time Travel reveals the limits of power

It might seem odd to compare a fictional elderly woman time traveler to former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, but that is exactly the person I thought of whilst reading Kate Mascarenhas’s novel The Psychology of Time Travel. 

Mascarenhas’s novel is a character driven science fiction story about the effect that time travel has a on a person’s mind. On another level it's about the effect that power has on people. Specifically, the power of knowing the future.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

The novel focuses on four women who invent time travel in the 1960s. Three of them go onto found a body called The Conclave, which regulates the use of time travel. The Conclave’s position beyond the limits of linear time, means it’s beyond the reach of any government or corporation. One of the three scientists, named Margaret, becomes the leader of the Conclave and thus has absolute dominion over the world of time travel.

The Psychology of Time Travel’s exploration of what absolute power does to a person reminded me of David Runciman’s book Where Power Stops: The Making and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers, which is a study of the limits of power in modern democracy. Runciman’s book explores the personality of political leaders and how this impacted their time leading their country. His argument is that the personality of the politician reveals the limits of what that kind of person can do with political power.

Power corrupts but power also reveals

Runciman based his argument on one of the greatest political biographies of all time, Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. This famously detailed biography (Caro has spent more time writing his book than Johnson himself was alive) has a simple premise at its core: power corrupts but power also reveals. Caro argues that the more power someone has the more we see who they are.

Caro claims that we saw the real LBJ when he got to be President. Johnson was corrupt, a vote cheat, a bully and various other nasty things, but when he became the president the office’s power revealed his caring side as he passed the Civil Rights legislation that his predecessor, John F Kennedy, was unable to pass.

Runciman's book argues the opposite: that power doesn't show the true nature of the politician, the politician shows the true nature of power, as it reveals what’s possible to achieve with that politician’s personality. Runciman states that the presidency didn’t show us something about LBJ, LBJ shows us something about the presidency.

Runciman on LBJ

Runciman argues that Johnson’s huge liberal accomplishments (not just Civil Rights legislation but also a programme of social reforms called The Great Society aimed at elimination of poverty and racial injustice) were not him revealing his true, caring self when he got to the Oval Office, it was an aspect of the person he always was.

Johnson was someone who did whatever it took to win and passing Civil Rights legislation and trying to eliminate poverty was how he won once he was president. It was how he beat his political opponents, but mainly it was how he beat the ghost of JFK.

Johnson had a lingering concern that he wasn’t worthy of being president and that he had ended up in the role because of unfortunate circumstances. Johnson beat these by passing the reforms that Kennedy was unable to get through Congress. Runciman writes that LBJ's caring side was second to getting power, which was his primary motivator through his whole life.

The personality of a time traveler

Runciman’s ideas apply to Mascarenhas’s novel. Margaret becomes supreme leader of The Conclave after it is founded. Throughout the novel we see how power affects her psychologically. She becomes more authoritarian and more callus. She sets up harsh hazing rituals to condition new time travelers to be ambivalent about death. Eventually she forces other members of The Conclave to play a version of Russian Roulette involving time traveling bullets.

It could be argued that the power that Margaret gains as leader of The Conclave reveals her personality. However, I think that Runciman’s ideas are more accurate. Margaret’s bullying and megalomania were present in her from the start. This is shown early on in the novel when Margaret refuses to let one of her colleagues, Bea, with whom she discovered time travel, into The Conclave because Bea’s mental health problems embarrasses Margaret during a TV interview.

The limits of Margaret’s power

Margaret’s leadership of The Conclave shows the limits of the power of that office. Her power is great, she knows when her subordinates will die and how, but it is limited. She cannot prevent her own death. She cannot change the past or the future, even if she knows what will happen.

Despite Margaret’s authoritarianism and knowledge of the future, she is unable to use the power of her office to stop people betraying her, which ultimately leads to her death. This shows the limits of power for a leader of The Conclave with Margaret’s authoritarian psychology.

The limits of power in science fiction

The novel The Psychology of Time Travel, and especially the character of Margaret, show the argument that Runciman makes in his book on the limits of power. It is not that a leader’s personality is revealed when they achieve high office, their personality can be seen from the start of their career as can be seen from the character of Margaret in chapter one of Mascarenhas’s novel. The nature of a leader does show us something about power and what can be achieved with that personality.

Fortunately, no politician is as powerful as Margaret; being beyond the reach of all other authority and with knowledge of the future. This means to explore the dynamics of Runciman’s ideas about the limits of power for such a leader, we need to turn to works of fiction.

The Trouble with Peace dramatises the economic and political changes that made our modern world

I wonder if I am the only person who, whilst reading Joe Abercrombie’s new epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace, was reminded of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s seminal work on economic development.

The novel is about a society poised on the edge of the transformation into the type of modern industrial society that we would recognise. Factories are springing up, whilst canals are being dug. Farm labourers are going to work in mills, whilst cities are growing. All of which reminded me of Acemoglu and Robinson’s study of the history of this process in our world.

A new world of factories and mines

The Trouble With Peace is the second book in Abercrombie’s The Age of Madness Trilogy, which takes place in his First Law world that has been established in a previous trilogy and standalone books. The First Law is not a Medieval-eques fantasy setting like Middle Earth or Westeros. The Trouble With Peace is set in a world where kings don’t have absolute power and economic rivalries between nations are becoming more important than military ones. There are warrior kings, like Stour Nightfall, King of the Northmen, but this is no longer their world. Their power is waning, whilst the prestige of industrialists and inventors is growing.

The new world that is being born values skills with finance and commerce, rather than swords. Entrepreneurs like the ambitious Lady Savine dan Glokta are becoming more influential and powerful aristocrats are seeking business partnerships with industrialists and inventors to enhance their prestige, whereas in the past this prestige would have been won on the battlefield. Poor people are pressed into factory and mine work, rather than fieldwork.

The Trouble With Peace is mainly set in The Union, a monarchy that is built on alliances between nobles and regional governors. The Union is beginning to go through the industrial revolution and some of the most powerful writing in The Trouble With Peace is the description of the squalor and danger that the new industrial workers have to live in. Abercrombie vividly renders the callousness of industrialists and how cheap human life is to them.

Economic development as a source of dramatic conflict

Acemoglu and Robinson write about this transformation and the type of political institutions needed for it to be a success. It is the fight over the control of these institutions that is the conflict in Abercrombie’s novel.

The core of Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument is that government is needed to create healthy economic development through making markets inclusive, which is done via education, training, providing infrastructure and helping people start business. Acemoglu and Robinson refer to “inclusive institutions” (rule of law, independent courts, banking and finance systems, property rights, etc.) as the bedrock needed for a prosperous country.

This may sound like a poor source of conflict for an epic fantasy novel, but many times throughout history a revolution has been necessary to create inclusive institutions. The American Revolution is a good example of this. Revolutions are a great source of conflict for a novel and the main plot of The Trouble With Peace is such a revolution.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Liberal bourgeoisie revolution

The Trouble with Peace explores a similar process. King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union has centralised power in his Closed Council and we can see the beginnings of a modern form of government with ministers appointed to key roles such as Arch Lector. At the same time nobles in the larger Open Council, which can be seen as a proto-parliament, are pushing for more authority, which is the beginning of a pluralistic form of government.

The main plot of the novel follows a rebellion against Union King Orso by Leo dan Brock, aka the Young Lion, a regional governor and a popular soldier. He is supported by his entrepreneur wife, Lady Savine dan Glokta and members of the Open Council vying for more influence. Leo’s rebellion can be seen as a liberal bourgeoisie revolution, similar to the wave of revolutions that spread through Europe in 1848.

These liberal uprisings (I mean liberal in the John Locke sense of the word, not the Joe Biden sense) challenged the absolute authority of monarchs and sought to create more inclusive governments based on modern ideas of rights and liberty. Or at least they sought inclusiveness, rights and liberty for middle class industrialists. Although many of these revolutions ultimately failed and led to a conservative authoritarian backlash, they were a step towards creating more inclusive institutions and thus part of the journey towards our modern form of government.

The rise of the middle class

The rise of the middle classes, merchants and industrialists, is crucial to the story of the liberal bourgeoisie revolutions and to The Trouble with Peace. Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail argue that the emergence of the merchant class is key to the move towards inclusive political institutions in England in the 17th Century.

The merchant class supported parliament in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution as it was in their interest to get a more pluralistic society that would represent their views. Again, this is shown in the Trouble With Peace through rising middle class industrialists such as Lady Savine supporting The Young Lion’s rebellion. We would expect that if Leo becomes king, then he would be beholden to the Open Council who made him king and will have to share more of his power with them, creating a more pluralistic society.

