Category Archives: Better Fantasy

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

Writing Better Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (Plus an Update)

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Writing

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It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, so when I saw this post on the FuturePundit blog, I immediately had to post about it. It gives a number of tips on writing more realistic post-apoc fiction (which can therefore lead to more interesting fiction). Check it out, it’s pretty good.

On a side note, I’m presently editing a collection of short stories which I plan to publish shortly. I’ve posted excerpts of early drafts before on this blog, and there’s more to come as we get closer to The Date. I’ve also having a children’s story I wrote a while ago illustrated, which is a lot more fun than working with prose editors! Details will be forthcoming on this blog, naturally, and I’m thankful for your attention, dear readers.

[UPDATE May 17 2013: It’s published! Check it out!]

On Sovereignty, Trust, and Protectorates

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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I recently read a journal article by Peter Haldén titled A Non-Sovereign Modernity: Attempts to Engineer Stability in the Balkans 1820-90. He writes to correct the conventional view that international relations in modernity is all about sovereign, independent states, and that the earlier era of protectorates, vassal states, or other such semi-autonomous regions ended with the arrival of nationalism. Indeed, the rationalist, modern Concert of Europe deliberately used non-sovereign zones several times in the Balkans area in order to control the outbreak of political crises.

The topic remains important for us readers today for a few reasons. First, understanding history is always good (particularly for budding fiction writers, who have a tendency to assume that all stories must be set in modern states or in absolutist monarchies, and thus impoverish their stories.) Second, non-sovereign states never really went away; they were just sleeping. Understanding the dynamics of non-sovereign states gives us a fresh lens to understand places like Kosovo, Chechenya, or even international organizations such as the European Union or the United Nations.

The power politics of the 19th century were marked by several themes, but two of the most important were the decline of the Ottoman Empire as a great power, and the rise of Russia which aspired to take its place. The fundamental problem facing the European powers was how to manage the fragmentation of Ottoman authority, which expressed itself in events like the Greek revolution, without causing a full-blown war between the Great Powers over the spoils.

Briefly, the favored solution was to take outlying provinces of the Empire and turn them into non-sovereign states, under the aegis of the Concert of Europe. These provinces would still nominally be subject to the Turkish Caliph and would pay tribute, and they would be prohibited from having free diplomatic relations with other states as an independent state would, or from having a military. But they would have civil militias and police forces for defense, they would be self-governing, and they could have diplomatic relations with the Concert of Europe as a body. Importantly, the Ottoman Empire would be forbidden to maintain troops in these non-sovereign states.

How does this help? In modern International Relations, states often try to set up buffer zones between them and some potentially hostile neighbor. These zones typically take the form of other, smaller, states. For example, China uses the totalitarian hell state of North Korea as a buffer between it and South Korea, or Japan. The “Low Countries” of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg were used as a buffer between France and Germany, to their periodic detriment.

The idea is that if you don’t share a border with a potential foe, then there are fewer opportunities for friction that might escalate into a full-blown war. After all, it is hard to distinguish between positioning troops to defend your borders, and positioning troops to attack your neighbor. So the buffer state helps to cool down the temperature. The only problem is that when a buffer state is independent, it can rely only on its own force of arms to maintain itself. The history of the Low Countries graphically demonstrates how easily this can fail; moreover, the potential for a buffer state to become a full-blown military ally of one side or the other ensures that the situation remains tenuous.

A demilitarized nonsovereign territory, on the other hand, is not guaranteed by force of arms, but by the cooperation of the potential rivals under color of an international agreement. There is less likelihood of miscalculation or escalating tensions, and more opportunity for creative institutional design (read the article for some great examples); not all peoples are ready for statehood, after all, even aside from the objections of their current rulers. And there would be less competition between rivals such as Britain and Russia as there would be (and were) over who would dominate the policy of newly independent states, if the territories could only have relations with the international body as a unit and not with other states bilaterally.

