Is the Federation really all that democratic, though? They have a president who’s elected somehow, but I don’t recall ever hearing about public elections, a legislature, or political parties (unless you count the Maquis). Given the whole cashless society thing, I always assumed the Federation government was more of a socialist meritocracy that draws its government leaders from the civil service.
I think the Fed has a decentralised government, with the Fedgov handing down a few basic principles, like no political murders and so on, along with whatever it is they do to support Starfleet and the unified foreign policy.
An opinion on the “Masses” in Science Fiction–
Is this a comment on Democracy?
I think one of the most important themes of the new *Battlestar Galactica *was how democracies deal with times of extreme crisis - the most extreme crisis imaginable, in fact. Along the way, it dealt with the relationship between the government and the military, civil liberties during emergencies, with the balance between what the public needs to know and what it has the right to know, and how democratic leaders have to be dictators at heart in order to be able to do their jobs. Frankly, it dealt with these subjects as well as any other TV series ever has.
The fear that the lower classes were outbreeding the elite goes back a century before Kornbluth. In America it was fueled by the increasing number of immigrants to the country, and became a major issue after immigration soared from the non-English speaking eastern and southern European countries. (In England, it pitted the lower classes against a faded aristocracy.) “Scientific” (i.e. bad science, sometimes outright faked) evidence about generations of inbred families, most famously the Jukes and the Kalikaks, creating large numbers of criminals and the “feeble-minded” convinced even rational people that nothing except forced sterilization could solve the problem. The whole eugenics movement of the early part of the 20th century was less about improving the upper classes than weeding out the lower classes.
Movements started at the height of eugenics like Technocracy, a rationalized democracy controlled by scientists and engineers, became popular as a fix for the Depression. Technocracy was hugely influential among the first generation of Golden Age science fiction writers. Kornbluth, along with his sometimes partner Pohl, tended to satirize this thinking. But the satirists never have the power of the originals.
Two minor comments: On the Vorkosigan Saga: It started out as a TOS era fanfic. Beta is the Federation and Barrayar are TOS-era Klingons. It’s evolved considerably since then, but the roots do still show.
On Harringtonverse:
It’s actually based on the pre-Napoleon French First Republic. You know, the Terror and all that. Rob S. Pierre, for crying out loud.
I actually know that, but I have no idea of random people on the internet understand revolution era France. People in this time and place do understand soviet and single party …
and if you like I can actually ask Lois if her universe started out as fanfic. Not sure if I can get her to join the dope and actually comment on here about it but you can join her mailing list and chat with her there, or on her list on the Baen boards.
Quoth Exapno Mapcase:
This is hardly surprising, given that libertarianism is fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.
Jerry Pournelle is the kind of paleoconservative who does seem to have a problem with democracy as such (and probably laments the fall of Apartheid – even, one suspects, the fall of the British Empire). See The Prince. (Co-authored in part by S.M. Stirling.) The story of the Helots’ rebellion on Sparta is, as Pournelle states in the foreword, a study of Maoist low-intensity conflict from the POV of the state, i.e., how to defeat it. The Helots’ casus belli is that on the planet Sparta, they have no votes – Sparta having an elaborate constitution designed by political scientists, so complex that even the heir to the throne once remarks, “I’d hate to have to explain how it works,” but one feature is that citizenship must be earned, by admission to a “phratry” and militia service, among other things; it is effectively impossible for first- or second-generation immigrants, of whom there are vast numbers. Notably – and quite preposterously, in light of the real-life history of struggles for franchise expansion – the Helots do not seem to have any actual grievance or suffer any socioeconomic disabilities just because of their exclusion from political participation. (Their only apparent ground for resentment is that many of them lived a cushy welfare-state existence on Earth (where “citizen” means “welfare bum” and the antonym is “taxpayer”) and then got deported to a planet where they are expected to work for a living; but none of the Helots’ leaders are making any promises to do anything about that.) In any case, the Helots are portrayed as Pure Evil – their leaders are cynical and amoral and power-mad, and all their followers are dupes and brutes. In the climax, there is a massive street-battle in the capital, in which the middle-class shopkeepers join forces with the elite and slaughter the lumpenprole Helots almost to the last man. The Middle and the High united against the Low in an utterly victorious war-to-the-knife. The pages of that scene fairly drip with Pournelle’s liberated semen.
No one wants to hear a tale of the space battlestation that didn’t get built because of galactic congressional budget cuts.
This is incorrect. It’s a rumor that’s been kicking around the fan community for years, but has no basis in fact, and has been repeatedly denied by Bujold:
Except in the SW Universe itself, where that would form a three-episode plot arc in the hip new holodrama about the hard-working, idealistic staffers in the West Wing of the Emperor’s Palace.
Actually, in A Civil Campaign you do see Miles and his croneys working to get 2 initiatives through the Council of Counts and various mentions throughout the series of various laws being worked on or discussed. In the Honor Harrington series there are occasional governmental things being touched on, especially once Honor ends up as part of her government, and subsidiary books dealing with the slave trade have a few scenes of people working on governmental issues, and in the Herris Serrano series there is actually one entire book of political shenanegans as the government essentially gets destroyed and they have to pick up the pieces and make it function [it is a fight between people who serieally rejuvenate and people who dont]
LMB: Ah, this one again.
There is just enough of a grain of truth under this that I can’t deny it outright, but the real story is rather more complex.
The Vorkosiverse actually got its proto-start in the very first novelette that I wrote, “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma”, back in late 1982. It never sold at the time. (Later, it was printed in the Boskone SF convention souvenir collection Dreamweaver’s Dilemma when I was GoH there in the mid-90’s.) Beta Colony and the Wormhole Nexus generally got its (somewhat off-stage) start in that tale, plus the history of jump ships, the initial colonization disapora from Earth, etc. Barrayar did not yet exist.