Proletariat uprising

Pluralistic reforms in the 17th century and 18th century England created greater freedom for the middle-classes and allowed the industrial revolution to happen, but this economic freedom came at the expense of the working classes who were moved from fields into factories and had to endure terrible working conditions. The “Dark Satanic Mills” that John Milton mentioned in his hymn Jerusalem.

This led to strikes, calls for better conditions, more rights for working people and working class led movements such as the Chartists and events such as the Peterloo Massacre. Working class rebellion is a constant presence in Abercrombie’s novel. Groups such as the Breakers and Burners disrupt production and agitate for better conditions for the proletariat or a revolution against the bourgeoisie mill owners. They are a clear parallel of the Luddites from English political history.

As a Marxist, and a lefty, I feel sympathy for the Breakers and Burners who are forced to endure horrendous working conditions and driven to drastic action to improve their lives. The Marxist theorist in me says that the Breakers and Burners need Leo dan Brock’s bourgeoisie rebellion to first overthrow the upper classes and spread power to the bourgeoisie before a proletariat uprising can seize the means of production. The historian in me says that working class agitation, from the Chartists to Peterloo, were important steps towards further reforms such as the Great Reform act of 1832 that led to more inclusive institutions and paved the way for the eventual enfranchisement of all people in the 20th century.

Grimdark fantasy

As you can tell, a fantasy novel with a lot of political and economic history analogies is something that I can really get into. There are a lot of other positive things about The Trouble With Peace. The story of the rebellion is tense and I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out how it ended. There are a lot of complex, well developed characters that bring the story to life.

Often as a reader, you think that you fully understand a character and then they will do something that surprises you, like Arch Lector Glokta, the head torturer for King Orso being surprisingly nice to his subordinate Vic when he is forced to leave his office. There are also the surprise switches of allegiance, twists and turns in the course of the rebellion that keep the reader engaged throughout the novel.

Abercrombie is known as the master of “grimdark”, a subgenre of fantasy, and this novel doesn't disappoint on that front. It is violent and bloody, although never with a sadomasochistic glee at the suffering of the characters. In Abercrombie’s writing, the suffering is a reflection of how violent society was in the Early Modern period. This novel also dismisses any romantic notion of what a war fought with pike and cannon was like.

No clearly defined right or wrong

There are also no clearly defined right or wrong in The Trouble With Peace or good guys and bad guys. I felt sympathy for Orso, who has unexpectedly found himself king and is trying to deal with a country that is changing rapidly, but before he can get his feet under the table he has to deal with his nobles rebelling. However, I also felt sympathy for The Young Lion, a brave soldier who might usher in the next phase of social reform to make society fairer and more equal (eventually).

This lack of good guys and bad guys also increased the tension. No one is fated to win from the start, so the rebellion could succeed or fail. In our status of omniscient reader, we are not given any more clues to the direction of future events than the unlikely protagonist themselves.

More than a rebellion

What I found most interesting about The Trouble with Peace is how it dramatises economic and political conflict through human conflict. A rebellion is about more than kings and nobles, it is a conflict between different ways of organising the world. What I liked most about this novel is how Abercrombie effectively uses an epic fantasy story to dramatise the economic and political changes that made our modern world. The same changes that Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.

The humans are the most alien characters in Under the Pendulum Sun

Under the Pendulum Sun is a novel by Jeannette Ng that achieved notoriety last year when it won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the acceptance speech that Ng gave exposed Campbell’s past as a fascist and led to the award being renamed as the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

The novel itself is an interesting and unusual read. It’s set in the Victorian era and is about a woman who goes in search of her missionary brother who has disappeared after traveling to Arcadia, the land of the fairies, to convert the fay to Christianity. It makes perfect sense that if the fay lands were discovered in the 19th century, then the Victorians would try to convert them.

The novel feels very Victorian. Not just in its setting, but in its characters’ outlook. Siblings Catherine and Leon Helstone are driven by values and an outlook on the world that appears very different to ours. I haven’t read many Victorian novels, but to my untrained eye this novel’s characters are believably Victorian.

Victorian characters

The characters’ Victorian-ness feels strange to us as 21st-century readers. The siblings are devout Christians, which is unusual today but not unheard of. However, there is an earnestness to their faith that seems very uncontemporary. The characters spend a lot of time discussing the Bible, its verses and their meaning, as well as the nature of God and the question of whether the fay have souls. Being so outspoken about faith seems unusual to me, as I was raised in a world where religion is a private matter.

In some ways, the deep religiousness of the characters is more unusual than the setting of Arcadia. As an avid sci-fi and fantasy reader I am used to novels populated by strange lands and bizarre creatures, but not to such religious fervor. By contrast, the fay in Ng’s novel seem more like us. They are motivated by a desire to express their individuality. They desire entertainment and immediate self-gratification and don’t care for larger belief structures.

This seems more like the people of today then the pious and self-sacrificing missionaries. As characters in a fantasy novel, the humans seem more like an alien or fantasy creatures, from a very religious society, than the non-human characters in Ng’s book

Spoilers ahead

The next section of this article drops a spoiler, so if you haven’t read the book and you want to approach it unspoiled then skip ahead. If you haven’t read the book, and I strongly recommend you read it, it’s better not knowing the spoiler I am about to drop … last warning … okay. 

Siblings Catherine and Leon also feel very different from people we know in our world because they engage in quite a lot of incest. There are many reasons for this in the book, but one is that they are isolated as people. There are very few characters in the novel and there is little mention of friends or companions for the siblings. Catherine and Leon have been isolated from everyone else and thus have developed sexual desires for each other out of lack of intimate connections to other humans. 

This sense of them being isolated pervades the novel. They are alone in a strange land and living in a large, almost empty building. This seems remote and difficult for us to understand. In today’s hyperconnected world, where people can be reached so easily via Zoom or Whatsapp (even during a global pandemic that is limiting human contact). It is strange that people could become so isolated that they would feel like they were the only people in the world. 

Seeing the world from another point of view

Under the Pendulum Sun invites us to see the world of Arcadia through the eyes of humans, primarily Catherine as the novel is written in the first person from her point of view. However as a protagonist, Catherine, is alien to us as she has different values and a different perception of the world.

The book is well written and encourages us to empathize with Catherine, despite her being different to us. I find it hard to understand what would motivate someone to become a missionary to a strange land, yet alone one as bizarre as Arcadia, but Ng’s writing makes the reader completely believe in Catherine and her journey.

I have written before about the power of science fiction and fantasy to make us see the world through the eyes of characters who are very different to us. What is different about Under the Pendulum Sun is that the strange characters whose different perspectives we are seeing the world through are not aliens, but are humans.

Good writing is political

This is why good writing is political as it invites us to spend a few hours walking in the shoes of someone else. This is a political act as it opens our mind to the idea that other people’s views and experiences that are different to ours, maybe even unimaginable, are valid.

We can use fiction to break from our perspectives. This is what Under the Pendulum Sun does so well: it lets us understand the lives of people who are different to us and opens our minds to new perspectives, which is why it is essential reading.

NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels show how dangerous it is to blame minorities for a climate disaster

If you haven’t read NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky) then stop what you’re doing right now and read them. They’re amazing. The three books are a powerful story, of several generations, struggling to survive in a hostile world where nature and society are brutally oppressive. 

The three novels take place on The Stillness, a world with a single giant content that is geologically unstable. There are frequent major volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, poisonous gases are suddenly released from the ground and ash falls from the sky, making it difficult to raise crops and animals. The people of The Stillness live in constant fear that the next shake of the ground could be the end of civilization.

In such a dangerous world, the human societies that form are brutal and oppressive. Although they offer some structures that provide protection from the environment, they are controlling, authoritarian and exploitative. Especially if you belong to a certain minority group.

A minority is blamed for the world’s problems

The Stillness is blighted by natural disasters, however, the geological instability that is the source of so much suffering was created by humans. The third of Jemisin’s trilogy, The Stone Sky, describes (mild spoiler coming up) how an ancient civilization’s greed for power and a failed experiment destabilised the whole world.

Despite this, the people blamed for the problems are not the people who caused them. The anger of the people of the Stillness is focused on a group of people called Orogenes. Orogenes are people born with the power to move the earth and thus have the ability to create (or prevent) the natural disasters that threaten the people of the Stillness.