For a modern parallel, we can look to the European Union, which began as the European Coal and Steel Community—a project to strip West Germany’s ability to produce war armaments without the cooperation of France, and vice versa. By effectively tying their own hands, the member states hoped to foreclose on the possibility of war between them, so they could focus on the vital task of withstanding the Soviet Bloc. Henceforth, relations between member countries would be based on partnership and negotiation, not power politics.

However, in the case of the Balkans, the stability of the protectorate arrangements for Greece and elsewhere depended crucially on the degree to which the Great Powers trusted each other. In the three cases that Haldén considers, the initial attempts to institute a nonsovereign territory broke down once Russia violated the terms of the agreement, and Britain could no longer trust the Russians to play nice. (I am oversimplifying grossly.) Indeed, the creation of new independent states from the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire was, in Haldén’s telling, a suboptimal outcome, forced on the Great Powers by the breakdown of cooperation and the increasing worry over Russia’s growing power. The independent states would have to fend for themselves, without the aegis of a Concert of Europe which was growing ever-less-concerted over time. No surprise that World War I kicked off in the Balkans; Serbia was one of these formerly nonsovereign states.

Similarly, arrangements such as the EU or the UN are hampered by the lack of trust between member states. Many predict that the current economic crisis may spell the end of the Euro currency, or of the EU altogether, because Germany will grow tired of footing the bill for its more spendthrift neighbors forever. Early aspirations for the UN to become a true world government, meanwhile, have run aground on the cold reality that Americans do not trust a body made up mostly of dictatorships to act with the public interest in mind.

Haldén also draws a fascinating parallel with the old free-markets/interventionism debate in economics. He writes that creating new independent states who would rely on their own armies for defense, and hoping that they can contribute to international stability, is comparable to the intent of the free market. Conversely, a managed protectorate under the oversight of an international body is similar to government control of the economy, under the theory that such control will lead to more manageable outcomes. Whether or not you believe that government control can lead to better outcomes in the abstract, it is clear that you will not desire actual government control unless you trust the government to play nice. If you do not trust the government, you will accept even the putatively suboptimal outcomes of the free market in exchange for keeping a measure of control over your own destiny.

Haldén apparently wrote a book exploring some of these themes, which I may want to read. For our purposes, we should remember that what we are familiar with is not everything that is possible. As well, if we want to build a new world, it is crucial that we trust the main players; otherwise, the world may turn out to be not what we expected.

Why Must Fantasy Always be Set in Huge Worlds?

09 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Writing

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One of the things that has struck me as I read fantasy is that when an author aspires to create an Epic Story, almost inevitably the story will involve lots of travel that will span the fantasy world, taking us between settings that are wildly different from each other, the better to convey that sense of yawning scope that we are looking for, and to showcase the depth of the story’s world (not to mention the cleverness of the author for creating such a world!).

As always, I hasten to note that this is not inherently bad. When such stories are done well, the vast distances traveled and massive shifts of setting will help to build a truly impressive story. (Off the top of my head, George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire does a good job here—as does, in a very different fashion, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.) It seems that as far back as humans were telling stories, we associate physical journeys with spiritual ones, so that a character’s changes take on special emphasis when he or she is also journeying.

Still, there are perils to this approach. The most common one is that in our haste to create big worlds, we skip past the minor detail of making deep worlds. To take a ludicrous example, imagine a story in which there are several continents, each of which is ruled by a monolithic empire which is only distinguished from the next one by the color of its clothing, or the shape of its people’s ears, or somesuch. For a more concrete example, David Eddings’s Belgariad series features a series of countries each with overpowering national stereotypes, so that all Drasnians are cunning spies, all Sendars are plain country folk (including the king!), and so on. To be fair to Eddings, he was in part doing a send-up of genre clichés that date back to Tolkien at least… but still. My objection is this: in our haste to have vast worlds, we skimp on the details that actually make things interesting.

