The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis shows that collective action is needed to tackle a pandemic

We can see how society collectively imagines pandemics by how they are represented in fiction. In many novels, pandemics are presented as the end of the world. In Stephen King’s The Stand a deadly disease called Captain Trips wipes out almost everyone and causes the collapse of civilisation. The survivors band together to form two communities, who engage in a good vs evil struggle for survival.

In I Am Legend, written by Richard Matheson, only one human survives, patrolling an empty world. In M R Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts a mutation in the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis causes it to take over humans and turn them into mindless “hungries” who bite other people to spread the fungus. London has been abandoned and a few survivors cling together in an authoritarian community called Beacon.

Many of these stories show the complete collapse of society because of some freak of nature or accident of science. In many stories, a few individuals survive and must band together to prevent the end of humanity. These people are now free of the rules and structures that govern our society.

Ayn Rand’s hellscape

In theory the post-outbreak world should be a libertarian paradise: a world where governments are gone and people are free to seize the limitless potential of the individual unconstrained by social pressures or commitments to other people. However, the stories about the post-outbreak world more often show a violent hellscape where the only thing that is unconstrained is people’s capacity for violence. It’s more Thomas Hobbes than Ayn Rand. 

Lots of these stories (especially zombie stories) show a world where humans are worse than the disease. Individuals liberated from the constraints of society are free to indulge in the worst aspects of human nature.

This isn’t a fictional apocalypse

The pandemic we are currently living through is nothing like this. It’s not the apocalypse of the Girl With All The Gifts or The Stand. In the words of writer Laurie Penny “This is not the apocalypse you were looking for”.

The closest representation in fiction I have found to what we are currently living through is The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Despite the dramatic title, it’s not about the end of the world but about a virus outbreak in near future Oxford.

The plot has two main threads. The one which concerns us, follows a mysterious disease outbreak in Oxford that starts at the University and then spreads through the population. The characters in this are the doctors, healthcare workers, University administrators and members of the public who are all caught up in the response to the outbreak.

What The Doomsday Book got right

The book was published in 1992 (and is set in 2054) and manages to predict a lot about the present. Oxford is put under quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus. The description of the town being locked-down over Christmas is uncannily accurate to what we just went through in Britain. One Oxford college administrator is perpetually worried about toilet paper supplies. Mask wearing is mandated in public. There are worries about shortages of EPG (Emergency Protective Gear).

There are other analogies to the present. Misinformation spreads about the virus originating in one of the Oxford labs. Immigration and the EC (European Community) are blamed for the spread of the virus. People try and live their lives as best as they can and enjoy Christmas as much as possible, given the circumstances.

The novel mainly follows doctors and college staff as they tackle the disease outbreak. It dramatises them finding spare beds for patients, conducting research into the virus, allocating the scarce resources of food and toilet paper. The protagonists are a motley crew thrown together by circumstances, including a group of American church bell ringers, whose tour of the UK has been delayed by the Oxford lockdown, and a teenaged boy visiting his great aunt at the University for Christmas.

The Pandemic in The Doomsday Book

Willis finds humour, tension and warmth in the small human moments of fighting a disease. The characters are under the pressure of competing demands, lack of resources, not enough sleep and the spread of the virus. It’s a slow quiet struggle where the biggest enemy is depression and the not the sudden collapse of civilisation.

The world of The Doomsday Book has an event called The Pandemic in its past. Little is said about it, but we are told that a deadly disease ravaged the world and it casts a long shadow in the minds of the protagonists. This disease killed huge numbers of Americans because they refused to have their freedom curtailed in any way, even to protect lives during a pandemic.

Toxic individualism

The Doomsday Book subtly makes the point that a free individual, unconstrained by the state or social pressures, is a threat to safety during a pandemic. This echoes the point made by Carolina Miranda in a recent LA Times comment piece about how American individualism is toxic and lethal during the Covid-19 pandemic.

American-style individualism is toxic during a pandemic, whereas European-style collectivism may just save us. In both the Doomsday book and our world, deference to authority and love of the NHS have helped us put measures in place to protect us during the pandemic. Whereas America’s emphasis on the free individual, unconstrained by society, has led to a tragic and unnecessary amount of death.

People working together is what will save us

The Doomsday Book doesn’t focus on brave heroic individuals fighting to save humanity in the ruins of society, it focuses on the people in society who protect us from threats to the human race: doctors, nurses, public sector administrators and ordinary people pitching in to do their part.

These people are part of the state and our existing social structures. The free individual, liberated from all state control, isn’t part of the solution. Given the choice between Mad Max and the doctors and college staff of The Doomsday Book, I know who I would rely on to save humanity.

What the Doomsday book gets right is that saving the world during a pandemic is more about administration than individual heroics. It’s worth remembering what will save us from the Covid-19 Pandemic is people working together within a social structure, not people working alone.

Ancient heroes in modern stories: How do we capture the stories of the ancient world in contemporary fiction?

A formative experience for many people I know was reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in their early 20s. I read it recently, in my mid-30s, but I was immediately transported back to that time in my life where my personality was still malleable and the trajectory of my life was undecided. Back then, it felt like I could be or do anything and that sense of an adult life coming into focus, with all its wonderful possibilities and crushing disappointments, is what Tartt captures so brilliantly in her book.

The novel chronicles the college years of Richard Papen, a disaffected teenager who falls in with a clique of eccentric classicists whilst attending a prestigious college in Vermont. For many people this is the quintessential coming of age novel, capturing the search for identity that many people in their late teens and early 20s go through.

The Greek students

The group of Ancient Greek students (Henry, Bunny, Francis, Charles and Camilla) that Richard falls in with are not just any other clique of sophisticated, intellectual misfits - who can be found at any university across the world - but are people with a deep affinity to the past and are disaffected from the modern world. They look to ancient cultures to find meaning in life.

This is one reason why so many teenagers or people in their early twenties love this book. It’s not just about becoming an adult or going to university, it’s about how you find out who you are if you are alienated from the modern world and instead feel the siren call of a different time. It’s about how you become an adult when you reject the roles that contemporary society has created for adults.

Ancient places

When I was at university we smoked weed and listened to the Beatles and fantasized about a time when writing a song called “Revolution” was a powerful statement; a world before Revolution was used to sell Nike trainers. Or we smoked weed and listened to the Levellers sing “Do I belong to some ancient race, because I like to walk in ancient places?” and “I don’t believe in your modern ways”. Or we smoked weed and watched Easy Rider or Withnail and I, whilst dreaming about running away from everything that tied us to a place and responsibility.

This was an act of rebellion against the path that had been laid out for us. A path from school to university to a boring white-collar job, to marriage, to home in the suburbs and 2.5 kids. It wasn’t an effective or particularly original rebellion against middle-class conformity, but it came from a place of wanting something different to the roles society had prepared for us.

Quoting Nietzsche

Had I read The Secret History at that time, it would have fitted perfectly into this world view of rejected contemporary middle-class life. Tartt’s book resonates with anyone who sees the modern world as being inauthentic, morally corrupt or soulless and goes searching for meaning in a different place or time. This theme is summed up by a quote from Frederick Nietzsche at the start of the book that reads:

“I enquire now as to the Genesis of a philologist and assert the following:

1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are.

2. He doesn't know whether he is suited for finding out about them.”

This quote (as well as being an amusing joke about studying languages) perfectly sums up the book’s themes because Richard, and the other Greek students, are looking towards the Greeks and Romans to find meaning in life.

Our idea of what Greeks and Romans were like

By using this quote, I don’t think Tartt literally means Greeks and Romans, the people who lived in those ancient civilisations. She is invoking our idea of what Greeks and Romans were like. This idea bears little relation to the everyday lives of those people - whose concerns and passions are as mundane as those of our age - but comes from the characters that fill the stories (history, myth and what lies in between) that have come down to us from those ancient civilisations.

These are stories about heroes and great people (usually, but not always, men). “Men of thought and deed” to quote the title of the archaic reference book that Bunny uses to write an English essay. People whose actions often outlasted their lives and have caused them to transcend their mortal (or sometimes fictional) lives to become legends. This is what is meant by Greeks and Romans.

Crucially these Greeks and Romans were not constrained by our modern, Western, middle-class, Christian values. The banal concerns of the modern American were of no consequence to these Greeks and Romans. Thus, many people who sought to escape bland modernity attempted to “know” these Greeks and Romans. Whether they were ready to or not.

Escaping the modern world

What the characters are searching for, and in places achieve, in the Secret History is to live like a Greek or a Roman in the modern world. The Greek students are all dissatisfied with their middle-class existence. They don’t identify with the values of their parents or the other students at Hampden - the prestigious East Coast college they attend.

Richard seems to be physically repelled by the banal West Coast existence of his lower middle-class parents, who live in the shadow of things he sees as shallow, i.e. Hollywood films and celebrities. By moving to Hampden and studying Ancient Greek, Richard is seeking to escape, not only his parents, but from middle-class American life by living like Greeks and Romans of the stories he studies.

Rejection of modern values

The characters want to be Ancient Greeks. Especially Henry, the one who is most clearly a man born at the wrong time. This is most obviously seen in his spearheading the recreation of the Ancient Greek ritual the characters preform in the book, but also by his complete disconnection from the modern world, this goes as far as Henry not knowing that man had walked on the moon.

The way that the Greek Students live their lives is not bound by Western, middle-class, Christian values. For example, the book implies (albeit through secondhand reports from unreliable witnesses) that the twins Charles and Camilla have an incestuous relationship. There is also the fact that the main characters successfully murder one of the group: a reflection of the more violent nature of ancient societies and the violence of ancient myths, where disputes were often settled by the sword.

They want to be heroes

The students want to be heroes in the very unheroic late twentieth century. The heroes of Greek and Roman stories distinguished themselves through warfare and in the construction of monuments, either putting lasting deeds into history or lasting buildings into the world. I can imagine Henry as a great warrior king of ancient Greece or a Caesar, but he’s not a hero for an age where war is done by drones and great buildings are designed and made by committees.

Much like Levellers in the song Sell Out quoted above, the Greek students hear the call of an ancient way of living, or at least the call of what our modern idea of ancient life was like. They want to live their lives in a heroic way, which is not possible in the modern world. There is even discussion at one point (only partly in jest) of the students marching on the town of Hampton like an army and seizing it; a plainly ridiculous idea that shows how unsuited the students’ desires are to the modern age.

In many ways this book about disaffected middle-class language students at college in the 20th century captures how we see the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome better than many direct adaptations of the legends of these societies.

Brad Pitt and Troy

The contrast can be strongly seen in the Brad Pitt starring film Troy, a direct adaptation of parts of the Iliad. Pitt plays Achilles the legendary Greek warrior, Eric Bana plays Hector and Brian Cox is Agamemnon. This film does a good job of squeezing a fair chunk of the epic poem into the shape of a conventional Hollywood film, complete with a three-act structure, love interest and epic battle scenes. It’s from the age of “gritty realistic” reboots of characters, like Batman and James Bond, and thus doesn’t contain any gods intervening or supernatural elements.

Unlike The Secret History, Troy doesn’t capture how different the ancient world was to ours through looking at its different morality and spirituality. Whereas The Secret History explores the ideas of escaping from contemporary western life into the ancient past where people thought and acted differently, Troy emphasis how similar we are to the ancients.

Pitt’s Achilles is motivated by very contemporary values of monogamous love and a sense of fair play in battle. This film is more a window into contemporary American values than an escape into the past, where things were different.

Pitt as Achilles

The film, although enjoyably entertaining, is also let down by Brad Pitt not being convincing as Achilles. Pitt plays Achilles as the superstar of his day, which he does well, but he has none of the legendary fighter's anger.

Pitt fails to convey the enormous rage of Achilles, which causes him to sit out most of the siege of Troy because Agamemnon scorns his pride and later brings him into the battle when he calls out Hector after the Trojan hero slays Patroclus. Pitt’s performance has none of the rage that leads Achilles to not only slay a man but to drag his corpse behind his chariot until it is a bloody ruin.

The film shows the events of the Iliad, but it doesn’t make them the stuff of legend. The legends that the Greek students are eager to escape into. This film doesn’t convince me that Achilles is a time defying hero, whose actions not only changed the course of a war but have lived on for millennia after his death.

Achilles is the sort of hero that Henry wants to be. Not a hero who fights for love of a woman or his country, but someone who fights so that his glory can be written in blood across all of time. An immortal whose life was greater than that led by anyone in middle-class America. This is the sort of life that is not available to Henry and the Greek students, but they reach for it anyway.

Ilium by Dan Simmons

Another literal attempt to adapt the Iliad is the novel Ilium by Dan Simmons. This is a sci-fi take on the book. It follows a dead classics professor who is reanimated on Mars, where the siege of Troy has been recreated by evolved beings claiming to be the Greek gods. These beings substitute advanced technology for the magical interventions in Homer’s poem. The book offers little explanation to why this is happening, but it does faithfully follow the plot of the Iliad.