Orogenes are treated awfully by the civilizations of the Stillness. They have no rights. They are controlled by an organisation called the Fulcrum who dictates every aspect of their lives. Their children are taken away from them. They are hated, feared and often killed by non-Orogenes because of who they are.

A prescient warning about our future

Many of the point-of-view characters in Jemisin’s novels are Orogenes and her powerful prose makes vivid the pain they are forced to go through by a society that hates and fears them. These books are an emotionally charged warning about what can happen when all of society blames a group of people for an environmental disaster.

The Orogenes aren’t responsible for the bleak existence the people of The Stillness have to endure: toiling in a hostile environment, constantly threatened by natural disasters. However, they are blamed for it.

I am worried that Jemisin’s novels are a prescient warning about our future. As we approach a climate disaster, and the effects of climate change become more widely felt, who will be blamed for the suffering this will cause? Will it be the greedy corporations? The businesspeople who run them? The politicians who have failed to act despite years of warnings? Or will we blame the victims of a climate catastrophe? The people we always blamed for social problems: poor people, people of colour and migrants.

The rise of Ecofascism

This is already happening. As the climate worsens and knowledge of how bleak our future could be spreads, people are becoming frightened. We are seeing on the news stories about how large numbers of people are displaced by climate change. For example, the stories about a migrant caravan heading to towards the USA during the 2018 mid-term elections.

The effects of the climate emergency are being more keenly felt in poorer countries and this will inevitably cause migration. Many people in wealthier countries are concerned that there isn’t enough to go around if we let these victims of climate disasters in. This fear of climate migration is fueling the far-right, and specific climate-related migration anxieties have led to the rise of “Ecofascism”.

Biran Khan has written in detail about how our fears about a climate disaster and the stories we tell about the environment are driving people towards Ecofascism. In the above article for Gizmodo, he interviewed Betsy Hartmann, a professor emeritus at Hampshire College who studies the connections between white nationalism and environmentalism. Hartman summed up the problems with the stories we tell about migration and climate change when she said: “Using this highly militarized and stereotyped Malthusian discourse about poor people of color is dangerous and counterproductive.”

I am worried that our narratives about a climate disaster, about how people could be displaced by the impacts of climate change and the strain this will place on our societies are fueling Ecofascism. This could lead to a very dark place.

A minority is blamed for our world’s problems

Are we heading towards a world like The Stillness? A world where the environment has turned against us and humans eke out a perilous, pitiless existence oppressed by hostile natural forces and tyrannical governments? A world where we blame a small group of easily recognisable people for all the problems of the world? A world where we hate a minority, seek to control them and frequently subject them to violence because of our fear about the dangers for the world?

This is possible, which is why we should all read Jemisin’s novels and experience the suffering of the Orogenes. We should let this be a warning against hating each other and blaming each other for the effect of a climate disaster. Our future doesn’t have to be The Stillness. We can work together, in solidarity, for a better, safer and more tolerant world.

In The Machine Stops E. M. Forster wrote an uncanny prediction of online politics today

In 1909 E. M. Forster published a novella called The Machine Stops. Forster is best known as the author of Howard’s End and A Room With A View, Edwardian-era novels about the social and romantic lives of wealthy people, so it may surprise you that The Machine Stops is a work of science fiction focusing on the lives of ordinary people in the future.

The novella imagines a future where everyone lives by themselves, underground, in small pods that are described as like bees’ honeycombs. Everyone is physically isolated from each other, but is connected via The Machine.

In this future, people rarely leave their pods but connect to each other via the telephone and plates that show images of the person being spoken to. The people who inhabit The Machine engage in what can only be described as an uncannily prescient depiction of online debating. They shun first-hand experiences, but are intellectually stimulated by the discourse around ideas. Usually, this is the discourse around the discourse around ideas.

An uncanny prediction of the present

Despite Forster’s novella being written over a century ago, it accurately describes a world where people are connected to each other via social media. It also shows how people perceive the world through social media, rather than first-hand experience of it.

The people of Forster’s story experience the world via The Machine and what it shows to them, just as we experience the world via what we are shown by the social media platforms. One aspect of the world of the story that Forster doesn’t explore is the degree to which The Machine controls what ideas are discussed. The world is too vast for The Machine’s users, or subjects, to perceive it all and thus it must be selective in discourse it shows to its users.

The Machine of our world

In our world, we know that this process of social media platforms selecting what we see has had profound political implications. Again there is too much content for the users of social media platforms to be shown it all so what a user sees is curated for them. The goal of a Facebook or Twitter is to maximise the time that we spend on their sites (so that they can show us more adverts (how they make their money), so when personalising our timelines the platforms prioritise content that will keep is engaged.

We have fed our whole lives into these platforms, so they have a lot of information about the things that keep us engaged. This is harmless enough when the platforms are showing me more Simpsons clips, because I previously watched some Simpsons clips, however it becomes more problematic when it comes to news and politics.

Attention-grabbing and extreme content

Personalising what news and political information we see based on what we engaged with well inevitably lead to our views not being challenged and more attention-grabbing (i.e. extreme) version of what we believe being shown to us.

In an article for Nieman Reports, Adrienne LaFrance spoke to product manager for Google News (a platform that personalises the news content its users’ see) Anand Paka who said: “Just due to the deluge of information, users do want ways to control information overload. In other words, why should I read the news that I don’t care about?”

Removing the news that we don’t care about is important because it removes our collective understanding of what the news is. In the same Nieman Reports article, LaFrance writes: “What’s important is how people use the news to have a discussion.”

She goes on to say: “You may have friends or colleagues, and you read the same things in common. You may decide different things about it. Then you debate with those people. If you’re not even seeing the same news story, it leaves you with a much narrower set of people with whom you share that common ground. You’re losing the common ground of news.” 

A gateway to far-right politics 

The breakdown of our shared understanding of the news leads the breakdown of our shared understanding of what the world is. This shared understanding is part of how we recognise extreme positions and avoid them. By perceiving politics through social media we have two problems: more extreme content being fed to us to hold our attention and a breakdown of our collective understanding of the news so that we don’t know what extreme is anymore.

A good example of this is a New York Times story about, Caleb Cain, a man who was radicalised into the Alt-Right by watching videos on YouTube. YouTube was showing Cain what held his attention and, in an attempt to keep him on the platform, it served him up increasingly extreme right-wing content. Through seeing politics only through what was served up to him online, Cain drifted away from a perception of the world shared by many people and ended up having a narrow perception of the world shape by extreme-right wing ideas.

The Machine is not the world

Key to this is that Cain only perceived the world through what YouTube (and other tech platforms) were showing him. Like the people in Forest’s novella, his politics wasn’t shaped by first-hand experience of the world, it was shaped by what The Machine was showing him.

The lesson to take from this is to remember that The Machine is not the world. It’s part of how we understand the world, but it should not take the place of the world. This a problem facing left-wing politics. So much of politics today is done via social media, but social media is not the world.

The Machine obscures the starlight

In Forster’s novella most people live underground and don’t see day light or starlight. The machine has physically obscured the starlight, but it has also done this in a metaphorical way. In his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, James Williams describes the different ways that social media distracts us from our lives. One way is by obscuring what Williams calls “the starlight,” which is our ability to navigate by our higher goals and values, our guiding stars.

Social media platforms cause us to focus our activity on the metrics they can measure, such as likes, shares and clicks, over things that are meaningful to people, such as human connections or happiness, that they cannot measure. Through overuse of social media our goals shift from things that matter to us to things that matter to the platforms. This is obscuring our starlight.

In the novella The Machine has achieved this via making the focus of human interaction discussing ideas via The Machine, which it understands, rather than our values of human connections. In our world, the starlight is obscured when we change our behaviour to maximise the likes or shares on social media instead of what brings us happiness.

Obscuring our political starlight

There is a political aspect to this as well as personal one. Now that so much of politics is done via social media, the starlight of our politics has been obscured as well. Too much of our political action is focused on what gets the most likes or retweets or who has delivered the most shared own on their political opponents, instead of changing minds or winning elections. I am as guilty as anyone of having my starlight obscured by social media.

The discourse around who said what about whom and who has delivered the sickest Twitter burn is taking the place of real activism, engaging people, and trying to win elections. The world is under threat. The far-right is on the march. We need to work fast to avert an environmental disaster. We need to tackle rising homelessness, inequality and child poverty. However, what we are focused on is what The Machine wants our goals to be rather than what we need our goals to be.