For myself as a political-science geek, one of the things that galls me is how often writers imagine that their fantasy kingdoms have no actual politics. Oh, sure, you can have your treacherous nobles or devious advisors, but what is their power base? Why are particular groups of nobles in one faction and not another? Where does each of the nobles live?

Consider, for example, The Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan, may he rest in peace, at least had the decency to include rebellious nobles in his story, which puts him head and shoulders above some other authors I could name; but the treatment of politics was boring. In each country, there were Loyal nobles, and Disloyal nobles, all of whom seemed to float in midair without any particular ties to geography, or concrete interests that might pull them toward one faction or another. And none of these conflicts ever spilled across borders! The factions that opposed our heroes never formed a broader alliance with each other, in stark contrast to all the rules of war and politics from time immemorial. No, they remained in their neat categorical boxes, country by country.

One ridiculous consequence is that no noble in WoT ever switches sides unless being faced with naked force, and even then only rarely. (In real conflicts, players are constantly trying to play both sides against the middle; for an example, just read up on any major Afghan warlord. James Clavell’s Shogun is a good fictional example of such maneuvering, albeit not a fantasy one, and notwithstanding the other objections you could make about it as historical fiction.)

For a while now, I’ve been toying with a move in the opposite direction: to have a fantasy story that takes place entirely within a single village. The characters no longer have the option of fleeing from their problems across the continent; the focus of the story would be on the intricate social conflicts between the village peasants, all of whom would naturally have to be identified by name and social position. I haven’t done it yet largely because it would be hard to pull off; all those family trees to work out, who’s married to whom and why it matters, the tangle of petty jealousies and feuds that mark village life, and so on. The biggest conceptual difficulty, I think, is how you could make a story of such constricted scope still have that vast fantasy feel. My current thinking is that the large-scale problems at work in the country as a whole would create fault-lines in the village, so that we still feel connected to the larger conflicts.

The attraction of such a challenge would be that the setting would have to be steeped in detail; indeed, only by having a rich texture in our setting would the story even be interesting. The characters would have to be well fleshed out, their relationships with each other would have to be compelling, the material facts of life in a fantasy village would have to be hammered out and establish the rhythms of the story. Compared to yet another world of flimsy cardboard countries, I think such a story could be a breath of fresh air.

For my readers, I would say that you have other choices besides a vast fantasy world stapled together from clichés. You might try a smaller canvas, with more care devoted to the individual brushstrokes, and see what that gets you.

Writing Interesting Characters with Transactional Analysis

02 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Self-Actualization, Writing

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By now, every aspiring author has been thoroughly brainwashed that to write a good story, you need strong characters. When you browse the web for resources on writing, you will commonly come across all sorts of checklists or creation tools for developing detailed characters. (Examples are all over the place, but some good ones can be found here, here, and here.) But I’ve noticed something interesting about 99% of these checklists: they focus on a given character, in isolation.

Yet think about yourself for a second. At all times, do you behave the same way? Or do you evince different behaviors, different emotions, different patterns of interaction depending on who you are with? I know that I behave very differently when I’m around my parents than I do when I’m around my professors, or my brother, or my friends in the community. Each of those patterns of behavior comes from a part of me, to be sure, but they are so different from each other that a single global “character sheet” would be unlikely to capture all of them.

Yet very often, we find fictional characters who always behave the same, because their authors seem to think that the characters must at all times be displaying their Traits with a capital T. There’s nothing particularly bad about this, when done well; character archetypes are a staple of mythic stories from time immemorial. But as writers we can expand our toolchest if we remember that people often act out different personas in their different relationships.

Fortunately, there is a tool we can use to make such characters. It is a heterodox brand of psychology called transactional analysis, first introduced by Eric Berne in his excellent 1964 book Games People Play. This book introduced a number of terms that have diffused into common speech, such as “stroking someone’s ego,” and so is interesting if only from a sociological standpoint. But beyond that, it provides a powerful lens for understanding how people might change depending on who they are with.