This book does capture the time defying greatness of figures like Achilles and Hector, this is mainly because we see them through the eyes of a 20th century classical scholar; complete with frequent off-topic moaning about his students being too politically correct, which cross the line from characterisation into an axe that the author is grinding.

Lack of contrast

The book literally transposes the heroic acts of the characters of Greek legend into a different story, but does little to explore the different moral codes that governed their lives. We are told about the Greeks and Trojans’ delighted in battle and acts of heroism, however, the morality and spirituality of the ancients are not shown in contrast to our own.

This is a novel about how someone from our time has escaped the mundane present into the legends of the ancient world, but it does not explore why someone would want to leave our world for the world of the Iliad. Exploring this idea is what makes The Secret History such a compelling story.

Wanting a different world

A great piece of art, like a great novel or epic poem, can make intangible ideas seem as real as the material world. It can also bridge a gap in understanding, making ideas or ways of life that were previously inconceivable to us understandable. Whilst reading The Secret History, I felt that I knew what it was like to grow up in suburban California, in the shadow of so much Hollywood grandeur that appeared impressive but in actuality is shallow. I understood what it was like to yearn for a heroic life in a land that didn’t just lack heroes, but had no need for heroes.

The Secret History capture’s Richard’s desire to escape the mediocrity of middle-class American life that he was born into. By surrounding himself with others who think like this and rejecting the contemporary, middle-class American values, he attempts to live that different life.

This speaks to me as someone who yearns for a different world. Not the more violent one of the age of Greek and Roman heroes, but a kinder world. Many people who want the world to be better than it is, find that this novel speaks to them. Not just people who fight for a specific cause or to right a specific wrong, but all the people who feel that the whole of our contemporary life is governed by the wrong values: those of greed and materials instead of compassion. This is especially true of people who have grown up surrounded by people who live middle-class, middle of the road, materialistic lives like Richard did.

As someone who wants the world to be a more caring place, I can relate to the story of someone who decides that he rejects the values that he grew up with and seeks to escape to a different world with different values. This is what the Secret History captures so beautifully: not only the desire to escape from the mundane world into a different one, but the belief that it might just be possible.

The Psychology of Time Travel reveals the limits of power

It might seem odd to compare a fictional elderly woman time traveler to former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, but that is exactly the person I thought of whilst reading Kate Mascarenhas’s novel The Psychology of Time Travel. 

Mascarenhas’s novel is a character driven science fiction story about the effect that time travel has a on a person’s mind. On another level it's about the effect that power has on people. Specifically, the power of knowing the future.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

The novel focuses on four women who invent time travel in the 1960s. Three of them go onto found a body called The Conclave, which regulates the use of time travel. The Conclave’s position beyond the limits of linear time, means it’s beyond the reach of any government or corporation. One of the three scientists, named Margaret, becomes the leader of the Conclave and thus has absolute dominion over the world of time travel.

The Psychology of Time Travel’s exploration of what absolute power does to a person reminded me of David Runciman’s book Where Power Stops: The Making and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers, which is a study of the limits of power in modern democracy. Runciman’s book explores the personality of political leaders and how this impacted their time leading their country. His argument is that the personality of the politician reveals the limits of what that kind of person can do with political power.

Power corrupts but power also reveals

Runciman based his argument on one of the greatest political biographies of all time, Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. This famously detailed biography (Caro has spent more time writing his book than Johnson himself was alive) has a simple premise at its core: power corrupts but power also reveals. Caro argues that the more power someone has the more we see who they are.

Caro claims that we saw the real LBJ when he got to be President. Johnson was corrupt, a vote cheat, a bully and various other nasty things, but when he became the president the office’s power revealed his caring side as he passed the Civil Rights legislation that his predecessor, John F Kennedy, was unable to pass.

Runciman's book argues the opposite: that power doesn't show the true nature of the politician, the politician shows the true nature of power, as it reveals what’s possible to achieve with that politician’s personality. Runciman states that the presidency didn’t show us something about LBJ, LBJ shows us something about the presidency.

Runciman on LBJ

Runciman argues that Johnson’s huge liberal accomplishments (not just Civil Rights legislation but also a programme of social reforms called The Great Society aimed at elimination of poverty and racial injustice) were not him revealing his true, caring self when he got to the Oval Office, it was an aspect of the person he always was.

Johnson was someone who did whatever it took to win and passing Civil Rights legislation and trying to eliminate poverty was how he won once he was president. It was how he beat his political opponents, but mainly it was how he beat the ghost of JFK.

Johnson had a lingering concern that he wasn’t worthy of being president and that he had ended up in the role because of unfortunate circumstances. Johnson beat these by passing the reforms that Kennedy was unable to get through Congress. Runciman writes that LBJ's caring side was second to getting power, which was his primary motivator through his whole life.

The personality of a time traveler

Runciman’s ideas apply to Mascarenhas’s novel. Margaret becomes supreme leader of The Conclave after it is founded. Throughout the novel we see how power affects her psychologically. She becomes more authoritarian and more callus. She sets up harsh hazing rituals to condition new time travelers to be ambivalent about death. Eventually she forces other members of The Conclave to play a version of Russian Roulette involving time traveling bullets.

It could be argued that the power that Margaret gains as leader of The Conclave reveals her personality. However, I think that Runciman’s ideas are more accurate. Margaret’s bullying and megalomania were present in her from the start. This is shown early on in the novel when Margaret refuses to let one of her colleagues, Bea, with whom she discovered time travel, into The Conclave because Bea’s mental health problems embarrasses Margaret during a TV interview.

The limits of Margaret’s power

Margaret’s leadership of The Conclave shows the limits of the power of that office. Her power is great, she knows when her subordinates will die and how, but it is limited. She cannot prevent her own death. She cannot change the past or the future, even if she knows what will happen.

Despite Margaret’s authoritarianism and knowledge of the future, she is unable to use the power of her office to stop people betraying her, which ultimately leads to her death. This shows the limits of power for a leader of The Conclave with Margaret’s authoritarian psychology.

The limits of power in science fiction

The novel The Psychology of Time Travel, and especially the character of Margaret, show the argument that Runciman makes in his book on the limits of power. It is not that a leader’s personality is revealed when they achieve high office, their personality can be seen from the start of their career as can be seen from the character of Margaret in chapter one of Mascarenhas’s novel. The nature of a leader does show us something about power and what can be achieved with that personality.

Fortunately, no politician is as powerful as Margaret; being beyond the reach of all other authority and with knowledge of the future. This means to explore the dynamics of Runciman’s ideas about the limits of power for such a leader, we need to turn to works of fiction.

This Land by Owen Jones: Essential reading

In 2015, along with over 250,000 others, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. We all know how that ended. If, like me, you have been preoccupied with how things could have been different since last December’s disastrous election, Owen Jones’ new book, This Land: The Story of a Movement, is essential reading.

It’s difficult to think of another commentator more widely maligned for his work than Jones. He’s risen to the unenviable position of a top hate target for the far-right, up to and including being beaten up by thugs in an unprovoked street attack. For centrists, who make up the majority of the non-right-wing commentariat, he’s worthy only of contempt. Such is life if you have the temerity to be a socialist with a media platform (see also: Ash Sarkar). Yet, on the left, he sometimes receives abuse for daring to honestly criticise the failures of the Corbyn project.

This is the context into which This Land has been released. In short, it’s a book that almost everyone has made up their minds about without reading it. Which is a pity, because it may well not be what you expect.

This Land is the story of the Corbyn movement—where it came from, how it happened, and how it went wrong. As much as he’s castigated from all angles, Jones is perhaps uniquely positioned to write this story.

A journalist and commentator first and foremost, Jones was nevertheless closer to the project than most, being an active supporter of it, whilst never actually being a part of it (interestingly, he was offered jobs by the Corbyn team on several occasions, but declined them). If Jones wasn’t actually present at a given event, chances are he was on first-name terms with plenty of major players who were. This gives the book a fly-on-the-wall perspective we’re unlikely to get elsewhere.

The first section clips briskly through the history of the past decade or so: the 2008 financial crash, austerity, student protests and a moribund Labour party, abstaining on welfare cuts and still banging on about ‘aspiration’ as if nothing had changed. I’m pretty familiar with all this, after all, it’s my generation’s story, but it’s refreshing to read it all from an unashamedly left-wing perspective, as well as to link this directly to Corbyn’s election. Like Brexit or Trump, it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Corbyn’s rise in 2015, as told here, still resonates with me: an unlikely figure of hope, emerging from a party known only by a whole generation as a party of neoliberalism and war, to beat the bland establishment candidates who had nothing new to say.

After this, the book becomes a more unpleasant read. Jones doesn’t spend too long on Corbyn’s enemies; he explains early on that the project was bound to attract ire from all the obvious angles. This is a good thing: after all, this is the part we all know. What is far more interesting is what I wasn’t previously aware of – the dysfunctional inner workings of the project.

Jones unflinchingly demonstrates that the problems of the Corbyn project were, first and foremost, a failure of management. Reading the latter chapters it is difficult not to be shocked how disorganised and unstructured the whole set-up was. Senior figures like Karie Murphy and Seumas Milne may have been individually highly skilled, but effective managers they certainly were not.

Potentially vital, motivated and ideologically enthusiastic people were brought in – then given nothing to do. That Labour’s HQ – then still Blairite-dominated – gave the project a hard time was obvious; what is truly shocking to read is how unprepared the Corbyn team were for practically anything. It wasn’t clear where decision-making authority lay. Corbyn himself, meanwhile, would often simply go AWOL when conflict reared its head.

The antisemitism crisis – which gets a chapter to itself – is an effective microcosm of this problem. This emotionally charged topic isn’t one I wade into lightly, and neither does Jones. You can tell this was not an easy write for him. He’s been a consistent, uncompromising voice for identifying and countering antisemitism on the left, whilst simultaneously calling out those who exploit the issue for their own ends - walking and chewing gum, as he refers to it. But here, too, he shows that the problem was first and foremost one of management failure. A problem that could have been nipped in the bud early on, but was allowed to fester, grow legs, and become ultimately debilitating.

As the recent EHRC report shows, the disciplinary structure wasn’t fit for purpose when Corbyn inherited it. But there was also little attempt at political education for the influx of new members, many newly engaged with politics, regarding what anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracies looked like. This did happen later, to an extent, but it came via Momentum (not that they get much credit for it) and not from the leadership.

A related problem was the lack of a proper media engagement strategy. Relying on well-attended rallies is all well and good, but it isn’t a substitute for a strong media strategy. All too often, the team inadvertently allowed others to set the narrative.

For example, we all remember the furore over Corbyn’s apparent support (dating from before his leadership) for a mural that contained anti-Semitic tropes, but what I didn’t know previously was that the whole episode was totally avoidable. Corbyn was advised to remove his Facebook profile – where the comments were made – upon becoming leader, warned that his entire history would be muckraked by hostile journalists, and he refused. And that was that.

Where were his advisors? Sure, Corbyn was notoriously stubborn, but that shouldn’t have been the end of it. The same mistake was repeated over and over again. Other hills weren’t worth dying on either – like whether or not to sing the national anthem, or the response to the Salisbury poisonings. A decent media strategy, a bit of scenario-planning – even in the context of an overwhelmingly hostile media landscape – could have prevented these becoming as damaging as they did.

This Land is an uncompromising read. For some, who believe Corbyn could do no wrong, it won’t be a message people want to hear. But it is far more than a post-mortem. There’s an explicitly hopeful message here too. Jones argues that it would be too easy just to say that Corbynism was crushed by its opponents, because that makes the logical takeaway that there’s no point. If you believe that any left-wing movement in the UK will inevitably be destroyed, then why bother at all?

However, if you believe that we can learn from our failures and do better next time, then that opens up the viable possibility of a next time. The preconditions and injustices that led to Corbynism have not gone away. There will be a next time.

So, if you want to read an account that argues that Corbynism was a perfect blossom inevitably crushed under the boot of the Labour right and a hostile media, then this is not for you. If you want a book that regurgitates received mainstream wisdom that Corbynism was rotten to its core, and supported by a combination of anti-Semitic old Trots and hopelessly naïve, feckless young people, needless to say this isn’t for you either. But if you want an honest, constructive, ultimately hopeful assessment of the last five years, not something easy to find, then this an absolute must-read.

This Land by Owen Jones is out now. You can also support Owen Jones’ new show on Patreon here.

The Trouble with Peace dramatises the economic and political changes that made our modern world

I wonder if I am the only person who, whilst reading Joe Abercrombie’s new epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace, was reminded of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s seminal work on economic development.

The novel is about a society poised on the edge of the transformation into the type of modern industrial society that we would recognise. Factories are springing up, whilst canals are being dug. Farm labourers are going to work in mills, whilst cities are growing. All of which reminded me of Acemoglu and Robinson’s study of the history of this process in our world.