Not the end of the world, yet

Fortunately, all is not lost for us like it is for the people of Forster’s story who are so reliant on The Machine that when it stops their society ends. Cain eventually stumbled on some left-wing YouTube content and de-programmed himself, which shows that we all are capable of realising that the world is not what The Machine is showing us. 

It’s not the end of the world, yet. We don’t need to wait for a disaster to realise that The Machine is not everything. We can escape the machine now before it is too late.

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels show how national identity might evolve in a hyper-globalised future

National identity is very important to a great number of people. It helps them define who they are amongst the teaming mass of humanity. Even the most metropolitan, the most “open”, the most well travelled individual knows the familiarity of their homeland, its customs and quirks.

For many people their national identity is something they are proud of, a key part of their own identity. They feel it is something that should be protected, almost sacred, which makes sense as religion is usually tied up with ideas of national identity.

The question this raises is, are strong national identities compatible with a globalised world, where people move easily? Human beings have become much more mobile in the last few decades, but the salience of national identity remains. This has led to conflicts between the people who want (or need) to move and the people who value staying put. It has led to the rise of populist parties, who claim nation identity is being deliberately eroded to serve the interests of those who benefit from this globalised world (or those who simply like it).

Can the answer be found in the 25th century?

This conflict seems irreconcilable. It appears that either globalisation or national identity must go. However there is an alternative, which is that both concepts need to evolve to co-exist.

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels lay out a possible path for this. Terra Ignota is a series of three science fiction novels (the fourth is due to be published next year) set on Earth in the 25th century; a 25th century very different to our own. What makes the 25th century of Palmer’s novels unusual is that she has imagined entirely new ways that people in the future think and behave.

Most science fiction novels imagine new technologies, and sometimes new political structures, for their futures. Terra Ignota has these, but these novels also imagine new philosophies for the future. Palmer is a historian who studies the Enlightenment and how its ideas spread. She has imagined a future where the ideas set in motion by the Enlightenment have continued to evolve. Terra Ignota’s 25th century Earth doesn’t just have different technology and geo-politics, it has entirely new ways of thinking about the family, government and the nation state.

Evolving national identity

One of the technological advances shown in Palmer’s novels is an automated system of flying cars capable of taking anyone anywhere in the world within two hours. The novels explore how national identity might be different in a world where borders and distance (crucial parts of national identity) are meaningless. In this world, national identity hasn’t perished, people still consider themselves to be Greeks or Indonesians. In fact, these form a crucial part of some people’s identity. The concept of national identity hasn’t disappeared in Terra Ignota’s hyper-globalised world, but it has evolved.

In the future as shown in Palmer’s novels, one trend is for people to wear clothing that declares their identity (we’ll come back to this) and people’s national identity can be a part of this. People who feel that their national identity is an important part of who they are wear an armband declaring which nation strat they belong to (and the fact that it is important to them). This way people are able to express their national identity in a future where technological and political change has meant that there aren’t national governments or borders anymore.

Hive identity and national identity

As well as nation strats, the world of Terra Ignota has the ‘hives’, another analogy for nation states. The vast majority of the human race belongs to one of the seven hives: the Masons, the Cousins, the Humanists, the Mitsubishi, the Europeans, the Gordians and the Utopians. Its voluntary to join a hive (you don’t automatically join one based on who your parents were or where you were born) and you can leave at any point.

Each hive is different. Governed differently, structured differently, has a different language, a different culture and attracts different types of people. In many ways they are similar to nation states - apart from being voluntary.

Palmer has said that because the hives were created at different points in time between the present and the year 2454, the hives vary in how similar they are to nations. The older hives are more like nations, having geographical territory for example, and grew out of pan-national organisations such as the European Union and the Mitsubishi corporation (which became the European and Mitsubishi hives respectively). Others are post-national organisations, such as the Humanists and Utopians. They are collectives of like-minded people that are not bound by physical space.

Hive identity and personal identity

Joining a hive reflects how you see the world and the type of larger structure you want to belong to. The Mitsubishi hive is a corporation where decisions are made by shareholder voters and individuals can attain more votes by purchasing property. The Cousins are a family and decisions are made via a suggestion box. The Masons are an Empire with supreme authority invested in the Masonic Emperor.

Members of hives typically wear clothes that identify themselves as members of that hive such as Cousins wearing wraps and Utopians wear Griffin-cloth cloaks. Those who find all this too prescriptive are free to not join any hives and be hive-less.

Hives transcended national identity

Hives are a less combative form of national identity. Although there are rivalries between hives, there are not military conflicts between them for territory or resources. There is suspicion between hives but there aren’t acts of racism directed at members of each hive. In the world of Terra Ignota humans have transcended national identity and hatred based on these divisions (mostly).

The fact that it’s easy to join or leave a hive guard against a hive becoming too oppressive or a leader too authoritarian. To leave an authoritarian hive, someone doesn’t need to leave their home, make a dangerous journey and become a stranger in a different land. It’s an administrative process. Hives have solved a crucial problem of the nation state: liberal democracies can use borders to keep people out who need shelter, and authoritarians can use the borders to keep people who want to flee in.

The more flexible system of hives, that still provides people with ways to express their identity, is a sensible evolution of the concept of national identity for a hyper-globalised future. One of the hives is even a nation (the Europeans) and offers a home for everyone who believes that national identity is a crucial part of their identity.

A story about national identity

The Terra Ignota novels show a positive vision of what national identity could look like in the future. The people of the year 2454 still have the positive aspects of national identity, such as the Olympics (where athletes can compete under the banner of their national strat), but they no longer have the hatred and war that exists between today’s nation states. The novels show that national identity can evolve to still be relevant in a globalised world.

We don't need to give up the concept of national identity as incompatible with globalisation. Neither do we need to end the openness and ease of travel that has become a feature of the last few decades to protect the positive things that come from national identity.

As technology continues to progress, and travel and communication gets easier, our ideas about the concept of nation states need to evolve. That is one of the great strengths of Palmer’s novels: they show not only how our world might change in the future, but also how our thinking about it might evolve as well.

Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers novels are the positive narrative about our future that we need

Recently I finished reading the Wayfarer novels by Becky Chambers. The series consists of three loosely connected novels set in the same future interstellar society. In this vision of the future, humanity lives across many worlds and some people even live permanently in space in the Exodus Fleet. Humans have also made contact with many other species and are part of a wider galactic community of different civilizations. 

The three novels have stories that take place in different parts of the galaxy. The first, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, follows the Wayfarer, a ship that makes wormholes that connect the galaxy up. The second, A Closed And Common Orbit, tells two stories about the youth and adulthood of a friend of a crewmate from the Wayfarer and the third, A Record of A Spaceborn Few, follows the sister of A Wayfarer crew member who lives in The Exodus Fleet, a permanent residence for humans in space. Across these three stories we see a wide range of how people live in this universe, all of which is vividly brought to life by Chambers’s imagination.

My main take away from reading these three books is that this is an optimistic vision of the future. This isn’t a utopia, like The Culture in Iain M. Banks’s sci-fi novels, but it’s certainly a more socially just future. By and large, there is peace and prosperity. Even in the resource-poor Exodus Fleet, everyone is provided with a basic standard of living.

A future where we live together in space

This is a future where humans and aliens share ships, living space and work together. The Wayfarer itself has a human and non-human crew and a few awkward moments aside (such as when the ship’s Aandrisks crew member is in a bad mood because she needs to shed her scales) everyone gets along fine. There are wide differences between a human and a Harmagian (a gooey mollusk like creature) and people are tolerant and accepting of the differences. There are rivalries between species, struggles for power and competing views of how we should relate to each other. There are wars, fought by the Aeluon commandos and dangerous pariah species such as the Toremi from the first novel, however, huge interspecies war (the kind we are accustomed too from sci-fi novels) seems rare, and sectarian violence doesn’t seem to exist at all.

In the first novel, aliens and humans share a ship and establish deep bonds leading to a found family. The second novel explores the interpersonal relationships between humans and AIs. In the third novel, despite being set in the predominantly human Exdos Fleet, has a plot line in which a curious Harmagian is accepted into human society.

As well as this being a vision of the future where different species can live together, it’s a future where humans can live with each other. There are cultural differences between the Exodus Fleet and non-fleet humans, however, there is little hostility between the two. The human race of this future is also accepting of LGBTQ+ people, tolerant of people with different gender identities and radical strife seems to be a thing of the past. These novels show that humans can live together without hate.