Briefly, Berne argued that people’s childhood experiences leave them with certain psychic needs that must be met, by subconsciously seeking out certain types of relationships that confirm preexisting beliefs about the world and one’s place in it. Think of the woman constantly complaining that all the guys she dates are losers, or the man who can’t hold down a job for more than a few months before lashing out at his boss. Berne provides examples of “games,” or scenarios that the multiple players in a relationship enact in order to fulfill their psychic needs.

For example, in “Why don’t you… Yes, But,” person A presents some problem that he or she is dealing with (“People annoy me at work,” for example), and persons B through Z then list off a series of solutions. “Why don’t you ask for a raise?” “Why don’t you wear earphones?” And so on. To each of these suggestions,  person A responds with an endless litany of excuses for why the solution could not possibly work. However frustrating and pointless the exercise might feel to an outsider, the participants are on some level satisfied. Person A gets to combine the illusion that he or she is trying to fix the problem with the true goal of the game, “confirming” that the problem cannot be solved and so no attempt need be made. The others get to feel as if they are being helpful, i.e. superior. And so it goes on and on.

Other games can be found in the book or summarized in the Wikipedia article. Some good ones include “I’ve Got You Now, You Son of a B****,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “If It Weren’t For You,” and “Look How Hard I Tried.” The point is that these are recurring pathological types of relationships between two or more people, which meet the unspoken and perhaps unconscious needs of the players thanks to various kinds of emotional harm that has marked their personalities.

I should note here that I am not a psychologist, and am not necessarily advocating the use of transactional analysis for therapeutic purposes. It may work for you or people you know, or it may not. Additionally, modern TA has gone off in several different directions, so Berne’s book should not be relied upon as the last word. Still, I am focused here on TA’s relevance for writing fiction, and for that it can be quite valuable.

How can you use this technique? Remember when writing your characters to consider how they interact with each other. Grunthor the Merciless might be gruff and unsympathetic to Lewellyn the Delicate, but be a devoted kind husband to Helga the Bonecrusher. The same person, acting out different patterns of relationships, based on how his particular impulses line up with those of the other person.

Still, there is a unifying thread between all of a person’s relationships, and that is the psychic needs of the person. Explaining this in detail would take me far afield; but suffice to say that this can provide the continuity between all of a character’s different interactions, allowing you to build a larger theme around each character’s relationships.

In short, think of your characters together, and not just alone.

The Social Effects of Weapon Technology (and How to Use in Writing)

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Military, Politics, State Formation, War, Weapons, Writing

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Mao said that power flows from the barrel of a gun.  He also said (and this is less remembered) that therefore, the Party must control the gun, and the gun must not control the Party. In other words, the brute facts of violence are important, but so are the social arrangements that control them.

This has been true throughout most of history. Whoever has control of violence will tend to gain political power. In several times and places, the military did not actually rule, but submitted to a legitimate authority—the United States is a decent example of this, or most the the European powers in the last few decades. But more frequently, those with the means of violence make the rules. Recent events in Egypt and elsewhere bear this out, as if we needed more examples.

That said, it makes a huge difference what the state of military technology is. For that will determine if weapons are available to the mass of people, or if they are restricted to only an elite few. Samuel Finer argued that his monumental History of Government (now out of print, and sadly hard to get—inexcusable on the part of Oxford Press in this time of print-on-demand!) that when weapons were widely available, politics tended to feature mass participation and broad egalitarianism, if not outright democracy as in the case of ancient Greek city-states and their hoplites. (Or, one might add, early America.)

On the other hand, when specialized weapons gave advantages to those wealthy enough to afford them, power tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few. For example, the rise of powerful kings in Europe had much to do with the advent of cannon—fantastically expensive to make, requiring a large specialized infrastructure of foundries. Furthermore, with cannon French kings were able to reduce the fortresses of their rebellious nobles, consolidating their own power.

