The engineer’s world view won't save the Seveneves

Without warning the moon explodes into seven fragments. After a few days of admiring the novelty of this, the human race realises that the fragments will collide with each other and break apart into smaller fragments, which will eventually rain down on the Earth. This Hard Rain will last for 5,000 years, killing every living creature and boiling the sea. Thus, humanity has approximately two years to come up with a plan to save all life on Earth.

This is the setup of Neil Stephenson’s novel Seveneves. It’s an excellent premise to build a novel on. It has a race against time, a struggle against nature to save humanity and a high-risk venture into space. The book is a gripping read that follows the plan to put as many people as possible onto the International Space Station or onto craft in a similar low Earth, so that some people survive the end of the world. There are double-crosses, near misses and disasters along the way, which make this a gripping page-turner.

Stephenson has done a lot of research into what would be involved in executing this plan. The book is peppered with a lot of details about the physics of low Earth orbits or asteroid mining that bring the story to life. However, my main criticism of the book is that it presents the end of the world as an engineering problem to solved and neglects the social implications of the end of the world.

In the novel most of the human race just accept that they, their families, communities and nations will die and focus their efforts on the Cloud Ark scheme, a plan to save a tiny fraction of 1% of the human race (and the genetic information of the Earth’s plants and animals). This to me seems unlikely. Surely there would be rioting, suspicion that this is an elite trick, or death cults springing up everywhere. The world would go mad, faced with this knowledge.

People would stop coming to work, which would have implications for the Cloud Ark. Even if NASA employees remain focused on the plan to save humanity, their supply chain would break down as manufacturers and logistics people decide they didn’t want to spend their last two years of life doing the 9 to 5. At one point in the novel it mentions that the Stock Market has ceased to operate, but the implications for global economic system (that has its resources geared towards making the Cloud Ark) are underexplored.

I accept this is already a long book and throwing in more details about how the human race psychologically or politically reacts to its impending destruction would only make it longer. The story of this novel is the people at the centre of the plan to save the human race, and it’s good that it sticks to that. There are a few chapters where these ideas are engaged with, such as a trip to Bhutan to collect prospective candidates for survival or the description of the public information campaign designed to inspire the people about the Cloud Ark and the future of the human race. Still, I feel this book lacks a wider perspective on the effects of its premise.

All of the nations of the Earth work together on a single project to save humanity. This also seems unlikely as the Cloud Ark plan is led by NASA and ultimately more Americans than any other nation survive the end of the world. Countries such as China and Russia, with proud cultures and nationalistic beliefs, would not just submit to be a part of the American plan. Only tiny Venezuela breaks with the American hegemony. There is no thought to the effects of the end of the world on its geo-politics.

When politics is discussed in the novel, it is always in a negative light. One of the book’s antagonists is the President of the United States who destabilases the Cloud Ark by injecting politics into its population. At several points in the novel politics is used a by-world is everything that is getting in the way of the engineers fixing the problem of the end of the word. The Cloud Ark is led by the smart people who, generally, make the right calls, but politics threatens their order.

When it becomes independent from Earth, the Cloud Ark is led by an unelected commander who is accountable to no one. The book attempts to engage with the anti-democratic implications of this, but seems reluctant to accept that the smart, heroic people in charge should be held accountable by the less smart, quivering masses they are in charge of.

The smart, competent NASA people in charge of the Cloud Ark don’t abuse their absolute authority and are always looking out for the future of humanity. The democratically elected politicians are self-serving and short sighted. In many ways this novel is a manifesto for, at best, technocratic government, and at worst, enlightened dictatorship. It supports the idea that the smartest and most capable should rule over everyone else and not be questioned by the less intelligent, less they damage society through their ignorance.

Hostility towards ordinary people’s ability to engage with the problems of the world is an ideology held by many people who work in engineering or tech companies. It manifests as a suspicion of politics in general (as the means of giving power to ordinary people who might not understand something) and politicians in particular (as those chosen to enact the wrong-headed whims of the ignorant masses). The way that politics is treated in Seveneves is a prime example of this.

The idea that the world should be led by smart people who shouldn’t have to answer to the wishes of less smart people is popular in Silicon Valley. It is an engineer’s world view, where you do not consult the ignorant masses about a problem, but only the most informed person. You wouldn’t elect a mechanic to fix your car, you’d find someone who knows about cars. So, you shouldn’t elect someone to handle the economy or the plan to save humanity, this power should only be given to those who know what they’re doing. Giving this power to elected politicians who are slaves to the will of the ignorant will only lead to things being screwed up.

This view leads to the idea that the problems of the world need engineering solutions. Issues such as climate change or world hunger need technical fixes and not engagement with the politics of these issues. Engineering will play a role in solving the climate crisis, but it will be ineffectual unless we engage with the politics of climate change. Such as how wealthy, powerful nations pollute a lot more than poorer nations or that 100 companies contribute 71% of global emissions. We need to engage with the politics behind this to fix climate change. Politics is not a distraction or a means to give power to the ignorant so that they can make the situation worse.