This is a story we need now

After reading these novels I felt that this is a story that we need now: a story about people can live together, if not in perfect harmony, but at least peacefully. Not just people as vastly different as humans and Aandrisks or Harmagians or Sianat Pairs or AIs but people who are similar to each other but have a different skin tones or religions.

In today’s fiction, there is a prevalence for dystopias and visions of disastrous futures where the few surviving humans eke out a pitiless existence either under the yoke of authoritarianism like in The Hunger Games, or in a climate devastated wasteland such as Mad Max: Fury Road. I can understand why visions of a dark future appeal. We are worried about the present and fearful about our future. Grim warnings about how bad things can get might jerk us into action or at least show us that we are not alone in being frightened about the future. However, taken together too many grim visions of tomorrow can lead us to believe that destruction and tyranny are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it.

Narratives about how we can't live together

There are also too many narratives about how we cannot live together. Stories in the news, from immigration to trans rights, are telling us that an inevitable consequence of humans being different from each other is strife between us. Stories about crime or civil disharmony say that human beings are always at each other’s throats. These contribute to a greater story about how we cannot tolerate each other. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up thinking that humans can’t live together and our future is just a slide into increasingly more fraught strife until we destroy each other.

The future is yet to be written and we can change it. That’s why we need narratives about hope, narratives about how we can live together in peace and tolerance, to show that it’s possible. We need stories and fiction that show us that we can tackle the deep divisions in society and live together. It won’t be easy and what we end up with won’t be perfect, but if we believe we’re not capable of anything better we won’t amount to anything better.

The Wayfarers novels give us a glimpse of a better, more tolerant future where people can live together as peacefully as their circumstances allow. We need stories like this to save us from our fear of each other in the present and our visions of grime dystopian futures that could easily go from stark warnings to the inevitable fate of us all.

How you would use a time machine is a feminist issue

What would you do if you had a time machine and wanted to change the world? Would you stop one event from happening? Prevent two people from meeting? Save a life? Take a life?

Killing someone important, before they did what they're famous for, seems like the easiest way to have a dramatic impact on history. You could kill Hitler and stop the rise of Nazism. Or kill Robert Oppenheimer to prevent the invention of nuclear weapons. If you killed Lenin would the October Revolution still happen?

This is the premise of the Terminator films: that you can change history by killing one person, because one person can change the world. However, that is based on the idea that history works a certain, very patriarchal, way.

"The history of the world is but the biography of great men"

This idea of history follows Thomas Carlyle’s “great man theory”. Thomas Carlyle was a 19th-century historian and philosopher, he came up with this theory, which is the idea that the course of history is changed by the actions of certain “great men” - and writing in Victorian times, he did mean men. In his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History he gave several examples of great men, from Oliver Cromwell to Dante, but no great women. In his book, Carlyle said: "The history of the world is but the biography of great me

If this is true then a time machine could easily be used to change history. You could identify the great men from history books (Carlyle provides helpful suggestions) and then you would know who to kill for your desired history change. Need to stop a war from devastating Europe? Then assassinate Napoleon. Want to stop people looking up the definitions of rude words? Then Dr Samuel Johnson is the great man to stop.

All this assumes that no one else could do what Napoleon or Dr Johnson did, which seems unlikely. Couldn't anyone have written the dictionary or risen out of the terror that followed the French Revolution to take control of a great army and then wage a war of conquest? If Skynet killed John Connor before he was born or when he was a teenager, wouldn't someone else emerge to meet the need for a leader to save humanity from Skynet? Is John Connor really necessary? What's important is the movement of people fighting the machines.

People's History

The opposite of Carlyle's great men theory is People's History or history from below. This theory states that history is changed by groups of people or mass movements. It emphasises the importance of marginalised and oppressed people in changing history. People's History holds that it's not John Connor’s leadership that makes the human resistance, but the need of humans to resist the machines. 

According to People’s History, if you had a time machine and wanted to change history then you would need to go back in time and build a movement or change an existing movement. You couldn't turn Britain back into an absolute monarchy by killing Oliver Cromwell. A groundswell of change in that direction is needed.

This is the premise of The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, a novel about a struggle between feminist and misogynist time-travelers attempting to change women’s rights in the present by editing the past. The novel focuses on key points in feminists history, such as suffragettes in late 19th century times and the 90s Riot Grrrl scene. It also states the People’s History theory when the book’s narrator explains that you cannot use time-travel to kill a single person to change history. She cites an example from their world where the killing of the dictator Emmnaule led to the rise of Napoleon. In the novel, the time-traveling feminists debate the great man vs people’s history approach to history, which informs the actions the characters take against the men attempting to erase women’s rights from history.

Time-traveling feminists

The Future of Another Timeline is a feminist book, not just because it’s characters are suffragettes and Riot Grrrlz, but because of its focus on people’s history as opposed to the great Men of history. The great men theory leaves out the role of women and other oppressed minority groups. This is because women’s influence on history has been downplayed over time or has been subtle, unlike the attention-grabbing role that Napoleon played.

Great women of history

Despite the Terminator films following the great men theory it’s still a feminist film, partly because in the Terminator universe there are great women of history such as Sarah Connor in the original film or Dani Ramos in the most recent Terminator: Dark Fate. Their actions change history and the film shows that the history of the world is not just the biography of great men, but of great women as well. However, the film still overlooks the role that movements play in shaping history. John Connor or Dani Ramos cannot change history and fight the domination of the machines without a movement behind them.

How we would change history reflects how we think about history. Anyone who wants to go back in time and kill Hitler is not thinking about the conditions that created the demand for what Hitler was selling, ie Nazism. If we subscribe to the great men theory of history theory then we are overlooking the roles that women and other oppressed minorities have played.

So, if you ever get your hands on the key to a time machine, take a movement to think about what has changed history, before you decide how you want to change it.

The Church in His Dark Materials is a totalitarian institution

The world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels - and his new series, The Book of Dust - is similar to our world in many ways, but it’s also strikingly different. One difference is that in His Dark Materials the Church, or the Magisterium, as it is known - is a totalitarian organisation.

Calling it totalitarian is not just an atheist grumbling about organised religion. The Magisterium conforms to many aspects of totalitarianism as laid out by the 20th century’s greatest scholar of totalitarian regimes, Hannah Arendt.

In her seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, Arendt lays out precisely what totalitarianism is. One of the key aspects of totalitarianism, which makes it different from authoritarianism, is that totalitarian regimes seek not just power, but to control every aspect of their citizens existence. The Magisterium does this through its control of what knowledge is acceptable and what is blasphemous, especially through its suppression of knowledge about Dust.

A totalitarian movement

The Magisterium is not a nation, it’s a set of beliefs, groups of people and institutions. Collectively, The Magisterium is what Arendt would describe as a totalitarian movement. Movements, according to Arendt, go beyond nation and politics and seek to dominate the entire world. This is clearly how Marcel Delmar intends to use the plans of The Magisterium in The Secret Commonwealth. Movements are also not political parties, Arendt said that they go beyond parties and were for men of all parties, as is the Magisterium.

Arendt said that totalitarian movements divide the masses into two camps: sympathisers and members. The ones who support the movement and the ones who act on its behalf. No other form of person is recognised. The members are organised into layers of inner circles that get increasingly ideologically purer and increasingly shielded from the outside world. The most central of these layers is the secret police who enforce discipline. This is how the Magisterium is structured, not as a single institution, but layers of different institutions of increasing ideological purity.

Shifting institutions

We have said that the Magisterium is not just one institution, but a series of shifting different institutions. The different institutions of the Magisterium are shown in His Dark Materials and are gone into in more detail in The Secret Commonwealth. Similar to a totalitarian regime, the Magisterium being a complicated series of interlinked institutions masks the true sources of power and makes it obscure to those who are not members of the movement. Members of the movement can follow the subtle clues as to where power resides, but everyone else is confused.

As Arendt said of totalitarian regimes, the more visible the institution, the less power it will have. Conversely, the more shadowy the institution, the more power it will have. This is clearly the case for the Magisterium where obscure offices like the La Maison Juste, aka the League for the Instauration of the Holy Purpose, or the General Oblation Board have a great deal of power but are hidden from the public.

This structure allows for power to be moved from institutions as their significance rises and falls within the movement without anyone noticing. It’s the opposite the transparent and stable power relationships of democratic governments. There are no clear hierarchies between these institutions, as is the case for the Magisterium, but some clearly possess authority.