In an earlier age, the armored knight was the undisputed master of the battleground, able to crush unarmored opponents with ease. Thus, power tended to be held by the armored warlords of the feudal era, whose rule depended on their use of naked force. Then the free Swiss militias developed their famous style of pike warfare, which completely nullified the advantages of the knight.

So weapons technology played a large role in politics. When considering a given era, we must ask: how common are weapons? Are they easy to use, or do they require specialized training? Do the wealthy gain any particular advantage from their wealth, or can mass armies defeat them?

This line of argument is one of the bases of the American gun-rights movement (examples can be found here, here, or here, but there are many others). It was also argued by Max Weber that the rise of the Israelite kings (over a previously egalitarian society) was the result of advanced armor, which gave a significant battlefield advantage to those wealthy enough to buy such armor.

This reasoning can also help explain the rise of child soldiers. P.W. Singer argues that child soldiers are now more feasible because small arms are becoming more advanced and lighter. Children can now use weapons effectively on the battlefield in spite of their small size and physical weakness, which has not been true for hundreds of years if ever. As a result, child soldiers are becoming a frequent sight in war-torn areas, since it is relatively easy for a brutal would-be warlord to coerce children into fighting for him (or her, I suppose).

Similar issues are beginning to arise because of drone technology. Robots have often been used for fun by hobbyists; but it is only a matter of time before these can be weaponized, and made available off the shelf. Governments will be unable to stop the spread of drone weapons into the general populace, and the social effects of this shift are likely to be extreme.

******

So as a writer, how do you use this?

First of all, when you are world-building, be careful to compare the state of weapons technology with the social system. Kings and castles are unlikely when no one wears armor or carries swords, or if everyone does. Magic can also be a weapon, in this sense, so if powerful magic is rare, it should generally translate into considerable power (unless there are social reasons otherwise).

You can write an interesting story about social upheavals caused by changing technology. For example, I’m presently messing around with a story where magic previously relied on using decades-long mental training to draw sigils of power in your mind; but then someone figured out how to get the same effects with sigils carved into physical media, such as discs of wood, and then everything collapsed into chaos as weapons technology exploded into the populace.

A great example of this concept is in the early installments of the excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary. A new means of transport allowing for functional teleportation is rapidly weaponized, and bombs are teleported into government offices across the galaxy. Chaos and war break out on hundreds of planets, and things only die down when scientists figure out how to block teleportation into protected areas.

I hope this piece proves useful. At any rate, it should be food for thought.

Tax Farming

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, Finance, History, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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April 15th is a date seared into the brains of most Americans—being the due date for us to turn in our tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service. In the modern era, most governments have wide-ranging powers to tax their populaces. Yes, you have problems with tax evasion here and there, but most urban dwellers are used to paying taxes as a matter of course (though we certainly aren’t happy about it).

When you think about it, though, the smooth collection of taxes requires a vast infrastructure of information processing, bureaucracy, and coercive enforcement if necessary. All of that came about very late in historical terms. In the United States, tax withholding from our salaries was only instituted during World War II, for example. (In a delicious bit of historical irony, the concept was developed in part by famed free-market economist Milton Friedman, when he worked for the Treasury in the early days of the war. For the rest of his life, he hoped that tax withholding would eventually be abolished.) The first income tax in the United States was a temporary measure enacted during the Civil War.

In other countries, the story was similar. The seminal work on this subject, at least in comparative politics, is Margaret Levi’s Of Rule and Revenue, a study of taxation systems throughout history. Levi’s basic argument is that rulers are constrained in how they can tax populations by their ability to coerce the people, the ease with which money can be hidden, and limitations in measuring technology. (I previously wrote of similar concerns behind the institution of English nobility.) In short, early rulers had a very hard time raising taxes directly, simply because it was next to impossible to extend their control over the populace.