A new world of factories and mines

The Trouble With Peace is the second book in Abercrombie’s The Age of Madness Trilogy, which takes place in his First Law world that has been established in a previous trilogy and standalone books. The First Law is not a Medieval-eques fantasy setting like Middle Earth or Westeros. The Trouble With Peace is set in a world where kings don’t have absolute power and economic rivalries between nations are becoming more important than military ones. There are warrior kings, like Stour Nightfall, King of the Northmen, but this is no longer their world. Their power is waning, whilst the prestige of industrialists and inventors is growing.

The new world that is being born values skills with finance and commerce, rather than swords. Entrepreneurs like the ambitious Lady Savine dan Glokta are becoming more influential and powerful aristocrats are seeking business partnerships with industrialists and inventors to enhance their prestige, whereas in the past this prestige would have been won on the battlefield. Poor people are pressed into factory and mine work, rather than fieldwork.

The Trouble With Peace is mainly set in The Union, a monarchy that is built on alliances between nobles and regional governors. The Union is beginning to go through the industrial revolution and some of the most powerful writing in The Trouble With Peace is the description of the squalor and danger that the new industrial workers have to live in. Abercrombie vividly renders the callousness of industrialists and how cheap human life is to them.

Economic development as a source of dramatic conflict

Acemoglu and Robinson write about this transformation and the type of political institutions needed for it to be a success. It is the fight over the control of these institutions that is the conflict in Abercrombie’s novel.

The core of Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument is that government is needed to create healthy economic development through making markets inclusive, which is done via education, training, providing infrastructure and helping people start business. Acemoglu and Robinson refer to “inclusive institutions” (rule of law, independent courts, banking and finance systems, property rights, etc.) as the bedrock needed for a prosperous country.

This may sound like a poor source of conflict for an epic fantasy novel, but many times throughout history a revolution has been necessary to create inclusive institutions. The American Revolution is a good example of this. Revolutions are a great source of conflict for a novel and the main plot of The Trouble With Peace is such a revolution.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Liberal bourgeoisie revolution

The Trouble with Peace explores a similar process. King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union has centralised power in his Closed Council and we can see the beginnings of a modern form of government with ministers appointed to key roles such as Arch Lector. At the same time nobles in the larger Open Council, which can be seen as a proto-parliament, are pushing for more authority, which is the beginning of a pluralistic form of government.

The main plot of the novel follows a rebellion against Union King Orso by Leo dan Brock, aka the Young Lion, a regional governor and a popular soldier. He is supported by his entrepreneur wife, Lady Savine dan Glokta and members of the Open Council vying for more influence. Leo’s rebellion can be seen as a liberal bourgeoisie revolution, similar to the wave of revolutions that spread through Europe in 1848.

These liberal uprisings (I mean liberal in the John Locke sense of the word, not the Joe Biden sense) challenged the absolute authority of monarchs and sought to create more inclusive governments based on modern ideas of rights and liberty. Or at least they sought inclusiveness, rights and liberty for middle class industrialists. Although many of these revolutions ultimately failed and led to a conservative authoritarian backlash, they were a step towards creating more inclusive institutions and thus part of the journey towards our modern form of government.

The rise of the middle class

The rise of the middle classes, merchants and industrialists, is crucial to the story of the liberal bourgeoisie revolutions and to The Trouble with Peace. Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail argue that the emergence of the merchant class is key to the move towards inclusive political institutions in England in the 17th Century.

The merchant class supported parliament in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution as it was in their interest to get a more pluralistic society that would represent their views. Again, this is shown in the Trouble With Peace through rising middle class industrialists such as Lady Savine supporting The Young Lion’s rebellion. We would expect that if Leo becomes king, then he would be beholden to the Open Council who made him king and will have to share more of his power with them, creating a more pluralistic society.

Proletariat uprising

Pluralistic reforms in the 17th century and 18th century England created greater freedom for the middle-classes and allowed the industrial revolution to happen, but this economic freedom came at the expense of the working classes who were moved from fields into factories and had to endure terrible working conditions. The “Dark Satanic Mills” that John Milton mentioned in his hymn Jerusalem.

This led to strikes, calls for better conditions, more rights for working people and working class led movements such as the Chartists and events such as the Peterloo Massacre. Working class rebellion is a constant presence in Abercrombie’s novel. Groups such as the Breakers and Burners disrupt production and agitate for better conditions for the proletariat or a revolution against the bourgeoisie mill owners. They are a clear parallel of the Luddites from English political history.

As a Marxist, and a lefty, I feel sympathy for the Breakers and Burners who are forced to endure horrendous working conditions and driven to drastic action to improve their lives. The Marxist theorist in me says that the Breakers and Burners need Leo dan Brock’s bourgeoisie rebellion to first overthrow the upper classes and spread power to the bourgeoisie before a proletariat uprising can seize the means of production. The historian in me says that working class agitation, from the Chartists to Peterloo, were important steps towards further reforms such as the Great Reform act of 1832 that led to more inclusive institutions and paved the way for the eventual enfranchisement of all people in the 20th century.

Grimdark fantasy

As you can tell, a fantasy novel with a lot of political and economic history analogies is something that I can really get into. There are a lot of other positive things about The Trouble With Peace. The story of the rebellion is tense and I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out how it ended. There are a lot of complex, well developed characters that bring the story to life.

Often as a reader, you think that you fully understand a character and then they will do something that surprises you, like Arch Lector Glokta, the head torturer for King Orso being surprisingly nice to his subordinate Vic when he is forced to leave his office. There are also the surprise switches of allegiance, twists and turns in the course of the rebellion that keep the reader engaged throughout the novel.

Abercrombie is known as the master of “grimdark”, a subgenre of fantasy, and this novel doesn't disappoint on that front. It is violent and bloody, although never with a sadomasochistic glee at the suffering of the characters. In Abercrombie’s writing, the suffering is a reflection of how violent society was in the Early Modern period. This novel also dismisses any romantic notion of what a war fought with pike and cannon was like.

No clearly defined right or wrong

There are also no clearly defined right or wrong in The Trouble With Peace or good guys and bad guys. I felt sympathy for Orso, who has unexpectedly found himself king and is trying to deal with a country that is changing rapidly, but before he can get his feet under the table he has to deal with his nobles rebelling. However, I also felt sympathy for The Young Lion, a brave soldier who might usher in the next phase of social reform to make society fairer and more equal (eventually).

This lack of good guys and bad guys also increased the tension. No one is fated to win from the start, so the rebellion could succeed or fail. In our status of omniscient reader, we are not given any more clues to the direction of future events than the unlikely protagonist themselves.

More than a rebellion

What I found most interesting about The Trouble with Peace is how it dramatises economic and political conflict through human conflict. A rebellion is about more than kings and nobles, it is a conflict between different ways of organising the world. What I liked most about this novel is how Abercrombie effectively uses an epic fantasy story to dramatise the economic and political changes that made our modern world. The same changes that Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.

The humans are the most alien characters in Under the Pendulum Sun

Under the Pendulum Sun is a novel by Jeannette Ng that achieved notoriety last year when it won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the acceptance speech that Ng gave exposed Campbell’s past as a fascist and led to the award being renamed as the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

The novel itself is an interesting and unusual read. It’s set in the Victorian era and is about a woman who goes in search of her missionary brother who has disappeared after traveling to Arcadia, the land of the fairies, to convert the fay to Christianity. It makes perfect sense that if the fay lands were discovered in the 19th century, then the Victorians would try to convert them.

The novel feels very Victorian. Not just in its setting, but in its characters’ outlook. Siblings Catherine and Leon Helstone are driven by values and an outlook on the world that appears very different to ours. I haven’t read many Victorian novels, but to my untrained eye this novel’s characters are believably Victorian.

Victorian characters

The characters’ Victorian-ness feels strange to us as 21st-century readers. The siblings are devout Christians, which is unusual today but not unheard of. However, there is an earnestness to their faith that seems very uncontemporary. The characters spend a lot of time discussing the Bible, its verses and their meaning, as well as the nature of God and the question of whether the fay have souls. Being so outspoken about faith seems unusual to me, as I was raised in a world where religion is a private matter.

In some ways, the deep religiousness of the characters is more unusual than the setting of Arcadia. As an avid sci-fi and fantasy reader I am used to novels populated by strange lands and bizarre creatures, but not to such religious fervor. By contrast, the fay in Ng’s novel seem more like us. They are motivated by a desire to express their individuality. They desire entertainment and immediate self-gratification and don’t care for larger belief structures.

This seems more like the people of today then the pious and self-sacrificing missionaries. As characters in a fantasy novel, the humans seem more like an alien or fantasy creatures, from a very religious society, than the non-human characters in Ng’s book

Spoilers ahead

The next section of this article drops a spoiler, so if you haven’t read the book and you want to approach it unspoiled then skip ahead. If you haven’t read the book, and I strongly recommend you read it, it’s better not knowing the spoiler I am about to drop … last warning … okay. 

Siblings Catherine and Leon also feel very different from people we know in our world because they engage in quite a lot of incest. There are many reasons for this in the book, but one is that they are isolated as people. There are very few characters in the novel and there is little mention of friends or companions for the siblings. Catherine and Leon have been isolated from everyone else and thus have developed sexual desires for each other out of lack of intimate connections to other humans. 

This sense of them being isolated pervades the novel. They are alone in a strange land and living in a large, almost empty building. This seems remote and difficult for us to understand. In today’s hyperconnected world, where people can be reached so easily via Zoom or Whatsapp (even during a global pandemic that is limiting human contact). It is strange that people could become so isolated that they would feel like they were the only people in the world. 

Seeing the world from another point of view

Under the Pendulum Sun invites us to see the world of Arcadia through the eyes of humans, primarily Catherine as the novel is written in the first person from her point of view. However as a protagonist, Catherine, is alien to us as she has different values and a different perception of the world.

The book is well written and encourages us to empathize with Catherine, despite her being different to us. I find it hard to understand what would motivate someone to become a missionary to a strange land, yet alone one as bizarre as Arcadia, but Ng’s writing makes the reader completely believe in Catherine and her journey.

I have written before about the power of science fiction and fantasy to make us see the world through the eyes of characters who are very different to us. What is different about Under the Pendulum Sun is that the strange characters whose different perspectives we are seeing the world through are not aliens, but are humans.

Good writing is political

This is why good writing is political as it invites us to spend a few hours walking in the shoes of someone else. This is a political act as it opens our mind to the idea that other people’s views and experiences that are different to ours, maybe even unimaginable, are valid.

We can use fiction to break from our perspectives. This is what Under the Pendulum Sun does so well: it lets us understand the lives of people who are different to us and opens our minds to new perspectives, which is why it is essential reading.

During the lockdown, London has become a fictional place to me

I live in London, but for the last few months I might have lived on the edge of any medium-sized to large settlement in the UK. The pandemic has reduced my horizons to my street, my local park and my local branch of Aldi. This has meant my experience of the world is not that of a Londoner, but of the resident of any middle-class suburb.

London still, theoretically, exists beyond these horizons, but there’s no point in visiting. It’s all closed and I’m too nervous to use public transport right now. London - the London most people think of when they say London, the London of Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Kings Cross Station and the National Gallery - is psychologically so far removed from me it might as well be a mythical place.

London is a place that I now relate to via fiction, just like I relate to places that I have never been. Places such as Tokyo, Timbuctoo or Olympus Mons are more concepts in stories than they are real places to me. Now I experience London via stories instead of by first-hand experience. This led me to think of the stories that sum up London the best.

Rivers of London

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series have always felt quintessentially London. The novels are (largely) set in London and follow the adventures of Peter Grant, a trainee detective and apprentice wizard at the branch of the Met Police that deals with magical crime. In his adventures, Peter meets the spirits of London’s rivers, talking foxes, people who live secretly in tube tunnels and other magical denizens of London.

Aaronovitch said that he imagined the books as a mythology of London. His writing captures how there is something magical about this city that lives amongst the crowded tubes, overpriced drinks and constantly sprouting blocks of luxury flats. The books (eight of them so far, plus two novellas, several short stories and comics) are set all over London and Aaronovitch always finds a way to intertwine his magical London with the London we experience.

The books contain the old London of Old Father Thames, a Roman who has lived here for over 2,000 years, and the new London of the young goddess of Beverly Brook, Peter’s girlfriend and PhD student in flood management. All of London is drawn into Aaronovitch’s story, its geography and its history. The novels capture the diversity of London and contain within its huge cast of characters the different people that make this city.

Neverwhere

A secret or hidden London is a common theme of urban fantasy novels set in London. Probably the best and most well-known example of this is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, a novel about Richard Mayhew, a young businessman in London, who helps a mysterious woman called Door and falls out of his London into the world of London Below. Once Richard crosses this boundary he is in a magical alternative London populated by the Earl of Earl’s Court and the Angel from Angel Islington and cannot go back to his old life.

What struck me about Gaiman’s novel is how accurate it is. There really is a secret London, that no one sees, which has a life of its own. This isn’t the magical world of the Floating Markets and monks who live at Blackfriars. It’s the London of the cleaners on zero-hours contracts, the people deliver the beer to the pubs, the people working in the coffee shops and bus drivers. All the people that the middle-class Londoners like me take for granted.