The engineer’s worldview leads to a few people having a lot of power and no accountability. Mark Zuckerberg could be the most powerful person in the world, King of a kingdom of over 2 billion people and possessing absolute authority over it. The enlightened dictatorship of Mark Zuckerberg has allowed the far-right to overrun his kingdom, but he and his Silicon Valley friends approach this issue as an engineering problem to be fixed and not political issues to be engaged with.

Despite the reluctance to engage with politics and a premiant engineer’s world view, Seveneves is a moving description of how humanity would face the end of the world. There are many sections of powerful, emotive prose that brought a tear to my eye. It is certainly a well researched, well written novel that I would recommend reading. I hope that this is how humanity would react to the end of the world: calmly finding a way to save humanity the problem as best as possible. Although looking at how humanity has handled climate change so far, I think this is a vain hope. 

When we fail to engage with the political nature of these enormous issues and see the world as an engineering problem we fail to fully engage with the problem. Not all problems have a solely technical fix and a range of policies is needed to address them. If we want to save our world (which is threatened by the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, not the sudden destruction of the hard rain) then politics will be as important as engineering in our salvation.

Use of Weapons: Reading something new for the last time

Five years ago my favourite writer, Iain M. Banks, passed away. With his passing the world seemed a little duller, a little less fantastic. At the time, I wrote an obituary, which stated that there was only one Iain M Banks book that I hadn’t yet read. I was saving this book, as once I had read it there would be new more new words from Banks left for me to read.

Five years later, I decided to sit down and read this novel, as it seemed like a fitting way to mark the passing of five years since his death. The book was Use of Weapons, the third novel in Banks's ‘Culture’ series, which is a loose collection of novels that can be read in any order. So, for the last time, I read something of his for the first time. 

Banks had a amazing imagination for science fiction. It comes to life in the small details of his writing as well as the big sci-fi concepts. Every one of his novels has unusual aliens, incredible locations or bizzare space ships. Use of Weapons is a fine example of his rich and complex vision, with the novel taking place across several different worlds, ships and space habitats, all of which are rendered vividly.

Banks also wrote literary fiction under the name Iain Banks, and his science fiction has some literary experimentation to it. Use of Weapons has an unusual structure as there are two narratives, one of which moves forwards in time and the other backwards. I found this to be confusing at first, but after a few chapters I got use the two narratives spinning forwards and backwards form their crossover point at the start of the novel.

Thus, the climax of the novel is also the beginning. The reader gets the conclusion and inception of a series of events in two hard-hitting final chapters that are very powerful. Banks is more experimental in his prose than a lot of science fiction writers, but he also had a wicked sense of humour that comes through in the dialogue of this novel. The seriousness of the literary experimentation is well-balanced against this humour.

Another interesting feature of the novel is how the focus change as it goes along. Use of Weapons starts out being very plot-focused. Culture agent Diziet Sma is taken away from an important diplomatic summit to find an old operative of hers, Cheradenine Zakalwe, who might be the only person who can stop a war that threatens to engulf an entire star cluster. As the novel develops, the focus shifts from this race against time to stop a conflict, into a study of Zakalwe’s character and how his traumatic youth made him the person who he is. The fate of cluster is left ambiguous at the end and the final chapters focus on Zakalwe’s life.

There are gut-wrenching revelations at the end of the book. I won't spoil them here, but the ending of Use of Weapons is a prime example of two techniques of which Banks was a master. The ‘act three twist’ that redefines what you have just read, and grotesque body horror, vividly described for maximum impact. These two work best together, as they do in Banks's debut literary novel. The Wasp Factory, and in Use of Weapons the final few chapters manage to combine body horror and a twist to leave the reader reeling. The ending of Use of Weapons could be one of Banks’s most gruesome scenes, and that’s really saying something.

All of Banks's novels are political to a greater or lesser extend. The Culture novels, for example, focus on a far-future utopia where machines facilitate a society for humans that has no laws, property, inequality, scarcity, crime, prejudice or want. Even death has been conquered in the Culture, leaving people free to pursue, art, culture, extreme sports and headism in all its forms. The Culture's only flaw is its need to meddle with other societies to improve them, ie make them more similar to the Culture.

Banks was one of the most interesting writers of utopias and leads the reader to question the assumptions we would make about whether the Culture is a perfect society. Use of Weapons looks at the rights and wrongs of the Culture interfering in wars, or situations that might become wars. The novel asks whether the Culture has the right to meddle in such a way, even when it has the best of intentions? Banks offers no firm conclusions to these questions, as do all great literary writers, but he does leave you asking lots of questions.

