Science fiction always has been literary
snack food for me. The very first novel I ever read (other than kid-lit) was
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
The second was H.G. Wells’ War of the
Worlds. There was no turning back after that. Scifi includes quality lit,
and more of it (beyond Brave New World
and 1984) deserves to be recognized
as such, but there is no doubt that the bulk of it is popcorn. This past week between weightier meals
I’ve snacked on short stories by veteran scifi author C.J. Cherryh, whose prose
and characters I like well enough to tolerate the large portion of her work
that is fantasy rather than scifi proper. In general I don’t care for fantasy.
Why do I balk at elves and wizards while being fine with ETs and warp driven
star ships? I could rattle off a list of whys and wherefores, but in truth they
would be more rationalizations than reasons. Let’s just say it is a matter of
taste. (Yes, the magical elements of Star
Wars bother me too, despite the whole midichlorian explanation for them.)
But the well-presented motives, flaws, and moral challenges of Cherryh’s characters (when she
is on her game) are all-too-human enough for me to simply sigh and accept the
setting. The social setting (quite aside from witches and enchanted woods and
so forth) is generally medieval, as is the case in most fantasy by other
authors.
This once again reminded me of how often
scifi proper has the same social setting. Apparently democracy doesn’t have a
future either on earth or in space. Instead, whether in A Princess of Mars written by E.R. Burroughs more than a century
ago or in The Last Emperox (despite
the gender neutral term) by contemporary author John Scalzi, we have monarchs, empires,
noble houses, trade guilds, and feudal fiefdoms in which people vie for power
through treachery and family connections with the tactics and ruthlessness of
Richard III. There is little ideological in any of the plots: there are good
nobles and bad nobles, but that is all a matter of personality and personal
morals. For example in Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, the difference between heroic Duke Leto Atreides and evil
Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is that Leto is a nice guy while Vlad is a sadistic
creep. They are both hereditary despots (nominally serving the emperor) who
never consider undermining their own aristocratic privileges.
The cheesiest adaptation of the ERB novel - and not in a good way
I understand why so many scifi authors
fall back on this trope. It simplifies world-building. We are all familiar
enough with these arrangements to grasp the implications for a character at any
place in the social order. In such a system the personal is political. This in
turn simplifies storytelling, particularly when the characters are of the
ruling class. Democracy is messy and writing about it is hard. It can be done.
Take Gore Vidal’s eminently watchable and readable (non-scifi) play The Best Man first staged in 1960 and
turned into a movie in 1964. Though much has changed since the early 60s in
both the electorate and the specific policy debates, the process of choosing a
candidate is much the same, and this play successfully makes it exciting. Nonetheless,
trying to incorporate something like this into a tale of space battles and
colonizing planets can be challenging. It may distract from the main plot. I can’t claim total resistance to the
temptation. One of my own scifi short stories about a planetary colony in
another star system (The Lion's Share) features aristocratic arrangements,
though I didn’t go full-on medieval. (Descendants of officers from the
interstellar ship that brought the first colonists retained hereditary privileges.)
Still, I admire scifi authors who try something completely different such as
the anarcho-capitalism that turns up in Vernor Vinge’s novels or the
anarcho-communism that turns up in Cory Doctorow’s or the globalist socialism
of H.G. Wells in Men Like Gods. The
point is not whether one likes or hates their visions as a reader – only that
they didn’t surrender to the medieval trope. By the way, I suspect the scifi popcorn
authors may be right about democracy not having a long term future, though I do
not anticipate a revival of medieval institutions. The outer trappings of
democracy are likely to remain, but mostly as window dressing. The extent to
which real power already resides elsewhere is widely debated though exactly
where and with whom (the permanent bureaucracy? the 0.01%? the Bilderberg
group?) is disputed largely along preexisting ideological lines. My favorite
theory though is the one about interdimensional reptile aliens running the
world – not because I remotely believe it but because at least it is fun. I
couldn’t resist penning a short story (The Reptile Way) about that, too. If I’m wrong, however, and feudalism
does return, either homegrown or imposed from the stars, let’s hope our planet
gets a nice guy Duke Atreides and not a Baron Harkonnen.
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