Tag Archives: Fantasy

How Ideas Drive Societies

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Recently I attended a wonderful seminar on “Capitalism and the Future of Democracy” with the Tikvah Fund. One of the main themes of the class was about how societies and economic systems could not simply exist on their own, but needed justification. Back in premodern times, all over the world, the pursuit of wealth was seen as morally corrosive, commerce was viewed with skepticism if not outright contempt, and governments saw it as their duty to guide economic behavior with a heavy hand. Then came John Locke, who argued that ownership of property was a God-given right, an individual accumulating wealth actually facilitated the welfare of the whole society, and the best thing that governments could do is to uphold property rights and otherwise get out of the way. Thanks in part to that claim, a revolution in thinking about commerce swept across Europe.

Now, many are agitating about growing inequality. Whether or not inequality is a problem (I think it is, though not always for the same reasons as others) and whether it should be solved by government intervention (I think most proposed remedies are worse than the disease), it is surely the case that ideas about economic justice are creating social currents that work against the “natural” direction of our current economic systems. Wealth will have to be justified if it is to be perpetuated.

I came away from that seminar with ideas for another long-term project, now that my dissertation is done. (More on that when I actually decide to launch into the thing…) But a larger point, which is useful for fiction writers as well as those seeking to change the political world, is that legitimacy is a powerful force. New ideas can change notions of what behavior is legitimate, or which institutions are legitimate, or how that legitimacy is to be established and maintained. Before you can overthrow the king and replace him with the glorious people’s assembly, you need to believe that kings are not divine and that people have the right to govern themselves. This is not an obvious belief, and how such beliefs get spread in a society could be a powerful story in itself.

Politics for Writers?

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

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This being November, I am once again participating in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Which of course has me thinking about one of my favorite topics, politics and fiction.

There’s a lot of “how-to” material for writers out there—how to write a compelling scene, create believable characters, and so on. But as far as I can tell with some random Googling, there seem to be few resources to help writers (especially fantasy and science-fiction writers) think about politics. As I’ve written about on this blog before, most writers have only a few mental models of how politics could work (fantasy medieval kingdom, evil galactic overlord, idealized democracy, and maybe one or two others); while there’s nothing wrong with any of these when handled well, the shortage of raw materials affects the kind of stories a writer can tell. As a political-science junkie, I find myself wishing for more variety.

What resources there are seem to view politics from the perspective of world-building, as an afterthought of things like culture and language. For example, Holly Lisle’s Create a Culture Clinic (which is otherwise a fantastic aid to fleshing out the richness of invented societies, and I highly recommend it) devotes less than ten pages to politics—and those are mostly asking checklist questions like “Who is in charge? How do they punish criminals? What rights are there?”

Missing is any discussion about what an author’s choices would mean for the story. Or, even more useful, what kinds of stories you could best tell in a given political system. Or, best of all, how the tensions within a given political system could give rise to powerful new stories. If I were a beginning author, I would want to start there—and once the plot is in place, then I would decide on the details that all the world-building resources deal with.

So it seems to me that there is a great need for a writer’s guide to politics in invented societies, and how to choose among political systems to help generate the strongest plots. But to write a guide like that, you would need to be an expert in politics who can cut through all the details and isolate the fundamental building blocks—the handful of key questions that are the key to rapid understanding. (As you can probably tell, I’ve been reading a lot of Timothy Ferris lately…)

As it happens, I am an expert in politics. And better, I’m an expert in Comparative Politics, which is the most interesting subfield within political science, if I may say so myself. And I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time.

What I’m envisioning is a relatively short e-book that would describe each archetypical political system before distilling it down to a single chart of features, showing the most important actors in the system, the key points of stress, and the story themes that this system is perfect for dealing with. For example, a communist dictatorship would be a good setting to address themes of the individual versus the state, or property and communal need, or privacy in the face of constant surveillance. A monarchy would be good for looking at questions of loyalty, honor, the role of divine right, and so on.

There’s a lot more, of course, but the key here is that in a very few pages, you could learn how to build exactly the political system you need to form the backdrop to the story you want to tell—or you could discover new kinds of stories that never would have occurred to you otherwise.

If this is something that you’d want to see, be sure to fave this post, and I’ll get right to work.

The Princess, the Dragon, and the Baker: A Chanuka Fairy Tale

19 Monday Aug 2013

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[What follows is the text of an illustrated children’s book, now available on Kindle and in hardback. The artwork from my artist collaborators is absolutely stunning! Check it out!]