Use of Weapons was published in 1990, but the debates at the heart of the book are as relevant today as they were then. Wars are raging in Syria and Yemen, and people in the West need to ask themselves: if we are responsible for these conflicts and what are our moral obligations to the people caught in the middle of them?

Banks packs a lot of complex political ideas into an accessible novel that has spectacular action scenes as well as interesting debates. Reading his novels has helped to shape my politics. I read my first Iain M Banks novel, just out of university and still naive about the world. Banks’s passion for a better future and his love for humanity come through in stories that embrace the complexities of our world.

Banks's writing shows that despite the fact that we often fail, we can be better than we are. His stories tell us that in the future we can move past the problems of today and live fuller, happier lives. I’m glad that I have had his novels in my life, even if now there will be no more new stories for me.

What can Will Save the Galaxy For Food teach us about a future without jobs?

It is a well-known fact that science fiction novels say more about the time in which they are written than about what is likely to happen in the future. Science fiction is full of predictions that didn’t come true (Space 1999, anyone?) but, more importantly, how we view the future gives us insight into the present.

With that in mind, I recently read Will Save the Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw, a post-modern take on the sci-fi trope of the hero starpilot. In the future, space travel led to a Golden Age of starpiloting, where daredevil adventurers found fame and glory in perilous deep space. Then Quantum Tunneling is invented and overnight no one needs starpilots anyone. The pilots themselves are thrown on the scrapheap and have to grovel for a meagre income selling guided tours of the sites of their past glory.

As I read the book, I realised that it spoke to a key anxiety of our world, namely that technology will make us all obsolete. Last year the Bank of England said that as many as 15 million British jobs could be lost to machine and online shopping has already caused 62,000 job losses in the retail sector. Due to rising automation in the workplace, we could all end up like the pilots in Croshaw’s novel.

If we are facing a jobless world, then there are policies we can adopt to prevent billions of people having to beg to survive, as the pilots do in WSTGFF. One such example is Universal Basic Income, and it is good that these policies are being explored in places such as Finland. What is striking about WSTGFF is not the poverty of the starpilots without an income, but the complete lack of dignity of their post-Quantum Tunneling existence.

The nameless starpilot protagonist is desperate to hold on to his pride, even as it becomes harder to make a living. He is against all attempts to commodify and sanitise the Golden Age of starpiloting, even if this might make him money. Some of the starpilots start businesses and try to move on, but many cling to the identity that their job gave them. Being a starpilot is more than a source of income - it is who you are.

This really rang true for me. We all base our identity on our source of employment. When someone asks me “what do you do?”, I don’t say: “I scour science fiction novels for political insights to post on the internet to make myself feel clever”, I say “I work in marketing”. Both are equally true.

If we lose our employment, we lose a crucial part of our identity. If we all lose our employment then a national crisis of identity will occur. Increasing advancement in robotics and companies eager to cut as many jobs as possible in order to drive up their profits don’t care about this. We need UBI to save us all from starving, but we need a change in the way we define ourselves slipping into depression.

If all our jobs disappear, we might find ourselves like the starpilots in WSTGFF, clinging to nostalgia for a time when our lives meant something, instead of seizing the opportunities of all our new free time. We might think that we were better off in a time when everyone had to toil away for an enormous chunk of their lives to provide an income that (for many people today) doesn’t cover the basic costs of living.

If there was no work, would we be consumed by nostalgia for a time where there was work? Increasing numbers of women are equal breadwinners to men, but now many men are wondering how a man can define himself when he’s not the sole provider for a family. This has led to nostalgia for a time when a man’s identity was simpler. This nostalgia completely fails to engage with the patriarchal oppression that women faced in the past and threatens to recreate it.

Without work, are we risking a similar crisis in identity? A similar nostalgia for a time when one could define oneself through work? A nostalgia that - similar to what is happening with many men - could be taken advantage of by those who have a dangerous agenda?

In WSTGFF, the pilot eventually learns to move on with his life and lets go of his nostalgia for a Golden Age that never really existed. It’s a good lesson, and it shows we can move on and recreate our lives. Our world is not as neat as a book and rarely provides a satisfactory ending that wraps everything up. There is no beneficent author figure resolving things in our world for the best. That’s why we need to heed the warnings of fiction.

To tackle the problems of growing automation and job losses, we need to think not only about how we will eat when there are jobs, but also how we will define ourselves. Our identities need to become more varied, more complex and less tied to what we do for a living. When people are more than what they do, it won’t matter what they do or if they do nothing.

Top five sci-fi political books

Science fiction is an ideal genre for exploring politics. Sci-fi novels ask “what if?” questions about humanity and the future and these are perfect for exploring political issues. Our world is messy and difficult to understand, despite our attempts to use politics to understand it. It can be much easier to comprehend a political argument when the entire world can be reconfigured for that purpose. For these reasons, there is a rich history of sci-fi novels tackling political issues and below are five of my favourite.