There’s also the London of the homeless and the poor that we don’t see. There is an entire hidden world of poverty, precarious housing, back-breaking labour we don’t see in the London of craft beer, casual dining and art galleries. Although even for a middle-class Londoner - like Richard, like me - if we lose our jobs we’re only a paycheck away from falling into that other London, perhaps never to return.

The City and the City

Of course, there are more than two different Londons, the rich and the poor. There are many experiences of the city. There’s the London of Michelin starred restaurants, Knightsbridge shopping and auction houses. There’s the London of clubs, bars, pills and booze. There’s the London of immersive theatre, underground exhibitions and fashion influencers. There’s the London financial transactions, property speculation, coffee and cocaine. These Londons are stacked up against each other, sharing the same geography but separate.

China Mieville’s novel The City and the City explores this concept. The novel is set in the fictional cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, two cities that inhabit the same space, even the same streets, but their occupants ignore each other. The people of Besźel and Ul Qoma go through their lives without acknowledging people who they are separate from but are still close enough to touch. 

This novel could be a metaphor for many cities with a divided community such as Belfast or Jerusalem. I believe this novel is a brilliant metaphor for London because there isn’t one London, there are many Londons. You can share the same street, the same tube car, the same shop with people who have a completely different experience of London. They share the same physical space as you do, but everything about it is different.

This difference might be due to different race, class, cultural background or could be that what they want from London, the establishments they frequent, are different. For one person London means Wetherspoons and for another it means cocktail bars. Hackney can mean craft beer and music festivals in parks for one person or resisting gentrification for another.

Experiencing London in fiction

All these novels tell us a story about London that helps us understand the city. The stories of the books mirror the story that is our own experience of the city. London is more than just the London anyone of us sees. It’s different things to different people.

The books I have chosen were all written by white men, this most likely reflects my experience of London as a white man. It’s also probably a sign I should try and read a more diverse range of writers. I would be interested to hear what other writers and stories reflect London, this most diverse of cities.

I enjoy being able to take a walk through a place via fiction that I cannot experience personally. Maybe because it’s far away or maybe because it doesn’t exist in our world. While I’m stuck at home, it helps to be able to experience the city I live in as fiction if I cannot experience it first hand.

NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels show how dangerous it is to blame minorities for a climate disaster

If you haven’t read NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky) then stop what you’re doing right now and read them. They’re amazing. The three books are a powerful story, of several generations, struggling to survive in a hostile world where nature and society are brutally oppressive. 

The three novels take place on The Stillness, a world with a single giant content that is geologically unstable. There are frequent major volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, poisonous gases are suddenly released from the ground and ash falls from the sky, making it difficult to raise crops and animals. The people of The Stillness live in constant fear that the next shake of the ground could be the end of civilization.

In such a dangerous world, the human societies that form are brutal and oppressive. Although they offer some structures that provide protection from the environment, they are controlling, authoritarian and exploitative. Especially if you belong to a certain minority group.

A minority is blamed for the world’s problems

The Stillness is blighted by natural disasters, however, the geological instability that is the source of so much suffering was created by humans. The third of Jemisin’s trilogy, The Stone Sky, describes (mild spoiler coming up) how an ancient civilization’s greed for power and a failed experiment destabilised the whole world.

Despite this, the people blamed for the problems are not the people who caused them. The anger of the people of the Stillness is focused on a group of people called Orogenes. Orogenes are people born with the power to move the earth and thus have the ability to create (or prevent) the natural disasters that threaten the people of the Stillness.

Orogenes are treated awfully by the civilizations of the Stillness. They have no rights. They are controlled by an organisation called the Fulcrum who dictates every aspect of their lives. Their children are taken away from them. They are hated, feared and often killed by non-Orogenes because of who they are.

A prescient warning about our future

Many of the point-of-view characters in Jemisin’s novels are Orogenes and her powerful prose makes vivid the pain they are forced to go through by a society that hates and fears them. These books are an emotionally charged warning about what can happen when all of society blames a group of people for an environmental disaster.

The Orogenes aren’t responsible for the bleak existence the people of The Stillness have to endure: toiling in a hostile environment, constantly threatened by natural disasters. However, they are blamed for it.

I am worried that Jemisin’s novels are a prescient warning about our future. As we approach a climate disaster, and the effects of climate change become more widely felt, who will be blamed for the suffering this will cause? Will it be the greedy corporations? The businesspeople who run them? The politicians who have failed to act despite years of warnings? Or will we blame the victims of a climate catastrophe? The people we always blamed for social problems: poor people, people of colour and migrants.

The rise of Ecofascism

This is already happening. As the climate worsens and knowledge of how bleak our future could be spreads, people are becoming frightened. We are seeing on the news stories about how large numbers of people are displaced by climate change. For example, the stories about a migrant caravan heading to towards the USA during the 2018 mid-term elections.

The effects of the climate emergency are being more keenly felt in poorer countries and this will inevitably cause migration. Many people in wealthier countries are concerned that there isn’t enough to go around if we let these victims of climate disasters in. This fear of climate migration is fueling the far-right, and specific climate-related migration anxieties have led to the rise of “Ecofascism”.

Biran Khan has written in detail about how our fears about a climate disaster and the stories we tell about the environment are driving people towards Ecofascism. In the above article for Gizmodo, he interviewed Betsy Hartmann, a professor emeritus at Hampshire College who studies the connections between white nationalism and environmentalism. Hartman summed up the problems with the stories we tell about migration and climate change when she said: “Using this highly militarized and stereotyped Malthusian discourse about poor people of color is dangerous and counterproductive.”

I am worried that our narratives about a climate disaster, about how people could be displaced by the impacts of climate change and the strain this will place on our societies are fueling Ecofascism. This could lead to a very dark place.

A minority is blamed for our world’s problems

Are we heading towards a world like The Stillness? A world where the environment has turned against us and humans eke out a perilous, pitiless existence oppressed by hostile natural forces and tyrannical governments? A world where we blame a small group of easily recognisable people for all the problems of the world? A world where we hate a minority, seek to control them and frequently subject them to violence because of our fear about the dangers for the world?

This is possible, which is why we should all read Jemisin’s novels and experience the suffering of the Orogenes. We should let this be a warning against hating each other and blaming each other for the effect of a climate disaster. Our future doesn’t have to be The Stillness. We can work together, in solidarity, for a better, safer and more tolerant world.

In The Machine Stops E. M. Forster wrote an uncanny prediction of online politics today

In 1909 E. M. Forster published a novella called The Machine Stops. Forster is best known as the author of Howard’s End and A Room With A View, Edwardian-era novels about the social and romantic lives of wealthy people, so it may surprise you that The Machine Stops is a work of science fiction focusing on the lives of ordinary people in the future.

The novella imagines a future where everyone lives by themselves, underground, in small pods that are described as like bees’ honeycombs. Everyone is physically isolated from each other, but is connected via The Machine.

In this future, people rarely leave their pods but connect to each other via the telephone and plates that show images of the person being spoken to. The people who inhabit The Machine engage in what can only be described as an uncannily prescient depiction of online debating. They shun first-hand experiences, but are intellectually stimulated by the discourse around ideas. Usually, this is the discourse around the discourse around ideas.

An uncanny prediction of the present

Despite Forster’s novella being written over a century ago, it accurately describes a world where people are connected to each other via social media. It also shows how people perceive the world through social media, rather than first-hand experience of it.

The people of Forster’s story experience the world via The Machine and what it shows to them, just as we experience the world via what we are shown by the social media platforms. One aspect of the world of the story that Forster doesn’t explore is the degree to which The Machine controls what ideas are discussed. The world is too vast for The Machine’s users, or subjects, to perceive it all and thus it must be selective in discourse it shows to its users.

The Machine of our world

In our world, we know that this process of social media platforms selecting what we see has had profound political implications. Again there is too much content for the users of social media platforms to be shown it all so what a user sees is curated for them. The goal of a Facebook or Twitter is to maximise the time that we spend on their sites (so that they can show us more adverts (how they make their money), so when personalising our timelines the platforms prioritise content that will keep is engaged.

We have fed our whole lives into these platforms, so they have a lot of information about the things that keep us engaged. This is harmless enough when the platforms are showing me more Simpsons clips, because I previously watched some Simpsons clips, however it becomes more problematic when it comes to news and politics.

Attention-grabbing and extreme content

Personalising what news and political information we see based on what we engaged with well inevitably lead to our views not being challenged and more attention-grabbing (i.e. extreme) version of what we believe being shown to us.

In an article for Nieman Reports, Adrienne LaFrance spoke to product manager for Google News (a platform that personalises the news content its users’ see) Anand Paka who said: “Just due to the deluge of information, users do want ways to control information overload. In other words, why should I read the news that I don’t care about?”

Removing the news that we don’t care about is important because it removes our collective understanding of what the news is. In the same Nieman Reports article, LaFrance writes: “What’s important is how people use the news to have a discussion.”

She goes on to say: “You may have friends or colleagues, and you read the same things in common. You may decide different things about it. Then you debate with those people. If you’re not even seeing the same news story, it leaves you with a much narrower set of people with whom you share that common ground. You’re losing the common ground of news.” 

A gateway to far-right politics 

The breakdown of our shared understanding of the news leads the breakdown of our shared understanding of what the world is. This shared understanding is part of how we recognise extreme positions and avoid them. By perceiving politics through social media we have two problems: more extreme content being fed to us to hold our attention and a breakdown of our collective understanding of the news so that we don’t know what extreme is anymore.

A good example of this is a New York Times story about, Caleb Cain, a man who was radicalised into the Alt-Right by watching videos on YouTube. YouTube was showing Cain what held his attention and, in an attempt to keep him on the platform, it served him up increasingly extreme right-wing content. Through seeing politics only through what was served up to him online, Cain drifted away from a perception of the world shared by many people and ended up having a narrow perception of the world shape by extreme-right wing ideas.

The Machine is not the world

Key to this is that Cain only perceived the world through what YouTube (and other tech platforms) were showing him. Like the people in Forest’s novella, his politics wasn’t shaped by first-hand experience of the world, it was shaped by what The Machine was showing him.

The lesson to take from this is to remember that The Machine is not the world. It’s part of how we understand the world, but it should not take the place of the world. This a problem facing left-wing politics. So much of politics today is done via social media, but social media is not the world.

The Machine obscures the starlight

In Forster’s novella most people live underground and don’t see day light or starlight. The machine has physically obscured the starlight, but it has also done this in a metaphorical way. In his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, James Williams describes the different ways that social media distracts us from our lives. One way is by obscuring what Williams calls “the starlight,” which is our ability to navigate by our higher goals and values, our guiding stars.

Social media platforms cause us to focus our activity on the metrics they can measure, such as likes, shares and clicks, over things that are meaningful to people, such as human connections or happiness, that they cannot measure. Through overuse of social media our goals shift from things that matter to us to things that matter to the platforms. This is obscuring our starlight.

In the novella The Machine has achieved this via making the focus of human interaction discussing ideas via The Machine, which it understands, rather than our values of human connections. In our world, the starlight is obscured when we change our behaviour to maximise the likes or shares on social media instead of what brings us happiness.

Obscuring our political starlight

There is a political aspect to this as well as personal one. Now that so much of politics is done via social media, the starlight of our politics has been obscured as well. Too much of our political action is focused on what gets the most likes or retweets or who has delivered the most shared own on their political opponents, instead of changing minds or winning elections. I am as guilty as anyone of having my starlight obscured by social media.

The discourse around who said what about whom and who has delivered the sickest Twitter burn is taking the place of real activism, engaging people, and trying to win elections. The world is under threat. The far-right is on the march. We need to work fast to avert an environmental disaster. We need to tackle rising homelessness, inequality and child poverty. However, what we are focused on is what The Machine wants our goals to be rather than what we need our goals to be.

Not the end of the world, yet

Fortunately, all is not lost for us like it is for the people of Forster’s story who are so reliant on The Machine that when it stops their society ends. Cain eventually stumbled on some left-wing YouTube content and de-programmed himself, which shows that we all are capable of realising that the world is not what The Machine is showing us. 

It’s not the end of the world, yet. We don’t need to wait for a disaster to realise that The Machine is not everything. We can escape the machine now before it is too late.

The Jane Austen Society

It’s hard to imagine a time when the name Jane Austen wasn’t synonymous with the idea of the English author. Today she casts a long shadow over all English literature and 203 years after her last books were published she is still very popular.

All six of her novels are still in print, on Valentine’s Day this year, the latest high-profile film adaptation of one of her works, Emma, was released and a Jane Austen themed improvised comedy group has sold out a West End Theatre in London. 

It’s easy to imagine it has always been this way, but Jane Austen hasn’t always been this popular. There was a time when she wasn’t a household name. 

The Jane Austen Society 

A new novel called, The Jane Austen Society, by Natalie Jenner takes us back to this time. The book is set during and immediately after the Second World War, in the English country village of Chawton where Jane Austen lived. However, financial hardship has befallen Austen’s descendants and her name is unrecognised in her home village.