So what did they do? The strategies of rulers were many, but in this piece I want to focus on a particular practice called “tax farming.” In its basic form, the ruler created some sort of tax or tariff—a 10% tax on salt, for example—but rather than collecting the taxes itself, the ruler would sell off the right to collect the tax to some private party. This was the tax farmer. The tax farmer would pay a large sum up front to the government, and in exchange would gain the right to ruthlessly apply the salt tax to anyone within his jurisdiction and pocket the proceeds.

This is not the same as modern privatized tax collection, where the private party must transmit collected taxes to the government. Here, the tax farmer is the direct beneficiary of tax revenue. In general, tax farming was incredibly lucrative for the farmer, while the state was forced to sell the future revenues at discount prices, simply because it lacked the capacity to collect taxes itself. (Here, we see another example of a principal-agent problem.)

A nice (free!) overview of tax farming in the 18th century can be found here, by the eminent scholar Eugene White. The French monarchy, for one, was heavily dependent on tax farming for revenue. This dependence was a major contributor to the French Revolution, for two reasons. First, royal revenues were always rather stunted because the tax farmers absorbed much of the take, weakening state power. Second, the tax farmers of France were notorious for harshly oppressing the populace in order to squeeze every last sou that they could. (Similar concerns were at play with the Publicans of ancient Rome; a nice overview can be found here.)

This is all very interesting, but why is it worth knowing? In fact, it is surprising just how relevant the principle of tax farming can be, even in modern society. Take casinos, for example. They pay a large sum of money to local and state governments, and in return gain the right to siphon vast amounts of money from willing gamblers. The voluntary nature of the transaction makes it more palatable, of course, but even then the addictive nature of gambling muddles things.

Even more striking is the history of the banking system. That subject is so fascinating that it deserves its own post, but for now, suffice it to say that for decades, many U.S. states raised nearly half of their revenue by selling monopoly banking charters. In return, a particular bank would be given exclusive control of its town, free to earn considerable profits from its residents.

Neither casinos nor early banks are really the same as tax farming, of course. But they are both indirect means of collecting revenue, in which private parties gain outsized profits compared to the government’s take. Other examples can be seen with only a little effort, and the idea of tax farming is a useful lens for viewing much government policy.

Aside from that, this is another opportunity to bang my hobby horse of more realistic fantasy writing. As noted, tax farming was often the cause of massive oppression of the people, and resulting political unrest. I’d bet my last cent that some budding fantasy author could spin a much more interesting story using tax farming as an ingredient, than the typical “Evil Overlord wants to oppress the peasants for the lulz.”

The key thing to remember is that a king turns to tax farming when he needs more money that he can easily extract with his own efforts. It is the hallmark of lands with difficult travel, poor communication, and weak and divided political loyalties. In time, the tax farmers can become extremely powerful in their own right, perhaps even rivaling the established authority in the same way that Italian mercenaries would often overthrow their employers. If that isn’t fertile soil for a good story, I don’t know what is.

Fantasy Fiction and Ideas for Writing Long Journeys

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, State Formation, Writing

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I’ve said before that I’m not a stickler for realism in fantasy, per se; but neglecting how things actually worked has costs, because authors miss opportunities for more interesting stories. The long journey is a perfect example. Going back deep into the mists of time, epic heroes are expected to take long journeys. J.R.R. Tolkien codified the trope for modern fantasy writers, and now you can hardly swing a cat without hitting a dozen fantasy books wherein characters travel from one side of their world to the other. A few examples suffice: Terry Brooks and the Shannara series, the Wheel of Time, to a lesser extent George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire.

The thing is that most of these depictions bear very little resemblance to how actual traveling tended to work in premodern societies. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; if realism gets in the way of a good story, then by all means, let’s chuck it out! But understanding how transportation worked back in the day can help us create new stories, or put new twists on old stories.

The first thing to understand is that most societies do not keep track of distances between locations; they keep track of how long it takes to get there. This makes sense; it might be only a few miles from one side of a steep mountain to the other, but actually traveling that distance could take most of a day. On the other hand, two villages might be twenty miles apart from each other, but if the intervening space is a flat, grassy plain, then it would be a relatively easy journey of less than a day. Travel time becomes more important than distance as the crow flies—after all, we aren’t crows.