But, before we get started, if you are interested in seeing me talk about some political non-fiction then watch this video from Claire Rousseau’s YouTube channel where I choose my favourite political non-fiction books:

Right, now onto the sci-fi novels:

Look To Windward by Iain M Banks (2000)

Iain M Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels had to appear on this list and it was difficult to choose one. Look To Windward is one of my favourite of the nine novels that Banks wrote in his utopian Culture universe. These are sci-fi stories that show what humanity is capable of, and that we can rise up from the hatred and greed that stains our world.

Set after the Idiran-Culture war that was the focus of Banks’s first culture novel, Look To Windward is a profound meditation on the effects of war. Banks’s work (both sci-fi as Iain M Banks and literary as Iain Banks) is always overtly political and asks a lot of interesting questions. What makes this book (and the other Culture novels) so effective is the political debates are summed well by characters voicing different views that never come across as lecturing the reader.

The Uplift War by David Brin (1987)

Politics has rarely been done on such a galactic scale as in David Brin’s Uplift novels. These are not so much novels about exploring politics in our world through the prism of science fiction, but novels about how politics might work in the future. After humanity makes contact with alien civilizations we discover the fact that we evolved without the guidance of another race is abhorrent to most other civilizations in the galaxy, who were raised to sentience through a process called Uplift.

The novel takes place on Garth, a human colony that is invaded by an alien species who hate humans because of our origins. What follows is not just a military conflict over Garth, but a political one as humans use diplomacy, espionage, subterfuge and guerrilla warfare to hold onto Garth. Brin’s novels explores how politics would work between different species and all the complexities that entails.

Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (1981)

If space exploration was a commercial venture than war between Earth and the stars would be motivated by profit. Such a war is the background to Cherryh’s seminal sci-fi novel set on a station that is 12 light years from Earth, which rebels against the wealthy Earth Company that has a monopoly on space colonization.

Many great science fiction TV shows and films owe a huge debt to Earth Company, not least Babylon 5, another show that deals with diplomacy in space. The politics of this novel are much more corporate than the others on this list, but it is still a hugely engaging sci-fi novel.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

Ursula K. Le Guin is well known as a great writer of political science fiction. Her Hainish Cycle books ask many daring “what if?” questions about humanity. Le Guin is an expert in describing the different routes humanity could have taken, which makes the point that so many of the exploitative power relationships of our world did not come about because they are natural but because we chose to go down this road. If unequal power relationships are not natural then we choose to perpetuate them, and if we choose to perpetuate them then we can choose to stop them.

The plot of the Dispossessed touches on many political themes from when it was written (published in 1974), such as the rivalry between a capitalist patriarchal state and an authoritarian communism. It also looks at anarchist societies as an alternative to the authoritarian communism practiced by the USSR. Le Guin is a great writer and her gift with language brings these debates to life. This novel is a must read for sci-fi fans and those interested in politics.

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig (2014)

There are many science fiction stories that explore the power dynamics of our world through a fictional one. The Fire Sermon is a great book about how those with power use it oppress those without. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where every woman gives birth to twins, one strong Alpha and a weaker Omega, the novel follows Cass, an Omega, trying to find her way in a world ruled by brutal Alphas. The sci-fi analogy of a society divided between weak and strong is a great way to explore the power dynamics of racism, sexism and homophobia.

The Fire Sermon is also a powerfully written book. Cass and her twin Zach, who becomes powerful in Alpha society, are well realised characters that sum up the power dynamic of the book. Author Francesca Haig is also an academic who studies Holocaust poetry and she has brought her knowledge of the darkest aspects of power dynamics to this incredibly engrossing sci-fi novel. 

Those are my choices. Let me know what political sci-fi novels you enjoyed in the comments below.

Books image created by Kirrus and used under creative commons.

Fear the future

What do we think about when we think about the future? I don't mean the future as in tomorrow or next week, or even next year. I mean, what do we think about when we imagine the future as science fiction writers might imagine it – the future in 50, 100 or 500 years’ time. Although based on everything that happened last year, 2020 seems like the far future.

When we think about the future, we mostly think that it will be awful; at least, that is what our science fiction is saying. You can tell a lot about a society from the science fiction it produces, as it shows how we think about the future. Judging by some of our recent output, we seem to think that civilization will collapse and we will be living in a wasteland like Mad Max: Fury Road or an extremely hostile urban environment like the Girl With All The Gifts.

Visions of destruction are more common than utopias. The works of authors such as Iain M. Banks or Hannu Rajaniemi show there is a lot of scope for telling stories in utopias. We seem to have stopped believing in utopias, probably around the time Iain M. Banks died in 2013. Our visions of the future are more Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the future right now, and a lot of fear. That is understandable. With rogue states testing nuclear missiles, horrendous wars and the rise of aggressive nationalism, the world and the future looks pretty scary. This is reflected in our popular culture.

