A lot of aspects of real life are hard to make interesting in a story. Any kind of work, for instance: For a story to be about the work, it has to be work with a human element, and ideally an element of human wills in conflict. House trying to puzzle out a diagnosis makes a good story because he usually has to see through the patient’s lies, conscious or unconscious, to do it; an engineer trying to solve a problem, that would be much harder.
Democracy is all about human wills in conflict. It is interesting to write about – all the more so because it is the system we actually live in; there are vast volumes of (realistic) fiction on political themes. But by the same token, it is all utterly familiar to us. In a world where democracy had never been tried – and where censorship were loose – speculation about democratic societies would be good material for SF.
I always liked that one of the protagonists in Futurama is a dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat (grade 34).
*They say this boy’s born to be a bureaucrat
To be all obsessive and snotty
I made my friends and relations file long applications
To get into my tenth birthday party.
**LaBarbara: *But something changed when my man turned pro. Hermes: I was sorting but I wasn’t smiling LaBarbara: He forgot that it’s not about badges and ranks Hermes: It’s supposed to be about the filing!
Those pathetic, cowardly, defeatist idiots defeated the extremely powerful Dominion in a no-holds-barred war in the last seasons of ST: DS9. Show some respect!
Kirk talked all the time about the Federation being democratic, and even the Klingons and Romulans who heard him and rolled their eyes didn’t contradict him; they just hated and opposed the Federation for doctrinal or geo- (galacto-?) political reasons. Although ST never went much into the mechanics of elections to the Federation Council, it is recognizably a democracy with many features - the rule of law, civilian control of the military, freedom of speech, freedom against self-incrimination, etc. - that we would recognize as similar to our own:
In other sf…
The U.S. is still recognizably democratic in Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two, and contrasted with the Soviet Union, which is not.
Niven and Pournelle feature a strong constitutional monarchy in The Mote in God’s Eye.
John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series has a future democracy of all humanity, not unlike ST’s Federation. Likewise the Confederacion of several of Joe Haldeman’s books, such as All My Sins Remembered, or the United Nations (truly a governing entity and not a debating society) of The Forever War.
As noted earlier, conflict is necessary for good, engaging drama, and a well-functioning democracy is boring to most people. Still, there are several very good political thrillers that implicitly say democracy is better than the alternative: I can think of Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s Seven Days in May, off the top of my head. The political comedy Dave is a good cinematic example - and, of course, The West Wing.
Bumping this thread to add a mention of Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi’s latest book. The democracy in question is only incidentally involved, but in all respects it’s portrayed as a government of the people which strives to do the right thing, and actually does play a role in defeating the villains.
Thanks for alerting me to this - I’ve never read John Scalzi, but I have loved the Little Fuzzy series ever since I discovered it in high school. I just put it on my library hold list.
In addition to Double Star (mentioned earlier), Heinlein’s novella Magic, Inc. is also almost entirely devoted to the democratic political process (although I suppose it’s strictly defined as fantasy, even though it reads more like SF).
That people can only find a handful of examples of democracy, many of them barely tangential at best, to mention over 60 years and tens of thousands of stories speaks louder than any examples they do find.
Word. I’d only dimly heard about him before the last couple weeks. Then I saw him on the list of guests for Phoenix Comicon and thought, oh, that’s cool, he worked on SGU. Then I started looking into his writing, and I became a fan overnight. I met him on Friday and he signed copies of Fuzzy Nation and Old Man’s War for me, and he read excerpts from upcoming books on a Saturday panel. Really cool.
I have over 5000 SF and fantasy novels out in the barn, You know how long it would take me to have mrAru drag them in one case at a time so I could flip through them looking for the political system in question? I am working off memory here …
Then I would have to separate out the different types of democracy, republicanism, representational monarchy, tyranies and dictatorships…
And, for that matter, there were a nigh-infinite amount of shorts and novellas in the golden age that were basically ‘America In The Future As A Space Empire’, but the government didn’t actually matter to the story.