The secret police

I have mentioned a few times the important role of the secret police in a totalitarian regime. They are the innermost layer of the movement, responsible for enforcing discipline and ideology. The Magisterium has its own secret police, the CCD (or Consistorial Court of Discipline), which is one of the most powerful institutions of the Magisterium, as you would expect in a totalitarian movement. The CCD are beyond the reach and power of national police services, who are subservient to them. Their jurisdiction is the entire world. In the Secret Commonwealth it is said that the CCD have a “magic key” to unlock the powers of national police forces even when they don’t have jurisdiction.

According to Arendt, the role of the secret police in a totalitarian regime is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when people or entire sections of society need to disappear, which is one of the roles of the CCD within the Magisterium. The police find criminals who are punished. Secret police find undesirables who are vanished. When someone vanishes, they don’t just disappear from the world, their entire existence disappears with them. It is as if they never existed. They are gone forever and have always been gone. Criminals return from the punishment system to society, whereas no one returns from being vanished.

The secret police are also the most important institution of a totalitarian regime. Amongst the shifting pattern of institutions they hold constant power as they enforce discipline. They are the innermost layer of the movement, made up of the most ideological members. This is the role of the CCD and they are amongst the most powerful institutions of the Magisterium. The secret police are also the closest institution to the leader, another key element of a totalitarian movement as identified by Arendt.

The leader

Arendt identified the leader as an essential part of any totalitarian movement. Having a single leader who is all powerful in the movement in key. The leader is someone who is identified with every action of their followers who are acting on his behalf. The opinions of the leader constantly change, however, these are not seen as lies by the members of the movement as they understand the true meaning of the lies. An example that Arendt uses is when Joseph Stalin said that: “Moscow is the only city in the world with subway.” This is evidently not true, as London and many other cities have subways that predate Moscow’s. The members of Stalin’s movement, the Bolshevik Party, saw the true meaning of this which was: “All other subways were built by capitalists which makes bad and we will destroy them.” The underlying ideology of the leader’s words remains the same while the meaning changes.

The leader of the movement described in Pullman’s novels is The Authority, the god of the Magisterium. He is a supreme leader whose words are not questioned, regardless of whether they make sense with corporal reality. His power over the Magisterium is supreme, his secret police do his will and all members of the movement are equal before the leader. The Authority fits closely with Arendt’s description of the leader of a totalitarian movement.

Concentration camps

The final aspect of the Magisterium that relates to the description of a totalitarian movement as laid out by Arendt is the research station of Bolvangar that appears in the first His Dark Materials novel, Northern Lights. You might think that there is nothing in The Origins of Totalitarianism that is similar to an arctic base where the link between children and their demons is cut, but there is one key institution of totalitarianism that is similar. I would argue that Bolvangar is a concentration camp.

Arendt described concentration camps (a feature of all totalitarian regimes) as “the laboratories of totalitarianism” as it was only in these barbaric places that experiments in total domination of human beings could be conducted. It was only in concentration camps that every single aspect of people’s existence be controlled and the dreams of totalitarians be realised. It is in concentration camps that totalitarians conduct their experiments in changing human nature.

As Arendt said, there are no parallel experiences to that of a concentration camp. No reporting or analysis can capture it. The people who went there went to the world of the dead and the living cannot understand the world of the dead. Even those who are returned to life doubt their experiences their and cannot convey them. Concentration camps destroyed individualism and spontaneity and create the ideal subjects of totalitarianism. There is no reasoning behind why people end up in concentration camps as they are not rational institutions. They are kept secret and guarded by only the movements’ most loyal followers as no one else could tolerate their existence.

The Arctic station of Bolvangar is the laboratory of the Magisterium. It’s here they perform their experiments in creating the ideal citizen who is innocent, untouched by Dust and is separated from their daemons. This is done to children who have been seemingly chosen at random and there is no rationality behind this action. Only the very loyal of the followers of Magisterium know about Bolvangar because anyone else would be horrified by such a place. As such, Bolvangar fits Arendt’s description of a concentration camp.

The totalitarian Magisterium

The Magisterium conforms in many ways to how Arendt described a totalitarian movement in her seminal study on what totalitarianism is. Like totalitarianism, the Magisterium is not bound by any law as they claim they represent the laws of nature and history (in the Magisterium’s case the law of god) which are higher than the law of people. We see this in the novels when the Magisterium vanish or kill citizens of countries regardless of the laws of those countries. Terror is the weapon of totalitarianism and it’s the weapon of the Magisterium. So, when I say that in His Dark Materials the Church is a totalitarian institution, I mean that literally.

The Testaments shows a world where the story that America tells is dead

What is the story that Gilead tell itself about itself? All nations do this. Nations are more accurately described as a collective story than a designated area of land. Although Margaret Atwood never explicitly states it, the story Gilead tells itself is that it is God’s kingdom on Earth and that all other nations are sinful. Gilead is the combined idea of nationhood with religious purity.

The world of Gilead is at the same time familiar and alien to us. They appear to have a similar level of technology as we do. They have cars and planes, for example. The life of a Commander’s daughter, as described in Atwood’s new novel The Testaments, is recognisable as an upper middle-class American household with a driver and cook.

However, Gilead is also unrecognisable to us. It’s a nation with an authoritarian government and a population of religious fundamentalism, apart from a few brave souls who resist. As Gilead is in many ways recognisable our world, it begs the question: how do we get from our world to Gilead? The stories that nations tell themselves will be instructive in answering this question.

The end of liberal democracy

The biggest difference between Gilead and our world is the complete absence of liberal democracy. This can be clearly seen in the role of women in The Testaments and the preceding novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In both novels women have no political or social freedom. Almost every aspect of their lives is tightly controlled by men. To us, citizens of liberal democracies, we find the lack of freedom that the women in Gilead have disgusting as it is diametrically opposed to how we view a fair society, which itself is based on our experience of liberal democracy.

In Gilead there is no democracy, no elections, no representation. The Commanders make all the important decisions and there are no checks and balances. The idea that our world of liberal democracy could move so quickly to one of no democracy is unrealistic. Yes, liberal democracy is showing strains in our world but, were it to fail, it wouldn’t turn so quickly into theocratic authoritarianism.

In the backstory of Gilead, as outlined in The Handmaid’s Tale, we see the breakdown and failure of democracy in America over several years. It’s realistic that our current mode of liberal democracy could end in several years. What is unrealistic is that there would be no democracy at all in Gilead.

Short and long stories of democracy

The difference between the end of our current mode of liberal democracy and the end of all democracy has to do with what Cambridge University politics professor David Runciman calls the long and short stories of democracy. Democracy is not one thing and it has meant different things at different times in history.

Runciman outlines that the long story of democracy goes back to Ancient Greece. Broadly, it’s the story of the idea that no one is born to rule, that there should be some means of selecting our leaders and some means of holding them to account. The short story of democracy is the story of our current mode of liberal democracy: that everyone gets a vote and all votes are equal.

It’s possible that the short story of democracy could end within our lifetime. In America, the idea that everyone should have a vote only goes back to 1920 when women got the vote and, in practice, only until The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965 that made it possible for many African Americans to use their vote. That’s not very long in the entire history of democracy. Ancient Greece denied women the vote and accepted slavery.

One generation in the future 

Is it realistic that America becomes Gilead and ends the short story of democracy over a few years? Yes, it’s possible according to Runciman. We don’t know how far in the future the novels take place. One generation or so from now? Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale could be the same generation as a theoretical daughter of mine. That would work within the time span of a possible end to the short story of democracy. It’s not even 100 years old in America (and even younger in some Eastern European countries). It could end within 20 years. That’s a realistic timeframe.

I can believe that the short story of democracy has ended in Gilead and been replaced by a theocracy that puts other people on a higher platform before God and has removed the idea that everyone should have a vote. The story that Gilead tells itself about itself is that this is all God’s will and that other liberal democratic nations are sinful.

The fact that there is no democracy in Gilead is less realistic. This story of democracy is over 2,600 years old and as such it’s much less likely to end in our lifetime. There would be some kind of election in Gilead. Only men would be allowed to vote and the choice would be between different members of the Commander class, as it was for much of the history of democracy in Britain and the US. Some form of democracy would continue, but it would be unrecognisable to us as citizens of a liberal democracy.

The story of women’s rights

Perhaps this is the case. The novels are written from the point of view of woman who would be disenfranchised in Gilead. This is outside the scope of the story that Atwood is telling about the lives of women in such a society.

What about the story of women’s rights? Like modern liberal democracy, women’s equality is a short story. In the US, women have only been allowed to vote since 1920 and abortion was only made legal nationally in 1973. Sadly, this means that the story of women’s rights could end within a generation, according to theory, and this makes Gilead much more chillingly realistic. This is the most important point that Atwood is making with these novels. The rights that we take for granted can be taken away very easily.