The novel follows a range of characters, all who have been touched by Austen’s writing. Her words have given meaning to their fears, hopes, personal tragedies and traumas. Together they form a society to preserve the memory of Jane Austen and to acquire a cottage in Chawton that she used to live in to turn it into a museum. 

The Jane Austen Society is a character-led novel. The book focuses intimately on the lives, feelings and thoughts of these characters. In the style of Austen herself, the book is mainly focused on their romantic desires as exploits of the Society brings the characters together, spark some new passions and rekindles some old flames.

Rich characterisation

The characterisation is rich and every one of the main characters is fully fleshed out. I got a strong impression of them as people, their pasts, their wants and needs. This was mainly achieved through the author’s voice explicitly telling the reader what the characters wanted in a particular moment or by having their backstory explained in detail. 

This novel could have benefited from showing the reader what motivated a character, rather than telling. I would have preferred that the characters reveal themselves for the reader via their own actions or words.

An intimate portrait of village life

Similar to Austen’s novels, The Jane Austen Society is an intimate portrait of English village life. The village of Chawton is as much a character in the story as any of the people. Like the other characters we a rich sense of the place and its history. The book explores the closeness of everyday life, in a world that is yet been changed by the big social upheavals of post-war Britain. 

The novel explores all aspects of such life, the positives and negatives. For example, there is the pressure to appear respectable. Some characters are subject to prying eyes and maybe would prefer the anonymity of a big city. It can be hard for love to bloom when it’s watched constantly. There is also the strong sense of togetherness that comes from living with people in such a small community.

Jane Austen’s whit

The Jane Austen Society has a lot in common with a Jane Austen novel. For example, several of Jenner’s characters cannot see for themselves what is the plain to the reader. They are so caught up in their thoughts that they cannot see the happiness that they could have if only they embraced it. This creates a strong sense of dramatic irony, as the reader understands much more about the situations than the characters do.

This novel has dramatic irony and the small rural community setting in common with a Jane Austen novel, but it lacks the whit that Austen is well known for. There is none of the witty sparing between characters or the wry observations that Austen did so well.

By contrast, the recent film adaption of Emma starring Anya Taylor-Joy found a way to make the humour accessible to a modern audience. Jenner’s prose is emotive and her dialogue is poignant. Many of character have suffered personal tragedies and their pain, sadness and fear is powerful portrayed in the novel. 

This creates a very different tone to one of Austen’s novels. Jenner’s novel is much sadder, which is not what I expected from a novel about one of English literature’s great wits. This isn’t a flaw in the novel, the descriptions of pain and loss in Jenner’s novel are very moving, but it wasn’t the tone I expected.

Passion for Austen

The character’s passion for Austen is tangible. I believe in their love of her writing, how it has touched these people and awoken a passion for her work. The characters spend a lot of time discussing Jane Austen, comparing the motivations of her characters and mentally casting themselves in the roles to help them understand their own lives. This is what fans of great stories have done throughout the centuries and continues today.

A lot of the novel is given over to characters discussing Austen in detail. It may not surprise you for a book titled The Jane Austen Society, but this is a book about characters who are chiefly concerned with Austen. This is certainly a novel for fans of Jane Austen as this is not just the focus on the book, but is almost exclusively its content. 

Happily married

Readers who love Jane Austen as much as Jenner’s characters will love this novel. I can imagine this book being well received by reading groups. There is certainly a lot to discuss. Which characters from the novel most closely align with Austen’s characters? Do you agree with how they interpret Austen’s characters? 

The Jane Austen Society builds to a neat and satisfying conclusion. In true Austen style, each character marries their true love and lives happily ever after. This leaves the reader with a content feeling that everything worked out for the best in the end, despite any upsets along the way. Much like a Jane Austen novel.

Audiobook review

The standout feature of this audiobook is Richard Armitage’s narration. His deep, rich voice is a pleasure to listen to. I have admired Armitage’s stage, TV and film performances for years, but I was struck by how well suited he is to reading audiobooks. 

Aside from Armitage, the production is a little flat. The audiobook lacks music or other embellishments to bring the story to life. However, this is more than made up for by Armitage’s excellent reading. I highly enjoyed this novel in audiobook form.

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels show how national identity might evolve in a hyper-globalised future

National identity is very important to a great number of people. It helps them define who they are amongst the teaming mass of humanity. Even the most metropolitan, the most “open”, the most well travelled individual knows the familiarity of their homeland, its customs and quirks.

For many people their national identity is something they are proud of, a key part of their own identity. They feel it is something that should be protected, almost sacred, which makes sense as religion is usually tied up with ideas of national identity.

The question this raises is, are strong national identities compatible with a globalised world, where people move easily? Human beings have become much more mobile in the last few decades, but the salience of national identity remains. This has led to conflicts between the people who want (or need) to move and the people who value staying put. It has led to the rise of populist parties, who claim nation identity is being deliberately eroded to serve the interests of those who benefit from this globalised world (or those who simply like it).

Can the answer be found in the 25th century?

This conflict seems irreconcilable. It appears that either globalisation or national identity must go. However there is an alternative, which is that both concepts need to evolve to co-exist.

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels lay out a possible path for this. Terra Ignota is a series of three science fiction novels (the fourth is due to be published next year) set on Earth in the 25th century; a 25th century very different to our own. What makes the 25th century of Palmer’s novels unusual is that she has imagined entirely new ways that people in the future think and behave.

Most science fiction novels imagine new technologies, and sometimes new political structures, for their futures. Terra Ignota has these, but these novels also imagine new philosophies for the future. Palmer is a historian who studies the Enlightenment and how its ideas spread. She has imagined a future where the ideas set in motion by the Enlightenment have continued to evolve. Terra Ignota’s 25th century Earth doesn’t just have different technology and geo-politics, it has entirely new ways of thinking about the family, government and the nation state.

Evolving national identity

One of the technological advances shown in Palmer’s novels is an automated system of flying cars capable of taking anyone anywhere in the world within two hours. The novels explore how national identity might be different in a world where borders and distance (crucial parts of national identity) are meaningless. In this world, national identity hasn’t perished, people still consider themselves to be Greeks or Indonesians. In fact, these form a crucial part of some people’s identity. The concept of national identity hasn’t disappeared in Terra Ignota’s hyper-globalised world, but it has evolved.

In the future as shown in Palmer’s novels, one trend is for people to wear clothing that declares their identity (we’ll come back to this) and people’s national identity can be a part of this. People who feel that their national identity is an important part of who they are wear an armband declaring which nation strat they belong to (and the fact that it is important to them). This way people are able to express their national identity in a future where technological and political change has meant that there aren’t national governments or borders anymore.

Hive identity and national identity

As well as nation strats, the world of Terra Ignota has the ‘hives’, another analogy for nation states. The vast majority of the human race belongs to one of the seven hives: the Masons, the Cousins, the Humanists, the Mitsubishi, the Europeans, the Gordians and the Utopians. Its voluntary to join a hive (you don’t automatically join one based on who your parents were or where you were born) and you can leave at any point.

Each hive is different. Governed differently, structured differently, has a different language, a different culture and attracts different types of people. In many ways they are similar to nation states - apart from being voluntary.

Palmer has said that because the hives were created at different points in time between the present and the year 2454, the hives vary in how similar they are to nations. The older hives are more like nations, having geographical territory for example, and grew out of pan-national organisations such as the European Union and the Mitsubishi corporation (which became the European and Mitsubishi hives respectively). Others are post-national organisations, such as the Humanists and Utopians. They are collectives of like-minded people that are not bound by physical space.

Hive identity and personal identity

Joining a hive reflects how you see the world and the type of larger structure you want to belong to. The Mitsubishi hive is a corporation where decisions are made by shareholder voters and individuals can attain more votes by purchasing property. The Cousins are a family and decisions are made via a suggestion box. The Masons are an Empire with supreme authority invested in the Masonic Emperor.

Members of hives typically wear clothes that identify themselves as members of that hive such as Cousins wearing wraps and Utopians wear Griffin-cloth cloaks. Those who find all this too prescriptive are free to not join any hives and be hive-less.

Hives transcended national identity

Hives are a less combative form of national identity. Although there are rivalries between hives, there are not military conflicts between them for territory or resources. There is suspicion between hives but there aren’t acts of racism directed at members of each hive. In the world of Terra Ignota humans have transcended national identity and hatred based on these divisions (mostly).

The fact that it’s easy to join or leave a hive guard against a hive becoming too oppressive or a leader too authoritarian. To leave an authoritarian hive, someone doesn’t need to leave their home, make a dangerous journey and become a stranger in a different land. It’s an administrative process. Hives have solved a crucial problem of the nation state: liberal democracies can use borders to keep people out who need shelter, and authoritarians can use the borders to keep people who want to flee in.

The more flexible system of hives, that still provides people with ways to express their identity, is a sensible evolution of the concept of national identity for a hyper-globalised future. One of the hives is even a nation (the Europeans) and offers a home for everyone who believes that national identity is a crucial part of their identity.

A story about national identity

The Terra Ignota novels show a positive vision of what national identity could look like in the future. The people of the year 2454 still have the positive aspects of national identity, such as the Olympics (where athletes can compete under the banner of their national strat), but they no longer have the hatred and war that exists between today’s nation states. The novels show that national identity can evolve to still be relevant in a globalised world.

We don't need to give up the concept of national identity as incompatible with globalisation. Neither do we need to end the openness and ease of travel that has become a feature of the last few decades to protect the positive things that come from national identity.

As technology continues to progress, and travel and communication gets easier, our ideas about the concept of nation states need to evolve. That is one of the great strengths of Palmer’s novels: they show not only how our world might change in the future, but also how our thinking about it might evolve as well.

Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers novels are the positive narrative about our future that we need

Recently I finished reading the Wayfarer novels by Becky Chambers. The series consists of three loosely connected novels set in the same future interstellar society. In this vision of the future, humanity lives across many worlds and some people even live permanently in space in the Exodus Fleet. Humans have also made contact with many other species and are part of a wider galactic community of different civilizations. 

The three novels have stories that take place in different parts of the galaxy. The first, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, follows the Wayfarer, a ship that makes wormholes that connect the galaxy up. The second, A Closed And Common Orbit, tells two stories about the youth and adulthood of a friend of a crewmate from the Wayfarer and the third, A Record of A Spaceborn Few, follows the sister of A Wayfarer crew member who lives in The Exodus Fleet, a permanent residence for humans in space. Across these three stories we see a wide range of how people live in this universe, all of which is vividly brought to life by Chambers’s imagination.

My main take away from reading these three books is that this is an optimistic vision of the future. This isn’t a utopia, like The Culture in Iain M. Banks’s sci-fi novels, but it’s certainly a more socially just future. By and large, there is peace and prosperity. Even in the resource-poor Exodus Fleet, everyone is provided with a basic standard of living.

A future where we live together in space

This is a future where humans and aliens share ships, living space and work together. The Wayfarer itself has a human and non-human crew and a few awkward moments aside (such as when the ship’s Aandrisks crew member is in a bad mood because she needs to shed her scales) everyone gets along fine. There are wide differences between a human and a Harmagian (a gooey mollusk like creature) and people are tolerant and accepting of the differences. There are rivalries between species, struggles for power and competing views of how we should relate to each other. There are wars, fought by the Aeluon commandos and dangerous pariah species such as the Toremi from the first novel, however, huge interspecies war (the kind we are accustomed too from sci-fi novels) seems rare, and sectarian violence doesn’t seem to exist at all.

In the first novel, aliens and humans share a ship and establish deep bonds leading to a found family. The second novel explores the interpersonal relationships between humans and AIs. In the third novel, despite being set in the predominantly human Exdos Fleet, has a plot line in which a curious Harmagian is accepted into human society.

As well as this being a vision of the future where different species can live together, it’s a future where humans can live with each other. There are cultural differences between the Exodus Fleet and non-fleet humans, however, there is little hostility between the two. The human race of this future is also accepting of LGBTQ+ people, tolerant of people with different gender identities and radical strife seems to be a thing of the past. These novels show that humans can live together without hate.

This is a story we need now

After reading these novels I felt that this is a story that we need now: a story about people can live together, if not in perfect harmony, but at least peacefully. Not just people as vastly different as humans and Aandrisks or Harmagians or Sianat Pairs or AIs but people who are similar to each other but have a different skin tones or religions.

In today’s fiction, there is a prevalence for dystopias and visions of disastrous futures where the few surviving humans eke out a pitiless existence either under the yoke of authoritarianism like in The Hunger Games, or in a climate devastated wasteland such as Mad Max: Fury Road. I can understand why visions of a dark future appeal. We are worried about the present and fearful about our future. Grim warnings about how bad things can get might jerk us into action or at least show us that we are not alone in being frightened about the future. However, taken together too many grim visions of tomorrow can lead us to believe that destruction and tyranny are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it.