However, this is not the only time in our history that we have been frightened of the future. In the 1960s there was a lot of fear about the immediate future – in 1963, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, many believed the human race could end in a nuclear firestorm at any moment. As well as this, Western society was deeply divided along racial and political lines and violence was common.

There was also a sense of optimism about the future. It was around this time that Star Trek first appeared on TV. Star Trek had a radical vision of a future without racial tensions, where Americans, Russians, Japanese, aliens and even Scots could go boldly forth together.

Around the same time, Dune was published, and although it did not strike the same optimistic tone as Star Trek, it did show that the future will be vibrant, strange and filled with a terrifying beauty beyond anything we could imagine. Crucially it said that we would survive the Butlerian Jihad and reach the stars.

So if we were frightened in the past, then why are we so grim now? The vision of a future in The Expanse, riven with conflict, seems more likely to come true than the harmony of Star Trek or the discordant beauty of Dune. The key difference is that in the 1960s we were wealthy. The economy was growing and people were getting wealthier, new products and technologies were appearing in ordinary peoples’ homes. The future was arriving through home television sets and commercial flights, and people could imagine this continuing until we all lived on the moon, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The reason why we fear the future now is not because we have tangible external threats from North Korea or ISIS, or even homegrown extremists, but because we have an internal crisis in our society that appears unresolvable and is more fundamental than a war or terrorism. A crisis with capitalism itself.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Fredric Jameson said and he was not wrong. We know that capitalism has been in crisis since the 2008 crash. The economies of the West are sluggish and weak. Wages have stagnated for nearly a decade and the cost of living is rising. A house that is not objectively awful is out of reach for most people. We are working hard and earning less. No one feels wealthy or confident about the future.

The main problem is that we don't have an alternative for capitalism, or even for this kind of ‘anything goes’ capitalism – or at least, not one that commands widespread support. Look at the collapse of moderate, social democratic, left-wing parties across the West if you think otherwise. If we cannot imagine a solution to the problems in our society then we cannot imagine a future for our society.

If the futures we imagine are not post-apocalyptic wastelands, then they are oppressive dictatorships likes The Hunger Games or 1984, which is suddenly popular again. This is because we can believe that the capitalism will end in fascism. It has happened before. However, imagining that capitalism will end in fascism is one step closer to accepting that our future is fascism.

We need to start imagining solutions to our problems or will we sleepwalk into tyranny or the complete collapse of society. Science fiction is one place where we can imagine a world where we have outgrown capitalism, or at least a world where we have fixed the problems that are killing our ability to imagine a future that is not filled with suffering.

Science fiction plays an important role in society by showing us how we think about the future. Right now, it is showing us that we think that there is no future. We need a science fiction that imagines a better future - not necessary a utopia, but a way through this crisis.

Sci-fi can provide hope to the hopeless that there will be a better future, which is desperately needed right now. We may be frightened of the future, but it does not have to be this way. Sci-fi can show us something else if it tackles the problems that we find ourselves facing. It can show us that the stars are within our reach. All we have to do is reach out and touch them.

The politics of Iain M. Banks novels

On Wednesday the 3rd of April, best-selling Scottish author Iain M. Banks announced that he was dying of cancer and that his next novel, The Quarry, will be his last. In light of the news, many fans must be looking back over his oeuvre, considering what conclusions can be drawn while he is still alive.

Iain Banks was famously described as “two of Scotland's best authors” because he writes both science fiction and literary fiction (the former as Iain M. Banks). Despite the different genres, the same broad political and social themes come up in all his novels and a lot of common ground can be found.

Iain Banks is amongst the most popular writers of today who is clearly left wing. He is outspoken on subjects as varied as Scottish independence and Israel’s military intervention in Gaza. Politics infiltrate his novels to varying degrees, but it is ever-present in the themes, characters and settings he explores. One recurring theme is the idea that political opinions are a manifestation of peoples’ deepest values, such as in The Steep Approach to Garbadale. The difference between left and right wing people, according to main character Alban Wopuld, all comes “down to imagination. Conservative people don’t have very much so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them... empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left leaning.”

Allegory is often used to convey these ideas. 1986’s The Bridge presents a strange coma-world which symbolises the crumbling of Britain’s post-war consensus and the onset of Thatcherism. The part of the Iron Lady herself is filled uncompromisingly by a sadistic Field Marshall, who indulges his pigs with luxury accommodation on his captured train whilst enjoying such activities as forcing tethered prisoners to run to exhaustion in front of the slowly driven locomotive. But it is, perhaps, the puzzling allegory of his Culture series which pose the most interesting political questions.