Once, long ago in a faraway land, there was a wise princess who lived in a magical castle. The princess commanded a large fearsome dragon, who was strong enough to do all sorts of work that people needed. If the people needed fish, the princess would tell her dragon to carry a giant net to the ocean and fish there. If the people needed a new road, the princess would have her dragon melt rocks with his fiery breath and pave the road with them. And the people were happy, because their princess took care of them.

But the dragon was not happy. Not only was he doing all the work, but he was always hungry, because the princess wouldn’t let him eat people. Imagine you were a dragon, and you were surrounded by happy people all the time, and you couldn’t even eat one of them! So the dragon was very sore at the princess, and dreamed of a day when he could break free of her control.

At last, his chance came. The dragon used a powerful magic spell to send the princess into a deep sleep, and hid her away in her castle. Then he flew out into the land, and ate dozens of sheep and cattle and even a few people. And the people were afraid, because their princess was gone and could no longer take care of them, and because the dragon’s hunger was insatiable.

Many heroes ventured into the castle to save the princess, but none of them ever returned. The people lost hope that they would ever have their princess back. But one man had not lost hope. Yet he was no great warrior, but a simple baker named Chanoch. And he had a plan.

One day, Chanoch came up the road to the castle, carrying a big heavy backpack, and cautiously crept inside. He found the main hall covered by thick darkness; he couldn’t even see the great throne where the princess sat, but he knew in his heart that she was there. Looking around the edges of the darkness, he saw four great oil lamps on the left side of the room, and four more on the right.

“If I light those,” he said, “I’ll be able to see the princess. Maybe then I’ll know what to do.”

But scarcely had he taken out his flint and tinder to light a torch, when the room rumbled as the dragon swooped down from the roof and landed on the floor with a thud. “Oh no you don’t!” he cried with a mighty roar. “I suffer a terrible hunger, and the princess would never let me satisfy it. So as long as the hunger remains, the princess will stay my prisoner!”

Oddly enough, this was just what Chanoch had expected. “Good sir dragon,” he said kindly, “of course I don’t want you to go hungry. But have you ever tried eating something other than people?”

The dragon paused and cocked his head. Normally, the heroes just went straight to the stabby stabby, and then he ate them. Chanoch’s politeness was unusual. “Well,” he said, “the princess fed me nothing but lettuce and tofu. It was all so bland. I needed something more. I needed to eat people!”

“I can understand that,” Chanoch said. “But what if there were a food that was better than people?”

“Like what?” the dragon asked, curious.

For answer, Chanoch took out mixing bowls, a frying pan, and ingredients from his backpack: flour, water, sugar, eggs, and oil. He mixed dough, formed it into round balls, and put them into the pan with a little bit of oil. “Could you do the honors?” he said to the dragon.

The dragon was skeptical, but he breathed a short puff of fire onto the pan, frying the dough balls in the oil. Chanoch nodded in satisfaction and held one of the dough balls out to the dragon.

“What is it?” the dragon asked.

“It’s called a donut,” Chanoch replied.

“Hmm,” the dragon said. He snaked out his big head and snagged the donut with his long thin tongue, chomping on it with his giant pointy teeth. “Not bad,” he said, surprised. “Nice and soft on the outside, and sweet and chewy on the inside. Kind of like people.” But he hesitated. “It’s still not as good as really eating people,” he said. “There’s something missing.”

“Tell me,” Chanoch said, “and I’ll try to fix it.”

“Well,” the dragon said, concentrating on the taste, “when I eat people there’s a gooeyness to it. The donut is too dry on the inside.”

Chanoch smiled. “Easy enough.” He took out a jar of strawberry jelly and a large syringe. Sticking the syringe into the center of a new donut, he squirted jelly inside, and sealed the hole with a little dough. He held it out to the dragon. “Try it now,” he said.

The dragon ate the jelly donut, chewing slowly, little globs of jelly dripping onto his scaly lip until he licked them up. “Hey, this is good,” he said. “Even better than before.” But still he hesitated. “It’s close, but it’s still not quite the same.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” Chanoch agreed. “Fried donuts aren’t people, even if you put jelly in them. But I’ll tell you how you can make them even better than people.”

“Better? Really?” The dragon blinked his great shining eyes.