Narratives about how we can't live together

There are also too many narratives about how we cannot live together. Stories in the news, from immigration to trans rights, are telling us that an inevitable consequence of humans being different from each other is strife between us. Stories about crime or civil disharmony say that human beings are always at each other’s throats. These contribute to a greater story about how we cannot tolerate each other. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up thinking that humans can’t live together and our future is just a slide into increasingly more fraught strife until we destroy each other.

The future is yet to be written and we can change it. That’s why we need narratives about hope, narratives about how we can live together in peace and tolerance, to show that it’s possible. We need stories and fiction that show us that we can tackle the deep divisions in society and live together. It won’t be easy and what we end up with won’t be perfect, but if we believe we’re not capable of anything better we won’t amount to anything better.

The Wayfarers novels give us a glimpse of a better, more tolerant future where people can live together as peacefully as their circumstances allow. We need stories like this to save us from our fear of each other in the present and our visions of grime dystopian futures that could easily go from stark warnings to the inevitable fate of us all.

How you would use a time machine is a feminist issue

What would you do if you had a time machine and wanted to change the world? Would you stop one event from happening? Prevent two people from meeting? Save a life? Take a life?

Killing someone important, before they did what they're famous for, seems like the easiest way to have a dramatic impact on history. You could kill Hitler and stop the rise of Nazism. Or kill Robert Oppenheimer to prevent the invention of nuclear weapons. If you killed Lenin would the October Revolution still happen?

This is the premise of the Terminator films: that you can change history by killing one person, because one person can change the world. However, that is based on the idea that history works a certain, very patriarchal, way.

"The history of the world is but the biography of great men"

This idea of history follows Thomas Carlyle’s “great man theory”. Thomas Carlyle was a 19th-century historian and philosopher, he came up with this theory, which is the idea that the course of history is changed by the actions of certain “great men” - and writing in Victorian times, he did mean men. In his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History he gave several examples of great men, from Oliver Cromwell to Dante, but no great women. In his book, Carlyle said: "The history of the world is but the biography of great me

If this is true then a time machine could easily be used to change history. You could identify the great men from history books (Carlyle provides helpful suggestions) and then you would know who to kill for your desired history change. Need to stop a war from devastating Europe? Then assassinate Napoleon. Want to stop people looking up the definitions of rude words? Then Dr Samuel Johnson is the great man to stop.

All this assumes that no one else could do what Napoleon or Dr Johnson did, which seems unlikely. Couldn't anyone have written the dictionary or risen out of the terror that followed the French Revolution to take control of a great army and then wage a war of conquest? If Skynet killed John Connor before he was born or when he was a teenager, wouldn't someone else emerge to meet the need for a leader to save humanity from Skynet? Is John Connor really necessary? What's important is the movement of people fighting the machines.

People's History

The opposite of Carlyle's great men theory is People's History or history from below. This theory states that history is changed by groups of people or mass movements. It emphasises the importance of marginalised and oppressed people in changing history. People's History holds that it's not John Connor’s leadership that makes the human resistance, but the need of humans to resist the machines. 

According to People’s History, if you had a time machine and wanted to change history then you would need to go back in time and build a movement or change an existing movement. You couldn't turn Britain back into an absolute monarchy by killing Oliver Cromwell. A groundswell of change in that direction is needed.

This is the premise of The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, a novel about a struggle between feminist and misogynist time-travelers attempting to change women’s rights in the present by editing the past. The novel focuses on key points in feminists history, such as suffragettes in late 19th century times and the 90s Riot Grrrl scene. It also states the People’s History theory when the book’s narrator explains that you cannot use time-travel to kill a single person to change history. She cites an example from their world where the killing of the dictator Emmnaule led to the rise of Napoleon. In the novel, the time-traveling feminists debate the great man vs people’s history approach to history, which informs the actions the characters take against the men attempting to erase women’s rights from history.

Time-traveling feminists

The Future of Another Timeline is a feminist book, not just because it’s characters are suffragettes and Riot Grrrlz, but because of its focus on people’s history as opposed to the great Men of history. The great men theory leaves out the role of women and other oppressed minority groups. This is because women’s influence on history has been downplayed over time or has been subtle, unlike the attention-grabbing role that Napoleon played.

Great women of history

Despite the Terminator films following the great men theory it’s still a feminist film, partly because in the Terminator universe there are great women of history such as Sarah Connor in the original film or Dani Ramos in the most recent Terminator: Dark Fate. Their actions change history and the film shows that the history of the world is not just the biography of great men, but of great women as well. However, the film still overlooks the role that movements play in shaping history. John Connor or Dani Ramos cannot change history and fight the domination of the machines without a movement behind them.

How we would change history reflects how we think about history. Anyone who wants to go back in time and kill Hitler is not thinking about the conditions that created the demand for what Hitler was selling, ie Nazism. If we subscribe to the great men theory of history theory then we are overlooking the roles that women and other oppressed minorities have played.

So, if you ever get your hands on the key to a time machine, take a movement to think about what has changed history, before you decide how you want to change it.

The Church in His Dark Materials is a totalitarian institution

The world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels - and his new series, The Book of Dust - is similar to our world in many ways, but it’s also strikingly different. One difference is that in His Dark Materials the Church, or the Magisterium, as it is known - is a totalitarian organisation.

Calling it totalitarian is not just an atheist grumbling about organised religion. The Magisterium conforms to many aspects of totalitarianism as laid out by the 20th century’s greatest scholar of totalitarian regimes, Hannah Arendt.

In her seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, Arendt lays out precisely what totalitarianism is. One of the key aspects of totalitarianism, which makes it different from authoritarianism, is that totalitarian regimes seek not just power, but to control every aspect of their citizens existence. The Magisterium does this through its control of what knowledge is acceptable and what is blasphemous, especially through its suppression of knowledge about Dust.

A totalitarian movement

The Magisterium is not a nation, it’s a set of beliefs, groups of people and institutions. Collectively, The Magisterium is what Arendt would describe as a totalitarian movement. Movements, according to Arendt, go beyond nation and politics and seek to dominate the entire world. This is clearly how Marcel Delmar intends to use the plans of The Magisterium in The Secret Commonwealth. Movements are also not political parties, Arendt said that they go beyond parties and were for men of all parties, as is the Magisterium.

Arendt said that totalitarian movements divide the masses into two camps: sympathisers and members. The ones who support the movement and the ones who act on its behalf. No other form of person is recognised. The members are organised into layers of inner circles that get increasingly ideologically purer and increasingly shielded from the outside world. The most central of these layers is the secret police who enforce discipline. This is how the Magisterium is structured, not as a single institution, but layers of different institutions of increasing ideological purity.

Shifting institutions

We have said that the Magisterium is not just one institution, but a series of shifting different institutions. The different institutions of the Magisterium are shown in His Dark Materials and are gone into in more detail in The Secret Commonwealth. Similar to a totalitarian regime, the Magisterium being a complicated series of interlinked institutions masks the true sources of power and makes it obscure to those who are not members of the movement. Members of the movement can follow the subtle clues as to where power resides, but everyone else is confused.

As Arendt said of totalitarian regimes, the more visible the institution, the less power it will have. Conversely, the more shadowy the institution, the more power it will have. This is clearly the case for the Magisterium where obscure offices like the La Maison Juste, aka the League for the Instauration of the Holy Purpose, or the General Oblation Board have a great deal of power but are hidden from the public.

This structure allows for power to be moved from institutions as their significance rises and falls within the movement without anyone noticing. It’s the opposite the transparent and stable power relationships of democratic governments. There are no clear hierarchies between these institutions, as is the case for the Magisterium, but some clearly possess authority.

The secret police

I have mentioned a few times the important role of the secret police in a totalitarian regime. They are the innermost layer of the movement, responsible for enforcing discipline and ideology. The Magisterium has its own secret police, the CCD (or Consistorial Court of Discipline), which is one of the most powerful institutions of the Magisterium, as you would expect in a totalitarian movement. The CCD are beyond the reach and power of national police services, who are subservient to them. Their jurisdiction is the entire world. In the Secret Commonwealth it is said that the CCD have a “magic key” to unlock the powers of national police forces even when they don’t have jurisdiction.

According to Arendt, the role of the secret police in a totalitarian regime is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when people or entire sections of society need to disappear, which is one of the roles of the CCD within the Magisterium. The police find criminals who are punished. Secret police find undesirables who are vanished. When someone vanishes, they don’t just disappear from the world, their entire existence disappears with them. It is as if they never existed. They are gone forever and have always been gone. Criminals return from the punishment system to society, whereas no one returns from being vanished.

The secret police are also the most important institution of a totalitarian regime. Amongst the shifting pattern of institutions they hold constant power as they enforce discipline. They are the innermost layer of the movement, made up of the most ideological members. This is the role of the CCD and they are amongst the most powerful institutions of the Magisterium. The secret police are also the closest institution to the leader, another key element of a totalitarian movement as identified by Arendt.

The leader

Arendt identified the leader as an essential part of any totalitarian movement. Having a single leader who is all powerful in the movement in key. The leader is someone who is identified with every action of their followers who are acting on his behalf. The opinions of the leader constantly change, however, these are not seen as lies by the members of the movement as they understand the true meaning of the lies. An example that Arendt uses is when Joseph Stalin said that: “Moscow is the only city in the world with subway.” This is evidently not true, as London and many other cities have subways that predate Moscow’s. The members of Stalin’s movement, the Bolshevik Party, saw the true meaning of this which was: “All other subways were built by capitalists which makes bad and we will destroy them.” The underlying ideology of the leader’s words remains the same while the meaning changes.

The leader of the movement described in Pullman’s novels is The Authority, the god of the Magisterium. He is a supreme leader whose words are not questioned, regardless of whether they make sense with corporal reality. His power over the Magisterium is supreme, his secret police do his will and all members of the movement are equal before the leader. The Authority fits closely with Arendt’s description of the leader of a totalitarian movement.

Concentration camps

The final aspect of the Magisterium that relates to the description of a totalitarian movement as laid out by Arendt is the research station of Bolvangar that appears in the first His Dark Materials novel, Northern Lights. You might think that there is nothing in The Origins of Totalitarianism that is similar to an arctic base where the link between children and their demons is cut, but there is one key institution of totalitarianism that is similar. I would argue that Bolvangar is a concentration camp.

Arendt described concentration camps (a feature of all totalitarian regimes) as “the laboratories of totalitarianism” as it was only in these barbaric places that experiments in total domination of human beings could be conducted. It was only in concentration camps that every single aspect of people’s existence be controlled and the dreams of totalitarians be realised. It is in concentration camps that totalitarians conduct their experiments in changing human nature.

As Arendt said, there are no parallel experiences to that of a concentration camp. No reporting or analysis can capture it. The people who went there went to the world of the dead and the living cannot understand the world of the dead. Even those who are returned to life doubt their experiences their and cannot convey them. Concentration camps destroyed individualism and spontaneity and create the ideal subjects of totalitarianism. There is no reasoning behind why people end up in concentration camps as they are not rational institutions. They are kept secret and guarded by only the movements’ most loyal followers as no one else could tolerate their existence.

The Arctic station of Bolvangar is the laboratory of the Magisterium. It’s here they perform their experiments in creating the ideal citizen who is innocent, untouched by Dust and is separated from their daemons. This is done to children who have been seemingly chosen at random and there is no rationality behind this action. Only the very loyal of the followers of Magisterium know about Bolvangar because anyone else would be horrified by such a place. As such, Bolvangar fits Arendt’s description of a concentration camp.

The totalitarian Magisterium

The Magisterium conforms in many ways to how Arendt described a totalitarian movement in her seminal study on what totalitarianism is. Like totalitarianism, the Magisterium is not bound by any law as they claim they represent the laws of nature and history (in the Magisterium’s case the law of god) which are higher than the law of people. We see this in the novels when the Magisterium vanish or kill citizens of countries regardless of the laws of those countries. Terror is the weapon of totalitarianism and it’s the weapon of the Magisterium. So, when I say that in His Dark Materials the Church is a totalitarian institution, I mean that literally.

The Testaments shows a world where the story that America tells is dead

What is the story that Gilead tell itself about itself? All nations do this. Nations are more accurately described as a collective story than a designated area of land. Although Margaret Atwood never explicitly states it, the story Gilead tells itself is that it is God’s kingdom on Earth and that all other nations are sinful. Gilead is the combined idea of nationhood with religious purity.

The world of Gilead is at the same time familiar and alien to us. They appear to have a similar level of technology as we do. They have cars and planes, for example. The life of a Commander’s daughter, as described in Atwood’s new novel The Testaments, is recognisable as an upper middle-class American household with a driver and cook.

However, Gilead is also unrecognisable to us. It’s a nation with an authoritarian government and a population of religious fundamentalism, apart from a few brave souls who resist. As Gilead is in many ways recognisable our world, it begs the question: how do we get from our world to Gilead? The stories that nations tell themselves will be instructive in answering this question.