These novels mainly explore the question of “how perfect is the Culture?” Is this anarchistic, socialist, post-scarcity collective really a utopia? It caters for every possible human need and removes the need for sickness, death, money, want and intolerance. No one works as society is administer but hyper intelligent computers known as Minds for the benefit of humanity. Who would not want to live in the Culture where literally anything is possible? The subtle question asked by most of the Culture novels is: “is the Culture so perfect that they feel the need to meddle in the affairs of the less perfect?” Banks’s reaction to real-world military interventions perhaps suggests an answer: on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he returned his torn-up passport to 10 Downing Street in protest (after abandoning his original idea of “crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns”).

Many of the early books provide simple comparisons between the Culture and other civilisations. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture is at war with the Idirans who seek to aggressively conquer other species because they believe themselves to be superior. In The Player of Games, the Culture encounters the Azad who have a suppressive hierarchical society, repressive gender politics and the material problems of scarcity. Compared to these societies, the Culture appears utopian and the reader feels that they are justified in intervening to improve the lot of their citizens. Similarly, in Excession the Culture face the Affront, who are so disgustingly violent towards every other living creature that the reader has sympathy for the Culture in declaring all-out war against such an insult to sentience.

However in later books, perhaps as a reaction to the cultural imperialism of neo-con foreign policy such as the Iraq war, the Culture's well-meaning interference has disastrous consequences. In Look To Windward, the Culture unbalances the fiercely cast-based Chelgrian society in an attempt to make it more egalitarian. This results in a bloody civil war for which many Chelgrians feel the Culture is responsible. The Culture's belief in their own perfection and how to better others ultimately leads to more death than the Idirans or the Affront could create deliberately.

Whereas the Culture novels show us how great the future could be, Banks’s non-Culture novels show us how awful the future could be. In Against A Dark Background, the Huhsz cult is allowed to hunt and kill people in order for their messiah to be born. In The Algebraist the future is divided between the overbearing Mercatoria and the sadistic Starveling Cult. In these nightmarish vision of the future, technology is turned against humanity to repress and cause suffering. Banks has scorn reserved for our own world too, from the cruelty of Thatcher’s Britain in The Bridge to money-grubbing US businesses in The Steep Approach to Garbadale.

In his Culture set novella The State of the Art, Banks turns his lenses directly to Earth as we know it. Set in the 1970s, it deals with the Culture's first contact with humans. The Culture citizens, with their perfect existence, are horrified by how cruel life on Earth is. However, one Culture citizen decides to stay on Earth, smitten by the concept of Christianity (reaching the opposite conclusion, co-incidentally, to The Crow Road’s Prentice McHoan, who eventually finds happiness by rejecting religion). Banks explores the idea of whether happiness is truly possible without experiencing suffering, and thus can anyone in Culture be happy? He poses the idea that the Culture's meddling in the affairs of others may just be a means to justify its own existence.

At its best, sci-fi tells us something about our own world – as Banks once said, “no-body who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.” The Culture is more than just an aspiration of what lefties believe that a future society could be like, free from binding social roles, repressive leadership hierarchies and scarcity of resources. It is also an allegory for how westerners feel enlightened compared to poorer nations, and our need to meddle in their affairs – much as the West has done over the course of Banks’s career. We want to live in the Culture as much as we realise that we would rather live under western liberal democracy than under most other governments on Earth. The Culture reminds of the need to be critical of ourselves to see what effect we have on other societies.

1984: A critique

George Orwell's 1984 has a good claim to be one of the most famous books of all time. It is certainly one of the most famous books about politics, and has given us terms such as Thought Police, Big Brother and Orwellian. 1984 is frequently referenced in political discourse, but I am curious as to how many people who quote the infamous line about ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’ have actually read the rest of the book. Until recently, I had not read 1984; I knew the story, set up and characters, and I have read many of Orwell's non-fiction books, but I had never actually read his seminal text. So I decided to read the often-referenced indictment of tyranny and oppression.

1984 lived up to the hype. As well as being a terrifying vision of the future of humanity, where individualism, free thought and emotions are crushed by a cruel one-party super-state, I found it to be brilliantly written. I also found the book to be strangely old-fashioned in its thinking. Not conservative or even suffering from having an outdated vision of the future, many of Orwell's ideas about constant surveillance, entertainment machines that monitor you, and a fearful population constantly policing each other have come true. The key difference is that it is Google and Facebook who are constantly watching us, not the government. It is not a political party that wants to crush any dissenting thought, but hundreds of angry middle aged men on Twitter sending abuse to any woman who dares to question patriarchy. 1984 brilliant predicts 21st century life, but behind the scrutiny is not a not a shadowy political elite but large companies and ordinary human beings.