“All you have to do,” Chanoch said, “is say ‘thank you’ before you eat them.”

The dragon laughed, smoke trailing from his mouth. “That’s silly! How could saying ‘thank you’ make food taste better?”

Chanoch smiled. “Because saying thank you shows that you appreciate the food. Here, try it.” He held out another jelly donut.

“I still think it’s silly,” the dragon said, “but all right.” He snaked his head forward again, but before grabbing the donut, he said, “Thank you for this donut.” Then he chewed and swallowed. As he did, the dragon’s face glowed with delight. “Wow!” he said. “You were right! This is so much better than people.”

“So does that mean you’ll free the princess?” Chanoch said.

The dragon licked his lips, fidgeting. “Do you think the princess will let me eat these jelly donuts? Or will she make me go back to tofu?”

“If you say thank you for them, I’m sure the princess won’t mind,” Chanoch said. “And I promise you’ll get all the jelly donuts you need.”

“All right then,” the dragon said. “I sealed the princess with a word of power. When you light the lamps, you’ll be able to read it. Just speak it aloud, and she’ll wake up.”

So Chanoch lit the eight lamps, and their light drove away the darkness in the throne room. Just as he knew she would be, the princess was seated on her throne, fast asleep. Hovering in front of her was a glowing word, written in the air. Chanoch spoke it aloud, and it dissolved. The princess woke up.

“Sufgan!” she said. “You’ve been a very naughty dragon!”

“I know,” the dragon said sheepishly. “But it’s okay now, because Chanoch is going to give me jelly donuts to eat instead of people.”

“That sounds better, Sufgan,” the princess said. “Just as long as you’re sorry, and you never do it again.”

So everyone was happy. The princess was awake again and could take care of the people once more. This time Sufgan the dragon got to eat jelly donuts, so he didn’t mind working. And he always said thank you to Chanoch.

The people were glad that their princess had been returned to them, so much so that they made a holiday in Chanoch’s honor, which they called Chanuka. They even forgave Sufgan the dragon, and called his jelly donuts Sufganiot. Even today, we eat sufganiot on Chanuka to commemorate when the princess and the dragon started working together again.

So now, dear readers, have a happy Chanuka. And remember that when your own dragon get hungry, it’s better to eat jelly donuts than to eat people. And don’t forget to say thank you!

[If you liked the story, check it out in lavishly illustrated Kindle or hardback!]

Why Must Fantasy Always be Set in Huge Worlds?

09 Thursday Aug 2012

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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.

And So It Begins—Camp NaNo, That Is

03 Friday Aug 2012

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Here I go again. It’s August, and that means that I’m indulging in more NaNo goodness. Yes, it is time for another round of Camp Nanowrimo, where a plucky community of writing addicts try to write 50,000 words in the space of a single month. As always, quality takes a distant second place to quality: the point of the exercise is to get words on paper (or realistically, on hard drives) and not to let your inner critic strangle them in the crib. Once the words exist, they can be edited; after all, that is the essence of good writing anyway.

This month, I’ve got an awesome group of “cabin-mates,” and they’re definitely making this a more fun experience. Special mention goes to Kimtsan, who I think is singlehandedly carrying the group forward.

I hope that this month will provide another supercharge to my writing; and perhaps it can generate some fodder for this blog. Stay tuned…

Random Fiction Excerpt #3

08 Sunday Jul 2012

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“Have you thought about how you will make your way in the world, child?”

Rafaela frowned. “I thought I would be like you, mistress,” she said. “Traveling around and healing people.”

“With your skill at healing?” Carlisa burst out laughing; a red flush rose in Rafaela’s cheeks. “No, child,” the sorceress continued, still chuckling. “You seem to be better at breaking things than putting them back together.”

“Well then, what? And stop calling me child,” Rafaela burst out suddenly. “I’m almost seventeen. I’m a full woman! I am your student, your servant even,” and oh how it rankled her to say the word servant, but she managed to spit it out without changing her tone, “but I am not a child!”

Carlisa sighed, an amused look on her face. “And how old do you think I am?” The question brought Rafaela up short; she started to stammer something, but the sorceress held up her hand. “Never mind. It’s not polite to guess at a woman’s age, mage or no. But believe me when I say that compared to me, you will be a child for years yet.”

Writing Interesting Characters with Transactional Analysis

02 Monday Jul 2012

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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 principal 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.