The end of liberal democracy

The biggest difference between Gilead and our world is the complete absence of liberal democracy. This can be clearly seen in the role of women in The Testaments and the preceding novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In both novels women have no political or social freedom. Almost every aspect of their lives is tightly controlled by men. To us, citizens of liberal democracies, we find the lack of freedom that the women in Gilead have disgusting as it is diametrically opposed to how we view a fair society, which itself is based on our experience of liberal democracy.

In Gilead there is no democracy, no elections, no representation. The Commanders make all the important decisions and there are no checks and balances. The idea that our world of liberal democracy could move so quickly to one of no democracy is unrealistic. Yes, liberal democracy is showing strains in our world but, were it to fail, it wouldn’t turn so quickly into theocratic authoritarianism.

In the backstory of Gilead, as outlined in The Handmaid’s Tale, we see the breakdown and failure of democracy in America over several years. It’s realistic that our current mode of liberal democracy could end in several years. What is unrealistic is that there would be no democracy at all in Gilead.

Short and long stories of democracy

The difference between the end of our current mode of liberal democracy and the end of all democracy has to do with what Cambridge University politics professor David Runciman calls the long and short stories of democracy. Democracy is not one thing and it has meant different things at different times in history.

Runciman outlines that the long story of democracy goes back to Ancient Greece. Broadly, it’s the story of the idea that no one is born to rule, that there should be some means of selecting our leaders and some means of holding them to account. The short story of democracy is the story of our current mode of liberal democracy: that everyone gets a vote and all votes are equal.

It’s possible that the short story of democracy could end within our lifetime. In America, the idea that everyone should have a vote only goes back to 1920 when women got the vote and, in practice, only until The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965 that made it possible for many African Americans to use their vote. That’s not very long in the entire history of democracy. Ancient Greece denied women the vote and accepted slavery.

One generation in the future 

Is it realistic that America becomes Gilead and ends the short story of democracy over a few years? Yes, it’s possible according to Runciman. We don’t know how far in the future the novels take place. One generation or so from now? Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale could be the same generation as a theoretical daughter of mine. That would work within the time span of a possible end to the short story of democracy. It’s not even 100 years old in America (and even younger in some Eastern European countries). It could end within 20 years. That’s a realistic timeframe.

I can believe that the short story of democracy has ended in Gilead and been replaced by a theocracy that puts other people on a higher platform before God and has removed the idea that everyone should have a vote. The story that Gilead tells itself about itself is that this is all God’s will and that other liberal democratic nations are sinful.

The fact that there is no democracy in Gilead is less realistic. This story of democracy is over 2,600 years old and as such it’s much less likely to end in our lifetime. There would be some kind of election in Gilead. Only men would be allowed to vote and the choice would be between different members of the Commander class, as it was for much of the history of democracy in Britain and the US. Some form of democracy would continue, but it would be unrecognisable to us as citizens of a liberal democracy.

The story of women’s rights

Perhaps this is the case. The novels are written from the point of view of woman who would be disenfranchised in Gilead. This is outside the scope of the story that Atwood is telling about the lives of women in such a society.

What about the story of women’s rights? Like modern liberal democracy, women’s equality is a short story. In the US, women have only been allowed to vote since 1920 and abortion was only made legal nationally in 1973. Sadly, this means that the story of women’s rights could end within a generation, according to theory, and this makes Gilead much more chillingly realistic. This is the most important point that Atwood is making with these novels. The rights that we take for granted can be taken away very easily.

The story that America tells the world

There is also a medium story of democracy, as well as a short and long one. The medium story of democracy is the story that America tells itself. It’s the story of directly electing people (usually men elected by men) to represent certain geographical areas into a congress. America was closer to this model of democracy when it began than Britain was even after the Great Reform Act of 1832. This American model of democracy has been replicated around the world with many nations having presidents, senators and congressmen. America has become the medium story of democracy.

Could this end? Within a single generation? It’s possible according to the theory. This mode of democracy is only just over 200 years old and it could end in 20 or 30 years. In Gilead it has ended, which means that Gilead is not just the death of the current mode of liberal democracy, it is the death of the story that America tells itself about itself.

The work of Runciman shows that the things we take for granted like universal suffrage, equal rights and liberal democracy are not as solid as we might think. They might not be around forever. Atwood in her books makes this point about women’s rights. Both show that women’s rights and liberal democracy are not something we should take for granted and we should not ignore emerging threats to them.

Riot girls, suffragettes and time traveling feminists: three good reasons to read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

I’m always on the lookout for good time travel novels. An author is taking on a challenge when writing a time travel novel, as their characters could get lost in eternal paradoxes that alienate readers. Done well, time travel stories can be as great as Primer or Dr Who adventures such as Blink. At their worst, well, imagine Bill and Ted without the humor. 

My interest in time travel stories meant that I was curious about Annalee Newitz’s new novel The Future of Another Timeline. The novel follows time travelling historical researcher Tess and opens with her visiting Irvine in California in 1992, which was when she was a teenager and before she became a time traveler. Here Tess encounters her younger self. The plot then diverges and we get chapters alternating in perspective from the older Tess and her teenage self, known as Beth to avoid confusion. This grabbed my attention as it’s an interesting premise for a novel and is a challenge to write well.

I read the opening four chapters of this novel, so I thought I would take some time to tell you all about it and why should read it.

Interesting plot

The plot of the book is interesting and the first few chapters include several tense scenes that left me hoping for my commuter train to hit a delay to give me enough time for a few more pages, so that I could find out what happened next.

Without giving too much away, the opening of the book includes Tess investigating a plot by time traveling misogynists bent on erasing women’s rights from history and Beth getting mixed up in an accidental death and a situation that spirals out of control. The opening chapters are undercut with a sense of tension that these events are all building to something horrible that is in Tess’s past and Beth’s future.

The time travel plot is well thought out. When writing a time travel story, it is important that the author considers the mechanics of time travel in their universe. The reader must not be confused, but a sense of mystery must be built up to encourage them to keep reading. This balance is not easy to achieve.

What I liked about Newitz’s novel is that the mechanics of time travel are not heavily dwelt on. A mechanism is not a story and the method of time travel if often less interesting than what it allows the author to do with their characters in historical or future settings. These opening chapters establishes an interesting protagonist who I want to go on a time travel adventure with.

The Riot Grrrl scene

Time travel is interesting, but what’s more interesting is where it can take a protagonists. What I liked the most about this opening was the Tess time travels back to the early 1990s, to the time of the Riot Grrrl scene and the dawn of third-wave feminism. It was great to have this point in history brought to life, as it’s a period that I am too young to have experienced but, like Tess, it was a formative experience for the older punks I met in my early twenties. I have been fascinated with the politics and especially the music of this period ever since.

The novel paints a vivid picture of this legendary moment in the history of punk. It was the time of a great surge in interest in gender politics as third-wave feminism took root on university campuses. There had been a rise in social conservatism during the Regan and Bush years, which was now being pushed back at by a new generation of punks; mainly women in the Riot Grrrl scene who combined rebellious music with radical gender politics. It was the time of Bikini Kill and Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas.

The novel’s opening is a detailed portrait of this scene, the positive and negative aspects of it. There is liberational for teenage girls smothered by the conformity of conservative suburbia, but not every man in the early 90s punk scene was a fellow traveler. There have been problems with the gender politics of the punk scene since, and probably before, Sid Vicious probably killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen and the novel does not shy away from this aspect of punk. There are a lot of teenage boys who are engaging with some very self-destructive and misogynistic cultural figures through punk. While some people were listening to Sleater-Kinney others were also listening to GG Allin.

Towards the end of the opening exact there it becomes apparent that the next stage of the plot will be focused on the 1890s and the suffragettes, what is now called first wave feminism. It will be interesting to see where this goes as feminism meant very different things in the 1890s than it did in 1992.

Engaging characters

What caused me to engage with the novel was the characters. They felt like real people, especially the teenage friends of Beth, who are the characters we find out the most about. My only criticism of the opening of the novel is that it is heavy on exposition. There is a lot to explain both about the setting the mechanics of time travel and hopefully now that this has been established the rest of the novel will move faster.

This is a novel that suits the current political moment. In Britain, there has been a recent explosion of feminist punk on the underground punk scene. This is the novel to read while listening to Dream Nails or Big Joaine. It feels right for this moment, to engage with the history of punk, feminism and politics.

Above all, this novel shows the struggle for womens’ rights that has been going on since first-wave feminism and how easily these rights can be taken away. This is something we should be aware of right now. For this reason alone - as well as the interesting characters, the punk and the cool time travel plot - you should go and read this novel. I can’t recommend it enough.

The politics of The Final Empire are reminiscent of empire and revolution in our world

The premise of The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is simple but instantly engaging: what if the dark lord won? The novel takes place a fantasy world when the main villain, an evil and powerful magican, holds dominion over the world. The Lord Ruler is a distant figure, like Sauron in Lord of the Rings and Voldermort in the early Harry Potter novels, but is ever present in the society he holds dominion over. 

Despite the familiar setting of a medieval-ish society, the world-building was interesting and original. Magical power in the Final Empire comes from burning metals. People with these abilities, known as Allomancers, consume small amounts of metals such as iron, tin, copper and steel, and can then use their alchemical power to move objects, enhance their vision or do other magical things. It was a struggle to keep all the different metals and their effects straight in my head, but this didn’t distract me too much from the story and Sanderson is able to explain the world without bashing the reader over the head with the details. There are other bizarre and interesting creatures in the novel. Such as the terrifying Steel Inquisitors, creatures whose supernatural power seems to derive from the metal spikes driven through their eyes.

The politics of the world are more interesting than the fantasy. The story of the novel follows a plot to overthrow the Lord Ruler and the world it is set in felt like a believable society where people live under the constant oppression of an authoritarian ruler and his enforcers. the political and economics of the world is relatively simple, but I was still able to believe this a functioning society.

Similarities to the Russian Revolution

The story of the revolution against the Lord Ruler and the plot the protagonists set in motion is the most interesting and engaging thing about this novel. The world of the book felt like Tsarist Russia before the February Revolution. The all-powerful leader is unpopular and abuses his powers. He has to go, but who can replace him? How can they make it happen?

The majority of the plot takes place inside the resistance movement, which also felt like a believable operation to install a revolution, albeit a plot aided by magic. One of the truths of authoritarian tyrants we know from our world is that people will resist. There will be plots to fight back, no matter how hopeless things look.

The story unfolds in an original and interesting way. Through several scenes written in the first person, we get the story of the Lord Ruler and how he became who he is. It is interesting that the back story of The Final Empire is Lord Ruler going on the archetypal fantasy hero's journey: being born the son of a blacksmith and then rising to be a great hero, defeating a terrible evil to fulfil a prophecy. The twist is that the Lord Ruler becoming a tyrant afterwards, but a benevolent ruler. Towards the end of the novel, I expected there to be a twist as to the Lord Ruler’s identity, which is kept secret from the reader. There is a slight twist in this regard, but I expected more.

The protagonist and leader of the plot against the Lord Ruler, Kelsier, is a good hero but a little generic. What is original about the story is that Kelsier dies during the middle of the novel and goes on to become a symbol of revolution, achieving more in death then he did in life like many larger than life icons of revolution such as Che Guevara.

What happens after the Revolution?

The other characters were interesting, especially the other protagonist a woman named Vin who has a more complex journey as she learns Allomancey while also learning to trust others. The novel also made me have sympathy for the few noble characters, the people around the Lord Ruler who despise him but also profit from his regime. This made the story more complex than a straight forward good guys and bad guys morality story.

The ending of the book was satisfying. The Lord Ruler is killed and his regime is overthrown. Although there are still many Steel Inquisitors in the world with a great deal of power. Overthrowing the ruler is only the first stop of a revolution; now the leaders of the coup have to tackle the social and political problems of the land.

What will happen when the revolutionaries govern? Will it be like the Russian Revolution? A brief movement of hope for a better world before descending into terror. Will the story of life after the Lord Ruler be as complex as real-world revolutions? I’ll have to read the other books in the Mistborn series to find out, however, as a novel that describes the first mile on the road of revolution, this book was a captivating read.

A Closed and Common Orbit lets the reader walk in shoes of people with very different lives

Recently I read a book that really opened my eyes. It was about a child without parents, in a poor society, living off scrap in a giant rubbish tip filled with everything wealthy people threw away. This story ran parallel to that of an adult, living in a prosperous society, trying to find their own identify whilst having a body that didn’t feel right to them. At the same they are trying to keep their otherness a secret unless their difference ignites the ire of the society they live in.

This novel wasn’t an Ali Smith or Martin Amis. It was A Closed And Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.

Living off scrap

The novel has two main plots. One follows Jane, a ten-year-old clone, who lives in a factory sorting through piles of rubbish. She escapes from the factory and is adopted by an AI in a crashed space ship called Owl. By salvaging the scrap, they are able to repair the ship and escape.

Scavenging through scrap is a hard life. There are many dangerous chemicals and bits of machinery, as well as very little food and nothing that we would consider society. Although Owl tries to provide for Jane as best she can, Jane doesn’t go to school or have any friends. Jane’s life is far away from the happy childhood that every kid deserves.