(James C. Scott, in his brilliant Art of Not Being Governed, notes that the upland societies he studied would describe distances in terms of units of time that are relevant to their situation. For example, you might say that a particular clearing is “three boilings of rice away.” Or, someone’s house might be “two cigarette smokings away.” In a society without clocks, such units of time make sense as well.)

Travel paths are guided by the contours of the land. This is particularly true for vehicles; the United States railroads, for example, were laid out where they were (along flat areas and valleys) because the heavy coal-freight cars could not climb up grades of more than a few degrees. In consequence, communities further up in the hills had no access to the railroad. Whereas American towns and cities had previously been spread across several kinds of terrain, once the railroad arrived population was inexorably sucked into the lowlands, where the new towns could access the national transportation network.

In the ancient world, the easiest and fastest way to travel anywhere was by water. This was especially the case when you had to transport a lot of cargo, such as grain. Scott writes that Chinese merchants transporting grain by ox-cart would only travel about 250 kilometers; any further than that, and the oxen would eat more grain than they carried. Charles Tilly notes that it was roughly as expensive to transport grain from one side of the Mediterranean to the other by ship, as it was to transport it across 100 miles on land. This had drastic effects; it was common for seaport warehouses to be filled to bursting with grain, while scarcely a few hundred miles away villages were starving.

It is no surprise that most cities are placed next to a river. Rivers were the highways of the premodern world. Roads on land were important too, but were typically a second-best choice. The greatest cities stood at junctions between rivers, where merchants needed to transfer from one river to the other, or between a river and the sea. Amsterdam is a classic example.

On well-traveled roads, you typically ran into a village every several hours of traveling. Often, these villages were little more than an inn and a trading post, meant specifically to cater to travelers. Conversely, in times of political upheaval, good roads meant an easy passage for marauding bandits; small villages tended to evaporate as their residents fled for defended cities, or up into the hills where they could escape danger.

Traveling cross-country was possible but unusual. There would be no guarantee of food or easy passage, and it was dangerous to go off the path. Wild animals, poisonous plants, treacherous footing, all gave ample reasons to stay in the well-trodden areas. There is a reason that African explorers carried machetes. Otherwise, you simply couldn’t make it through the jungle. The European forest was similarly impassible. Mountainous areas too were formidable obstacles; have you ever tried hiking up a mountain?

Now, how can you turn all of this into plot elements? First of all, I believe there’s not enough fantasy-traveling over water. (A good counterexample is Eric Flint’s and David Weber’s 1633, not surprising given the emphasis on military logistics.) To be sure, most fantasy stories will have the obligatory canoeing sequence, but it is usually a short sequence soon forgotten. But imagine if your main mode of transport were to go down the length of one river, and then make portage to the next one, and the next? There are possibilities there for new sorts of plot obstacles, hair-raising dangers, river pirates, and more. Plus, you get the benefits of land mere feet away from your boat, allowing detours off of the river and into untamed wilderness whenever the plot demands it.

Second, because travel tends to follow predictable paths, it makes ambush far more likely and realistic. This can work for and against the heroes. There’s no need for contrivance to make sure your heroes intercept the dastardly villain, when said villain can only pick one realistic path to travel on.

Third, a bit of research can help you depict just how hard it really is to go off the road. If our heroes need to avoid danger by leaving the main highways, why not emphasize how this makes them giant studs?

Finally, how many times have you skimmed over yet another paragraph describing the heroes’ journeys? With a little more realism, such passages can actually become interesting to read, precisely because they can be filled with unexpected details. For example: if it is so expensive to transport goods over land, what goods are being transported and why?