Scratching around for what to write next, in December of 1982, I bethought me of a TOS scenario that I had made up to entertain myself while driving to work at OSU Hospitals at least five years prior. Which was, indeed, a female Federation officer and a Klingon captain (pre-ridged-rubber-heads; these were the old-style fuzzy-eyebrows morph) down on a hostile wilderness planet who had to cooperate to trek I-don’t-remember-where for I-don’t-remember-why; the mental movie was never written down. There was no more to it. Whether or not this long-vanished train of thought qualifies as “fanfic” seems to me a question for debate. By someone other than me.
Walking around behind the notion of Klingons to the actual historical Earth militaristic cultures upon which they were based, I considered both European and Asian models, especially the samurai. A key work under this (besides a 3-volume history of early Japan I’d read back-when, and a history of the Meiji era) was A Daughter of the Samurai (1928) by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, a memoir of a woman who was born just prior to the Meiji era as the daughter of a rural two-sword samurai, and who ended teaching Japanese at an eastern American university in the 1920’s. The notion of a planet with that sort of abrupt generational socio-political transition came from that reading. Lost colonies being an SF staple, one with such a traumatic rediscovery yielded my Barrayar pretty quickly. It slotted very neatly into my wormhole diaspora background from the novelette, Aral’s boots appeared in the mud in front of Cordelia’s nose, and the rest was, so to speak, future history.
Note that the rest of the series, not to mention the rest of that book, was not yet in my mind: just getting to the end of My First Novel quite filled my plate. (Working title Mirrors, final title Shards of Honor (1986))
You may copy and quote this in full if you wish.
Ta, L.
There are many reasons I love hanging out on a mailing list belonging to a favorite author, social conviviality with fellow readers aside, we frequently get into very long discussions about what is going through peoples minds as they read the books, and what the author had going through her mind writing them.
You don’t have to. Firstly, it’s mildly obvious. Secondly, she already said as much in Dreamweaver’s Dilemma. I love her work, by the way, or I wouldn’t have made the effort of tracking that down.
Ah, yes. You actually did write to her. I thank you, and I ask you to pass along my admiration for her work and her style. God knows I can’t do it. I’ve tried. I can’t even do fanfic, it winds up flat and with a single voice.
That’s where it started. It’s not a bad place to start, and it’s certainly different now. God knows I prefer it over TNG era Klingon inanity. It’s not that it is fanfic, it’s not that it has remained fanfic. It’s just that I can see the roots of it going back to a medical officer in a velour miniskirt and a noble Klingon officer fantasy. She gets the tone beautifully in Shards of Honor. Different, but both strong willed, but from different worlds entirely. So few people can pull that off.
It’s like saying I can see the roots of the Federation series being based on Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Or Battlestar Galactica in Mormon theology. Or, of course, Star Trek’s roots in Hornblower.
It’s all but gone once Miles shows up. But the first bit, I can see the set and the uniforms and makeup. And I’m certainly not complaining at all. It just bleeds through a tiny bit, enough for me to see the old velour uniforms.
(Feel free to share my statements with her, I hope she understands what I had to say is not disparagement or criticism.)
And, in the spirit of the staircase, I should add that I hesitated between ‘drabble’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘fanfic’ in the original post, and chose ‘fanfic’ as the most respectful of the possibilities. Fantasy may have been more appropriate, but it struck me as slightly denigrating.
Further, if you can convince her to join to post, even once, I would be delighted to fork over for a year’s membership for her. (It is as close as I can come to a palanquin littered with rosepetals, in this curs’d electronic format.) Not that you should make any effort that way, simply that if she is so inclined, I state I shall do such a thing and am willing to be called on it.
Heinlein’s Double Star is pretty much all about democratic politics (in a constitutional monarchy).
There seems to be a lack of balanced, constitutional democracy in most SF, there is democracy ,yes., but they are pathetic, cowardly, defeatist, idiots as in Star Trek or the New Republic in Star Wars, high ineffective as in the Old Republic in Star Wars and generally has a “mob” comparble in intelligence to the worst of the Third World dictatorships. Apparently even though technology has massively advanced the average man has become more and more ignorant.
For content, I’ll agree that Eric Flint’s 1632 series is entirely within the realm of science fiction. Social science rather than hard science, but science nonetheless. Make a thing happen, have the happening event be the focus of the story, see what happens next. At least as much as Asimov’s Nightfall is. Just because it’s an alternate past doesn’t knock it out of the running at all. And god knows it’s all about small town politics, county wide politics, small country politics, and empire-wide politics… even military politics at some points. I adore it. And it’s very pro-democracy.
I think it’s harder to write democracy well. You can write about a small group of people easily, but mass movements and backbench fighting all at once can be a pain in the rear on anything short of a thousand page scale. Especially if you’re trying to cover anything else, like a heroic battle against evil. The 1632 series focuses on democracy as a battle against darkness and repression, so it works well there.
There used to be a theory that transportation and communications technology would limit the number of people, and the amount of territory, that could be effectively governed by a democracy. If the polity got above that limit, then the ability to respond quickly to a crisis would take priority over the legislative and bureaucratic niceties. This idea gave a quick, simplistic explanation for why Rome went from republic to empire, and why China had never been a republic. A galaxy-spanning civilization would certainly be over such a limit.
Also, there is an element of wish-fulfillment in a lot of science fiction. If your hero rescues The Galactic Emperor’s daughter from the space pirates, he can be rewarded much more lavishly than if he rescues some prime minister’s daughter.
This is not unique to science fiction, by the way. A whole lot of romance novels are set in 17th Century to 19th Century Europe, and their heroes are often titled aristocrats.