Jane is a poor child, sifting through the discarded trash of a wealthier civilization that doesn’t know or care about her miserable existence. Jane lives in the most absolute poverty; by the standards of our world she could be amongst the most disadvantaged people on Earth. The parallels between her life and the lives of children in giant scrap yards in China are obvious.

Hiding your true self

The other story follows Sidra, who lives on another planet in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, diverse society where humans rub shoulders with non-humans and everyone, more or less, gets along. The problem is that Sidra is a ship’s AI that has been downloaded into a “kit” that has the appearance of the human body. This is illegal, so Sidra has to hide her true self from everyone she meets. She also has to adapt to life in a body that’s different to one that had been assigned to her when she came into the world.

It is difficult not knowing who you are or how you fit into the models that society creates for people. Having to pass as a human is difficult for Sidra but she has to hide who she is because her very existence transgresses the rules of society. She does not know if someone will be tolerant or will react with violence when they find out the details of her personal history.

Sidra’s material needs are met, but that doesn’t mean that she is happy. The parallels between Sidra’s life and that of many people in West who are queer, trans or LGBTQ is clear. Just because she is safe from starvation or the raw elements, doesn’t mean she isn’t at risk when living in a supposedly tolerant society. Recently in London a young couple were attacked because of their sexuality.

Politically important 

Jane’s needs are towards the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter, safety. Sidra’s are towards the top: friendship, self-actualization. Neither protagonist’s needs are more important than the others’. As a reader, we care about both at the same time. They’re both people trying to live.

This novel shows how stories about both absolute poverty and social acceptance are important. There are people who argue that the left should focus only on the economic inequality that leads to absolute poverty. Conversely, there are those who think that the left should focus only on the social inequality that leads to hatred. This novel shows that both are valid. We can care about more than one thing.

Science fiction is a great genre for opening your eyes to the lives of other people. It requires a leap of imagination to picture worlds or characters that are different to your own. This leap of imagination can allow the reader to understand what it’s like for someone whose culture is different, or is poorer, or has body dysmorphia, or feels alienated from society. Imagining the lives of others is a crucial step to take towards improving them.

Quietly political

There are also those believe that sci-fi is just for frivolous entertainment and cannot say anything more substantial about society. Some of these people are authors who write sci-fi novels, although they don’t admit it, such as Ian McEwen or Margaret Atwood. They think only literary fiction has something to say. A Closed and Common Orbit shows that this is not the case.

Chamber’s book is quietly political, but is very powerful and had a huge impact on me. I found it very moving and it opened my eyes not only to how different people live but also to the fact that despite the different challenges we all face, all of our struggles are equally valid. We are all equally deserving of compassion, no matter the circumstances of our lives.

Children of Time and bridging the gap of understanding

Mediums are important. Why write a novel when you could make a film or write a play? The answer needs to be more than ‘I have no money and no friends, so I’m writing a novel’. The story you are telling needs to suit the novel as a medium. If you want to make a film, then write a film script; don't just describe a film in prose.

Each medium is suited to a certain type of storytelling. Novels can express things that other mediums struggle with. A good example of a story that works brilliantly in a novel is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. Half of the novel takes place on a planet populated by intelligent spiders. The spiders, both as individuals and as a civilization, are very different to humans, however, Tchaikovsky's novel takes the reader effortlessly inside the minds of the spider characters. Dramatising a civilization of giant spiders who communicate by dancing or by drumming on silk via film or TV would appear either laughable or terrifying.

The way the novel is written leads the reader to connect with the spiders as if they were human. We experience their individual hopes, fear and desires as well as understanding their social structures and the problems facing their civilization. By the end of the book, we relate to the spiders as much as we do to the human characters. The use of the novel as a medium neatly sidesteps the problem of how different to us the spiders are, and allows the reader to bridge the gap of understanding between a spider and a human in a way that would never work on film or TV.

Bridging the gap of understanding

Novels bringing an understanding of something that is alien to us are not just limited to making accessible non-human characters. Prose can take you inside the head of a character and give you feelings you wouldn't ordinarily feel or allow you to gain an intimate understanding of an aspect of life you haven’t experienced. It can allow you to understand what is like to be a poor, Latino woman struggling with mental health problems whilst also periodically time travelling to the future, such as in Marge Piercy‘s novel Woman on the Edge of Time.

This is how works of art, not just novels, can express things that are outside our field of understanding or are difficult to depict visually. This allows us to bridge the gap of understanding to new experiences. These works of art often deal with how something feels, rather than how it looks. They can be less instantly accessible works of art.

Example of this are the plays of Harold Pinter or the film's or David Lynch, which often depict character on the edge of complex and unknowable systems that we cannot see or understand but we can see their effects. This expresses something about the big intangible political or economic forces that govern our lives that are hard to appreciate.

Reaching for the intangible

The film Hunger by Steve McQueen takes us inside a prison in the 1980s where IRA detainees are staging a dirty protest. It conveys the feeling of isolation and desperation that leads to such behaviour as well as the visual reality of it. Zia’s Kalthoum’s documentary film, A Taste of Cement, attempts to capture the experience of being a migrant construction worker in Lebanon who had fled the violence in Syria, rather than just recording the daily lives of its subjects.

This process of reaching for the intangible in art can most keenly be seen in the painting of the Impressionists. Painters such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne were working at a time when photography was spreading as a medium and the purpose of painting needed to more than just capturing the look of something. When Monet painted Bain à la Grenouillère he did not just capture the image of a boating lake, but captured the representation of looking at a reflection in the water. This is not capturing what a reflection looks like in a single frozen instant (like a photograph does) but capturing the sensation of looking at something as dynamic as ripples in water.

FIlms that work in a similar way include Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, which won the best picture Oscar in 2017. The movie conveys how a young black man feels at three challenging points in his life. The way it’s shot, scored and edited takes you inside the protagonist’s emotions, which makes it more power. The same can be said of NK Jemisin’s fantasy novel the 5th Season and its sequels, which also conveys the complex feelings that result from a lifetime of oppression.

Political acts

This expression of the intangible can be political. Crossing the bridge of understanding lets us appreciate the lives of people who are very different to us (such as a poor, gay black man in Moonlight) or whose experiences are very different to ours (such as an enslaved and othered woman in the 5th Season). This can engender sympathy in the reader and lead them to take political actions that improve the lives of people outside their tribe.

Children of Times encourages us to sympathise with spiders, who we normally view as beneath us or as repugnant. Creating sympathy for creatures we viewing as frightening or as animals to look down on has obviously political connotations in a world riven by hatred and threatened with environmental destruction. If we can think of spiders as people then maybe we can stop the destruction of the natural world. Children of Time encourages a very difficult shift of perspective.

Art that expresses something intangible is essential for bridging the gap of understanding and creating empathy. These intangible experiences are what make us who we are and through art we broaden our understanding of the human condition. Novels are an excellent medium to achieving this as they are suited to expressing the intangible. Empathising with a spider is an important step to understanding the lives of others through art.

The engineer’s world view won't save the Seveneves

Without warning the moon explodes into seven fragments. After a few days of admiring the novelty of this, the human race realises that the fragments will collide with each other and break apart into smaller fragments, which will eventually rain down on the Earth. This Hard Rain will last for 5,000 years, killing every living creature and boiling the sea. Thus, humanity has approximately two years to come up with a plan to save all life on Earth.

This is the setup of Neil Stephenson’s novel Seveneves. It’s an excellent premise to build a novel on. It has a race against time, a struggle against nature to save humanity and a high-risk venture into space. The book is a gripping read that follows the plan to put as many people as possible onto the International Space Station or onto craft in a similar low Earth, so that some people survive the end of the world. There are double-crosses, near misses and disasters along the way, which make this a gripping page-turner.

Stephenson has done a lot of research into what would be involved in executing this plan. The book is peppered with a lot of details about the physics of low Earth orbits or asteroid mining that bring the story to life. However, my main criticism of the book is that it presents the end of the world as an engineering problem to solved and neglects the social implications of the end of the world.

In the novel most of the human race just accept that they, their families, communities and nations will die and focus their efforts on the Cloud Ark scheme, a plan to save a tiny fraction of 1% of the human race (and the genetic information of the Earth’s plants and animals). This to me seems unlikely. Surely there would be rioting, suspicion that this is an elite trick, or death cults springing up everywhere. The world would go mad, faced with this knowledge.

People would stop coming to work, which would have implications for the Cloud Ark. Even if NASA employees remain focused on the plan to save humanity, their supply chain would break down as manufacturers and logistics people decide they didn’t want to spend their last two years of life doing the 9 to 5. At one point in the novel it mentions that the Stock Market has ceased to operate, but the implications for global economic system (that has its resources geared towards making the Cloud Ark) are underexplored.

I accept this is already a long book and throwing in more details about how the human race psychologically or politically reacts to its impending destruction would only make it longer. The story of this novel is the people at the centre of the plan to save the human race, and it’s good that it sticks to that. There are a few chapters where these ideas are engaged with, such as a trip to Bhutan to collect prospective candidates for survival or the description of the public information campaign designed to inspire the people about the Cloud Ark and the future of the human race. Still, I feel this book lacks a wider perspective on the effects of its premise.

All of the nations of the Earth work together on a single project to save humanity. This also seems unlikely as the Cloud Ark plan is led by NASA and ultimately more Americans than any other nation survive the end of the world. Countries such as China and Russia, with proud cultures and nationalistic beliefs, would not just submit to be a part of the American plan. Only tiny Venezuela breaks with the American hegemony. There is no thought to the effects of the end of the world on its geo-politics.

When politics is discussed in the novel, it is always in a negative light. One of the book’s antagonists is the President of the United States who destabilases the Cloud Ark by injecting politics into its population. At several points in the novel politics is used a by-world is everything that is getting in the way of the engineers fixing the problem of the end of the word. The Cloud Ark is led by the smart people who, generally, make the right calls, but politics threatens their order.

When it becomes independent from Earth, the Cloud Ark is led by an unelected commander who is accountable to no one. The book attempts to engage with the anti-democratic implications of this, but seems reluctant to accept that the smart, heroic people in charge should be held accountable by the less smart, quivering masses they are in charge of.

The smart, competent NASA people in charge of the Cloud Ark don’t abuse their absolute authority and are always looking out for the future of humanity. The democratically elected politicians are self-serving and short sighted. In many ways this novel is a manifesto for, at best, technocratic government, and at worst, enlightened dictatorship. It supports the idea that the smartest and most capable should rule over everyone else and not be questioned by the less intelligent, less they damage society through their ignorance.

Hostility towards ordinary people’s ability to engage with the problems of the world is an ideology held by many people who work in engineering or tech companies. It manifests as a suspicion of politics in general (as the means of giving power to ordinary people who might not understand something) and politicians in particular (as those chosen to enact the wrong-headed whims of the ignorant masses). The way that politics is treated in Seveneves is a prime example of this.

The idea that the world should be led by smart people who shouldn’t have to answer to the wishes of less smart people is popular in Silicon Valley. It is an engineer’s world view, where you do not consult the ignorant masses about a problem, but only the most informed person. You wouldn’t elect a mechanic to fix your car, you’d find someone who knows about cars. So, you shouldn’t elect someone to handle the economy or the plan to save humanity, this power should only be given to those who know what they’re doing. Giving this power to elected politicians who are slaves to the will of the ignorant will only lead to things being screwed up.

This view leads to the idea that the problems of the world need engineering solutions. Issues such as climate change or world hunger need technical fixes and not engagement with the politics of these issues. Engineering will play a role in solving the climate crisis, but it will be ineffectual unless we engage with the politics of climate change. Such as how wealthy, powerful nations pollute a lot more than poorer nations or that 100 companies contribute 71% of global emissions. We need to engage with the politics behind this to fix climate change. Politics is not a distraction or a means to give power to the ignorant so that they can make the situation worse.

The engineer’s worldview leads to a few people having a lot of power and no accountability. Mark Zuckerberg could be the most powerful person in the world, King of a kingdom of over 2 billion people and possessing absolute authority over it. The enlightened dictatorship of Mark Zuckerberg has allowed the far-right to overrun his kingdom, but he and his Silicon Valley friends approach this issue as an engineering problem to be fixed and not political issues to be engaged with.

Despite the reluctance to engage with politics and a premiant engineer’s world view, Seveneves is a moving description of how humanity would face the end of the world. There are many sections of powerful, emotive prose that brought a tear to my eye. It is certainly a well researched, well written novel that I would recommend reading. I hope that this is how humanity would react to the end of the world: calmly finding a way to save humanity the problem as best as possible. Although looking at how humanity has handled climate change so far, I think this is a vain hope. 

When we fail to engage with the political nature of these enormous issues and see the world as an engineering problem we fail to fully engage with the problem. Not all problems have a solely technical fix and a range of policies is needed to address them. If we want to save our world (which is threatened by the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, not the sudden destruction of the hard rain) then politics will be as important as engineering in our salvation.