Our political debate has moved on from 1984. On the surface, Orwell's novel is an argument against the power of the state and for individual freedom. Orwell lived through the rise of Fascism and Stalinism in the 1930s and saw the USSR stretch its influence across Europe after the Second World War. He joined a Trotskyist brigade in the Spanish Civil War and fought against Fascism, but was appalled at how Stalinism was crushing alternative political movements on the left. Orwell believed in democratic socialism and individual freedom, and was against the naked tyranny of Stalinism. He wrote 1984 as a left-wing criticism of Stalinism, and not as a blanket condemnation of Communism - which unthinking readers often assume that it is.

Today, the threat of a specifically Stalinist dictatorship conquering the world through its subversion of the worker's struggle for emancipation is a distant memory. However, individual freedom does not reign worldwide. We are still watched over by a unknown elite, but now it is the masters of big data, not big government. Our thoughts and actions are still policed, not by political officers but by each other. Stalinism is dead, but we are still as frightened and as alienated as we were during Orwell's lifetime.

From our contemporary point of view, 1984 reads like a vision of the future from the past. It seem as a strange as the view in 1975 that we would be living on the moon in 1999. As I was reading the book, I kept asking myself, who supports this system? Who passionately believes in it, in the way that men on Twitter defend patriarchy and capitalism? Does everyone only support it out of terror? The political system of 1984 is so mercilessly awful that I felt that someone needs to gain from it or feel more secure through its existence to create the social cohesion that holds the system together. There are a few inner-party people who gain from the system, but what does the majority of the population get from it? Neoliberal capitalism benefits mainly a tiny group of the ultra-rich and oppresses billions worldwide, however the power of the ultra-rich is built on a comfortable middle class, who are supportive of the system because of their fear and superiority over the poor. The middle class lose out under neoliberalism (how many middle class people can afford to buy a property in London any more?), but they support it because they benefit enough from it not to cause a fuss.

In 1984, everyone suffers but no one questions. I do not see a political system like this surviving today, not with our ability to self-organise through social networks. Look at the Arab Spring and how the cruel dictatorships were swept aside by popular resentment (unfortunately to be replaced by war, chaos and more dictatorships). A system like that shown in 1984 could have conceivably existed the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s, but not today. Social control still exists, but not in such as an aggressive and heavy-handed way.

Orwell was a member of a Trotskyist Party in the Spanish Civil War and a Marxist critique of class and capitalism runs through his writing. However, 1984 does not take into account the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony. The totalitarianism of 1984 is heavy-handed and unstable. Culture is used to protect the party's power; the character of Julia works writing novels for the Ministry of Truth, but these are also blunt instruments of state control. Today social control still exists, but without taking away our individual freedom. It exists through subtly convincing us all that an artificial economic system - which only really benefits the very rich - is natural, inevitable and in all our best interests. If Orwell was writing 1984 today, it would reflect a similarly bleak future, but it would also reflect how individual freedom is co-opted by cultural hegemony to suppress dissent against the economic and political elites. The nature of Marxist critiques of society have changed.

One of the most positive things that happened during the second half of the 20th century was the decline of totalitarianism and the expansion of democracy. The Berlin Wall fell and the dictatorships of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy. China has liberalised, apartheid has ended in South Africa, and totalitarian in regimes in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Burma and many other countries have ended or are currently embracing democracy. The Arab Spring showed how the oppressed people of the world hunger for freedom and democracy. However, we are still not free. We are not free from class when social mobility is declining, we are not free from patriarchy when 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, we are not free from racism when Donald Trump can glide his way to the Republican nomination on a platform of Islamophobia and anti-Hispanic racism. Russia transitioned from a communist dictatorship to a capitalist one. The far right and neo-Nazi parties are growing in popularity across Europe and Fundamentalist Islam is spreading in the Middle East across Iraq and Syria. With the fall of Communism, it looked like freedom had won, but freedom is as much under threat today as it looked when Stalin might roll his tanks from Berlin to Lisbon.

Tyranny is still real, but it's face has changed since Orwell wrote 1984. It has become subtler and more appealing to our fears and insecurities. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalinism and Fascism wanted aggressively to take away our rights and suppress our individualism; now, it is our rights and our individualism that is used to police us. There is no Big Brother, no Party, no Thought Police, but we are constantly watching each other and any deviation from the dominant ideology is swiftly punished - ask anyone who stands up for women's rights on Twitter. The ways in which a shadowy elite control society and politics for their own interest have become much subtler since 1984 was written, but they are still just as present. If you want a vision of the future, just imagine a voice whispering that this is natural and in our best interest into your ear, forever.

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig

The poor do not deserve to be poor and the rich do not deserve to be rich, this is something I firmly believe in. An individual’s economic situation owes more to chance than to hard work or intelligence. My own middle-class status is because I had middle-class parents. However, those who are wealthy justify the fact that they have more money than others by arguing that they deserve it, which implies that the poor deserve to be poor.