I hope that this post can help you restore a sense of size to your fantasy worlds. Again, I’m not asking for realism for its own sake; but use the ideas here to come up with new stories to tell, or new ways to tell them. Difficulties in travel impose constraints; how your characters overcome those constraints is a story, if you want to tell it.

On Revolutions in (Some) Fantasy Fiction

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Politics, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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(This post has been retroactively made part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Traditionally, fantasy has lent itself to stories of heroic uprisings or revolutions, as the Evil Overlord is swept out of power by the brave protagonists and their loyal army of oppressed commoners. That can be a good story, and sometimes the stories are indeed quite good. It feeds directly into some of our cultural loves: rooting for the underdog, the reestablishment of justice and defeat of evil, and so on.

But what makes this literature trying for a student of comparative politics is how infrequently revolutions are handled with any degree of realism. Not that I demand absolute realism in all books touching on politics—far from it. Often we simplify the mechanics of a story to distill its essence. Still, what annoys me is that people end up telling the same bloody story over and over and over again. And this is so, I think, because the mental model most fantasy authors have of revolutions is so impoverished.

From what I’ve read, most fantasy authors have two archetypes for how a revolution goes off: Robin Hood (as refracted through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), or the French Revolution and the various other Parisian dustups. Egregiously, I haven’t read any fantasy modeled after the American Revolution,* and only a single work of science fiction (Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a fun read). And most published fantasy writers live in the United States, for Heaven’s sake! And of course, the American Revolution is by no means the only other model you could look to.

The example that spawned this post is Steven Brust’s novel Teckla. (This is not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against Brust in particular, but only because it’s the book I happened to read.) In the book, an oppressed, illiterate underclass is being organized by a group of revolutionaries with the goal of blocking commerce into the capital city, in order to force reforms. To do so, the revolutionaries first endeavor to teach everyone how to read, so that they could then publish propaganda in newspapers.

This was the first point where I was tempted to throw the book across the room. In a real illiterate society, no one would have had the daft idea to publish a mass-market newspaper in the first place. It’s a bit like writing and selling manuals on how to use an iPod in the 1960s. Worse, written material would not be the most effective way to organize untutored masses anyway. Far more effective would have been using actual people to spread the message and organize more revolutionaries where they went, as was done by revolutionaries from Spartacus to Mao.

It got worse. The favored tactic of the revolutionaries was to build Paris-style barricades across the main road into the capital city. All well and good, except that a major mechanic of Brust’s entire series is that the ruling class knows how to teleport with magic. Barricades, or any static defense not augmented with its own magic, would be worse than useless.

So why did Brust rely on such tired tropes, even when they went counter to the very logic of his fantasy world? I suspect that the only model he had for how revolutions work was revolutionary France. And because he had no other mental model to work with, Brust did not have the building blocks that would have fit his story better.

And this is my point. When you study real historical revolutions with an eye toward fiction writing, you quickly find the potential for all sorts of stories that have rarely been told in Western fantasy. More realistic treatment of revolutions can be used to explore themes of divided loyalty, or how governments structure their environment to better exert their power, or how revolutionaries end up doing the same thing, or—and this is particularly fascinating—how civilians will often exploit the conflict between government and rebel, by extorting aid from both sides, or by denouncing resented neighbors as traitors to the cause (so that they will be executed and you can take their stuff).

At any rate, new stories, with new possibilities. This doesn’t mean that the old classics need to be chucked out; Robin Hood will always be a good story. But a creative author can take the old building blocks and mix in a few new things from real life, to make something original. A good place to start (not least because it’s free) is the 1970 classic by Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority (PDF). It’s a study they carried out in the middle of the Vietnam War for the RAND Corporation, and has details from the history of Western counterinsurgency. Much recommended.

Oh, and if there is actually good fantasy or sci-fi out there that handles rebellions well, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to read it.

_______

* Which was not technically a revolution in the political-science sense, since the American social structure and forms of government remained more or less intact, and no one tried to extend the revolution to Great Britain. Really, you could best describe the colonial uprising as a war of secession from Britain.