The story that America tells the world

There is also a medium story of democracy, as well as a short and long one. The medium story of democracy is the story that America tells itself. It’s the story of directly electing people (usually men elected by men) to represent certain geographical areas into a congress. America was closer to this model of democracy when it began than Britain was even after the Great Reform Act of 1832. This American model of democracy has been replicated around the world with many nations having presidents, senators and congressmen. America has become the medium story of democracy.

Could this end? Within a single generation? It’s possible according to the theory. This mode of democracy is only just over 200 years old and it could end in 20 or 30 years. In Gilead it has ended, which means that Gilead is not just the death of the current mode of liberal democracy, it is the death of the story that America tells itself about itself.

The work of Runciman shows that the things we take for granted like universal suffrage, equal rights and liberal democracy are not as solid as we might think. They might not be around forever. Atwood in her books makes this point about women’s rights. Both show that women’s rights and liberal democracy are not something we should take for granted and we should not ignore emerging threats to them.

Riot girls, suffragettes and time traveling feminists: three good reasons to read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

I’m always on the lookout for good time travel novels. An author is taking on a challenge when writing a time travel novel, as their characters could get lost in eternal paradoxes that alienate readers. Done well, time travel stories can be as great as Primer or Dr Who adventures such as Blink. At their worst, well, imagine Bill and Ted without the humor. 

My interest in time travel stories meant that I was curious about Annalee Newitz’s new novel The Future of Another Timeline. The novel follows time travelling historical researcher Tess and opens with her visiting Irvine in California in 1992, which was when she was a teenager and before she became a time traveler. Here Tess encounters her younger self. The plot then diverges and we get chapters alternating in perspective from the older Tess and her teenage self, known as Beth to avoid confusion. This grabbed my attention as it’s an interesting premise for a novel and is a challenge to write well.

I read the opening four chapters of this novel, so I thought I would take some time to tell you all about it and why should read it.

Interesting plot

The plot of the book is interesting and the first few chapters include several tense scenes that left me hoping for my commuter train to hit a delay to give me enough time for a few more pages, so that I could find out what happened next.

Without giving too much away, the opening of the book includes Tess investigating a plot by time traveling misogynists bent on erasing women’s rights from history and Beth getting mixed up in an accidental death and a situation that spirals out of control. The opening chapters are undercut with a sense of tension that these events are all building to something horrible that is in Tess’s past and Beth’s future.

The time travel plot is well thought out. When writing a time travel story, it is important that the author considers the mechanics of time travel in their universe. The reader must not be confused, but a sense of mystery must be built up to encourage them to keep reading. This balance is not easy to achieve.

What I liked about Newitz’s novel is that the mechanics of time travel are not heavily dwelt on. A mechanism is not a story and the method of time travel if often less interesting than what it allows the author to do with their characters in historical or future settings. These opening chapters establishes an interesting protagonist who I want to go on a time travel adventure with.

The Riot Grrrl scene

Time travel is interesting, but what’s more interesting is where it can take a protagonists. What I liked the most about this opening was the Tess time travels back to the early 1990s, to the time of the Riot Grrrl scene and the dawn of third-wave feminism. It was great to have this point in history brought to life, as it’s a period that I am too young to have experienced but, like Tess, it was a formative experience for the older punks I met in my early twenties. I have been fascinated with the politics and especially the music of this period ever since.

The novel paints a vivid picture of this legendary moment in the history of punk. It was the time of a great surge in interest in gender politics as third-wave feminism took root on university campuses. There had been a rise in social conservatism during the Regan and Bush years, which was now being pushed back at by a new generation of punks; mainly women in the Riot Grrrl scene who combined rebellious music with radical gender politics. It was the time of Bikini Kill and Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas.

The novel’s opening is a detailed portrait of this scene, the positive and negative aspects of it. There is liberational for teenage girls smothered by the conformity of conservative suburbia, but not every man in the early 90s punk scene was a fellow traveler. There have been problems with the gender politics of the punk scene since, and probably before, Sid Vicious probably killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen and the novel does not shy away from this aspect of punk. There are a lot of teenage boys who are engaging with some very self-destructive and misogynistic cultural figures through punk. While some people were listening to Sleater-Kinney others were also listening to GG Allin.

Towards the end of the opening exact there it becomes apparent that the next stage of the plot will be focused on the 1890s and the suffragettes, what is now called first wave feminism. It will be interesting to see where this goes as feminism meant very different things in the 1890s than it did in 1992.

Engaging characters

What caused me to engage with the novel was the characters. They felt like real people, especially the teenage friends of Beth, who are the characters we find out the most about. My only criticism of the opening of the novel is that it is heavy on exposition. There is a lot to explain both about the setting the mechanics of time travel and hopefully now that this has been established the rest of the novel will move faster.

This is a novel that suits the current political moment. In Britain, there has been a recent explosion of feminist punk on the underground punk scene. This is the novel to read while listening to Dream Nails or Big Joaine. It feels right for this moment, to engage with the history of punk, feminism and politics.

Above all, this novel shows the struggle for womens’ rights that has been going on since first-wave feminism and how easily these rights can be taken away. This is something we should be aware of right now. For this reason alone - as well as the interesting characters, the punk and the cool time travel plot - you should go and read this novel. I can’t recommend it enough.

The politics of The Final Empire are reminiscent of empire and revolution in our world

The premise of The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is simple but instantly engaging: what if the dark lord won? The novel takes place a fantasy world when the main villain, an evil and powerful magican, holds dominion over the world. The Lord Ruler is a distant figure, like Sauron in Lord of the Rings and Voldermort in the early Harry Potter novels, but is ever present in the society he holds dominion over. 

Despite the familiar setting of a medieval-ish society, the world-building was interesting and original. Magical power in the Final Empire comes from burning metals. People with these abilities, known as Allomancers, consume small amounts of metals such as iron, tin, copper and steel, and can then use their alchemical power to move objects, enhance their vision or do other magical things. It was a struggle to keep all the different metals and their effects straight in my head, but this didn’t distract me too much from the story and Sanderson is able to explain the world without bashing the reader over the head with the details. There are other bizarre and interesting creatures in the novel. Such as the terrifying Steel Inquisitors, creatures whose supernatural power seems to derive from the metal spikes driven through their eyes.

The politics of the world are more interesting than the fantasy. The story of the novel follows a plot to overthrow the Lord Ruler and the world it is set in felt like a believable society where people live under the constant oppression of an authoritarian ruler and his enforcers. the political and economics of the world is relatively simple, but I was still able to believe this a functioning society.

Similarities to the Russian Revolution

The story of the revolution against the Lord Ruler and the plot the protagonists set in motion is the most interesting and engaging thing about this novel. The world of the book felt like Tsarist Russia before the February Revolution. The all-powerful leader is unpopular and abuses his powers. He has to go, but who can replace him? How can they make it happen?

The majority of the plot takes place inside the resistance movement, which also felt like a believable operation to install a revolution, albeit a plot aided by magic. One of the truths of authoritarian tyrants we know from our world is that people will resist. There will be plots to fight back, no matter how hopeless things look.

The story unfolds in an original and interesting way. Through several scenes written in the first person, we get the story of the Lord Ruler and how he became who he is. It is interesting that the back story of The Final Empire is Lord Ruler going on the archetypal fantasy hero's journey: being born the son of a blacksmith and then rising to be a great hero, defeating a terrible evil to fulfil a prophecy. The twist is that the Lord Ruler becoming a tyrant afterwards, but a benevolent ruler. Towards the end of the novel, I expected there to be a twist as to the Lord Ruler’s identity, which is kept secret from the reader. There is a slight twist in this regard, but I expected more.

The protagonist and leader of the plot against the Lord Ruler, Kelsier, is a good hero but a little generic. What is original about the story is that Kelsier dies during the middle of the novel and goes on to become a symbol of revolution, achieving more in death then he did in life like many larger than life icons of revolution such as Che Guevara.

What happens after the Revolution?

The other characters were interesting, especially the other protagonist a woman named Vin who has a more complex journey as she learns Allomancey while also learning to trust others. The novel also made me have sympathy for the few noble characters, the people around the Lord Ruler who despise him but also profit from his regime. This made the story more complex than a straight forward good guys and bad guys morality story.