This applies to any oppressed group in society; those who are discriminated against due to race, gender, religion, etc. They do not deserve it, your race or gender is decided by chance, and so no one deserves to be oppressed. However, powerful social groups justify oppression through any means of excuses from pregnancy being a “life style choice” so women can be paid less than men, to it being natural for one ethnicity to dominate another - this comes up with depressingly regularity throughout history.

There are many novels which explore the idea of the undeserving oppressed: for example, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, or Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman. A novel that I recently read which handles this expertly is The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig. Haig’s book makes the point that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged by chance and not their own actions in a powerful, captivating and accessible way.

The Fire Sermon takes place in a dystopian future, after society has been destroyed by “the Blast”. The surviving humans eek out a quasi-medieval life, and – as in medieval times – this life is often brutal and short. One side effect of the Blast is that all pregnancies result in twins: one Alpha twin, strong and healthy, and one Omega twin, weaker and different. Omegas are missing limbs, or have extra limbs, or occasionally possess strange predictive abilities. The difference between Alpha and Omega twins forms the basis of the class division in The Fire Sermon.

Once the Omega twins are a few years old, the Alpha communities who birthed them reject them. Omegas cannot have children so they are forced to leave Alpha society and live on the edge of the Alpha world. Occasionally, Omegas band together into supportive communities, which are frequently oppressed by the Alphas. Omegas are driven to the infertile lands where their medieval subsistence-farming existence is made more brutal and even shorter. The Fire Sermon makes the point that the Omegas in society are not to blame for the situations that they find themselves in, but the Alphas blame the Omegas for their poor quality of life, when in reality they are to blame.

What is most powerful about The Fire Sermon is that the twins are forever linked. If one dies then the other dies at the same time (this is what keeps the Alphas from exterminating the Omegas), if one suffers a great amount of pain then other twin feels it too. This shows that humanity is linked together by a common bond that cannot be broken, however the politically powerful ignore this bond by taking every opportunity enrich themselves at the expense of others.

The Fire Sermon shows how the powerful blame the powerless for being powerless, when it is really the fault of the powerful. A particularly graphic example of this is a section in the novel where an Omega is whipped and the narrator (an Omega) talks about how the Alpha twin will feel the pain of the whip. The narrator comments that rather than blaming a society that whips Omegas with little cause, the Alpha twin will blame the Omega for the pain that they feel by proxy. This shows how social structures direct people’s rage towards oppressed groups instead of the system of oppression. We see this with how the wealthy turn the working poor against the non-working poor, or how rich whites turn poor whites against ethnic minorities.

Another well observed event in The Fire Sermon, frighteningly similar to real life, is when the narrator sees how even those who do not benefit from the social structure, namely poor Alphas, are in favour of it because they can look down on Omegas. The poor Alphas are oppressed by the same social structures and scarcity of resources which oppress the Omegas, but rather than fighting to change the system in solidarity with Omegas, the poor Alphas cling to their small amount of superiority of being Alphas, and look down on the Omegas even more. We see this with race and class a lot in our world. The poor should be natural allies, but they are turned against each other by the social structures that oppress them.

As you can probably tell from this article, I find The Fire Sermon most interesting from a political point of view. The Alphas are the rich and Omegas are the poor; this is both materially true in the novel, and in an allegorical sense. Alphas pretend their greater material wealth is just, when it is obviously not. They claim the Omegas bring their poverty on themselves, when it is clearly because of Alphas excluding Omegas from good jobs and lands from which wealth can be extracted. Despite the Alphas’ policies to impoverish the Omegas, the Omegas are still blamed for being poor. We see this in our world when programs to help the poor, such as state-funded education or Sure Start Centres, are cut and then the poor are blamed for being uncompetitive. How the poor are supposed to be competitive when starting from a position of disadvantage without help is never explained.

What makes the allegory of The Fire Sermon so lasting and powerful is Haig’s knowledge of real life instances of oppression. Before publishing this book, she was an academic studying the Holocaust and has cited Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces as a major influence. Haig has pointed out in talks that the word Holocaust means burnt offering, which is appropriate to The Fire Sermon.

Haig has weaved a sense of sadness and hopelessness throughout The Fire Sermon, which is emblematic of how a lot of people think about the Holocaust. Her knowledge of how the social structures can turn from prejudice into bare-faced oppression shows in how painfully real the social structures of The Fire Sermon are. We see many examples of oppression in The Fire Sermon echoed in our world, and these details bring the book to life and make it believable.

That the poor do not deserve to be poor and the rich do not deserve to be rich is powerful in its simplicity, as is the allegory of The Fire Sermon. The nature of the oppression of the Omegas is similar to events in our world, which gives the novel a painful resonance and makes it a powerful argument for human compassion across social divisions. It is also a stark warning about how dangerous the belief that the oppressed deserve to be oppressed can be.