The ending of the book was satisfying. The Lord Ruler is killed and his regime is overthrown. Although there are still many Steel Inquisitors in the world with a great deal of power. Overthrowing the ruler is only the first stop of a revolution; now the leaders of the coup have to tackle the social and political problems of the land.

What will happen when the revolutionaries govern? Will it be like the Russian Revolution? A brief movement of hope for a better world before descending into terror. Will the story of life after the Lord Ruler be as complex as real-world revolutions? I’ll have to read the other books in the Mistborn series to find out, however, as a novel that describes the first mile on the road of revolution, this book was a captivating read.

A Closed and Common Orbit lets the reader walk in shoes of people with very different lives

Recently I read a book that really opened my eyes. It was about a child without parents, in a poor society, living off scrap in a giant rubbish tip filled with everything wealthy people threw away. This story ran parallel to that of an adult, living in a prosperous society, trying to find their own identify whilst having a body that didn’t feel right to them. At the same they are trying to keep their otherness a secret unless their difference ignites the ire of the society they live in.

This novel wasn’t an Ali Smith or Martin Amis. It was A Closed And Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.

Living off scrap

The novel has two main plots. One follows Jane, a ten-year-old clone, who lives in a factory sorting through piles of rubbish. She escapes from the factory and is adopted by an AI in a crashed space ship called Owl. By salvaging the scrap, they are able to repair the ship and escape.

Scavenging through scrap is a hard life. There are many dangerous chemicals and bits of machinery, as well as very little food and nothing that we would consider society. Although Owl tries to provide for Jane as best she can, Jane doesn’t go to school or have any friends. Jane’s life is far away from the happy childhood that every kid deserves.

Jane is a poor child, sifting through the discarded trash of a wealthier civilization that doesn’t know or care about her miserable existence. Jane lives in the most absolute poverty; by the standards of our world she could be amongst the most disadvantaged people on Earth. The parallels between her life and the lives of children in giant scrap yards in China are obvious.

Hiding your true self

The other story follows Sidra, who lives on another planet in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, diverse society where humans rub shoulders with non-humans and everyone, more or less, gets along. The problem is that Sidra is a ship’s AI that has been downloaded into a “kit” that has the appearance of the human body. This is illegal, so Sidra has to hide her true self from everyone she meets. She also has to adapt to life in a body that’s different to one that had been assigned to her when she came into the world.

It is difficult not knowing who you are or how you fit into the models that society creates for people. Having to pass as a human is difficult for Sidra but she has to hide who she is because her very existence transgresses the rules of society. She does not know if someone will be tolerant or will react with violence when they find out the details of her personal history.

Sidra’s material needs are met, but that doesn’t mean that she is happy. The parallels between Sidra’s life and that of many people in West who are queer, trans or LGBTQ is clear. Just because she is safe from starvation or the raw elements, doesn’t mean she isn’t at risk when living in a supposedly tolerant society. Recently in London a young couple were attacked because of their sexuality.

Politically important 

Jane’s needs are towards the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter, safety. Sidra’s are towards the top: friendship, self-actualization. Neither protagonist’s needs are more important than the others’. As a reader, we care about both at the same time. They’re both people trying to live.

This novel shows how stories about both absolute poverty and social acceptance are important. There are people who argue that the left should focus only on the economic inequality that leads to absolute poverty. Conversely, there are those who think that the left should focus only on the social inequality that leads to hatred. This novel shows that both are valid. We can care about more than one thing.

Science fiction is a great genre for opening your eyes to the lives of other people. It requires a leap of imagination to picture worlds or characters that are different to your own. This leap of imagination can allow the reader to understand what it’s like for someone whose culture is different, or is poorer, or has body dysmorphia, or feels alienated from society. Imagining the lives of others is a crucial step to take towards improving them.

Quietly political

There are also those believe that sci-fi is just for frivolous entertainment and cannot say anything more substantial about society. Some of these people are authors who write sci-fi novels, although they don’t admit it, such as Ian McEwen or Margaret Atwood. They think only literary fiction has something to say. A Closed and Common Orbit shows that this is not the case.

Chamber’s book is quietly political, but is very powerful and had a huge impact on me. I found it very moving and it opened my eyes not only to how different people live but also to the fact that despite the different challenges we all face, all of our struggles are equally valid. We are all equally deserving of compassion, no matter the circumstances of our lives.

Children of Time and bridging the gap of understanding

Mediums are important. Why write a novel when you could make a film or write a play? The answer needs to be more than ‘I have no money and no friends, so I’m writing a novel’. The story you are telling needs to suit the novel as a medium. If you want to make a film, then write a film script; don't just describe a film in prose.

Each medium is suited to a certain type of storytelling. Novels can express things that other mediums struggle with. A good example of a story that works brilliantly in a novel is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. Half of the novel takes place on a planet populated by intelligent spiders. The spiders, both as individuals and as a civilization, are very different to humans, however, Tchaikovsky's novel takes the reader effortlessly inside the minds of the spider characters. Dramatising a civilization of giant spiders who communicate by dancing or by drumming on silk via film or TV would appear either laughable or terrifying.

The way the novel is written leads the reader to connect with the spiders as if they were human. We experience their individual hopes, fear and desires as well as understanding their social structures and the problems facing their civilization. By the end of the book, we relate to the spiders as much as we do to the human characters. The use of the novel as a medium neatly sidesteps the problem of how different to us the spiders are, and allows the reader to bridge the gap of understanding between a spider and a human in a way that would never work on film or TV.

Bridging the gap of understanding

Novels bringing an understanding of something that is alien to us are not just limited to making accessible non-human characters. Prose can take you inside the head of a character and give you feelings you wouldn't ordinarily feel or allow you to gain an intimate understanding of an aspect of life you haven’t experienced. It can allow you to understand what is like to be a poor, Latino woman struggling with mental health problems whilst also periodically time travelling to the future, such as in Marge Piercy‘s novel Woman on the Edge of Time.

This is how works of art, not just novels, can express things that are outside our field of understanding or are difficult to depict visually. This allows us to bridge the gap of understanding to new experiences. These works of art often deal with how something feels, rather than how it looks. They can be less instantly accessible works of art.

Example of this are the plays of Harold Pinter or the film's or David Lynch, which often depict character on the edge of complex and unknowable systems that we cannot see or understand but we can see their effects. This expresses something about the big intangible political or economic forces that govern our lives that are hard to appreciate.

Reaching for the intangible

The film Hunger by Steve McQueen takes us inside a prison in the 1980s where IRA detainees are staging a dirty protest. It conveys the feeling of isolation and desperation that leads to such behaviour as well as the visual reality of it. Zia’s Kalthoum’s documentary film, A Taste of Cement, attempts to capture the experience of being a migrant construction worker in Lebanon who had fled the violence in Syria, rather than just recording the daily lives of its subjects.

This process of reaching for the intangible in art can most keenly be seen in the painting of the Impressionists. Painters such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne were working at a time when photography was spreading as a medium and the purpose of painting needed to more than just capturing the look of something. When Monet painted Bain à la Grenouillère he did not just capture the image of a boating lake, but captured the representation of looking at a reflection in the water. This is not capturing what a reflection looks like in a single frozen instant (like a photograph does) but capturing the sensation of looking at something as dynamic as ripples in water.

FIlms that work in a similar way include Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, which won the best picture Oscar in 2017. The movie conveys how a young black man feels at three challenging points in his life. The way it’s shot, scored and edited takes you inside the protagonist’s emotions, which makes it more power. The same can be said of NK Jemisin’s fantasy novel the 5th Season and its sequels, which also conveys the complex feelings that result from a lifetime of oppression.

Political acts

This expression of the intangible can be political. Crossing the bridge of understanding lets us appreciate the lives of people who are very different to us (such as a poor, gay black man in Moonlight) or whose experiences are very different to ours (such as an enslaved and othered woman in the 5th Season). This can engender sympathy in the reader and lead them to take political actions that improve the lives of people outside their tribe.

Children of Times encourages us to sympathise with spiders, who we normally view as beneath us or as repugnant. Creating sympathy for creatures we viewing as frightening or as animals to look down on has obviously political connotations in a world riven by hatred and threatened with environmental destruction. If we can think of spiders as people then maybe we can stop the destruction of the natural world. Children of Time encourages a very difficult shift of perspective.

Art that expresses something intangible is essential for bridging the gap of understanding and creating empathy. These intangible experiences are what make us who we are and through art we broaden our understanding of the human condition. Novels are an excellent medium to achieving this as they are suited to expressing the intangible. Empathising with a spider is an important step to understanding the lives of others through art.