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It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
-Voltaire
I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
-Woody Allen
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
-Winston Churchill |
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Government
I might have mentioned here that I participate in a fantasy & science fiction book club. Every month we read a different book (this month's was The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, a first novel that makes me glad I have a day job to keep). We spend about half the time discussing the novel, and the other half discussing the other things we've read, and generally talking about fantasy and science fiction.
In our last meeting, someone raised a good question: "Why are all the governments in these books feudal?"
There was no direct answer to that, though I pointed out that this is more prevalent in fantasy than in science fiction - though your space operas generally feature some form of Galactic Emperor. The best we could come up with was that castles lend themselves to fantasy, and castles were a mainstay of feudalism, so therefore... So I got to thinking about it, and decided that dammit, it's about time we started incorporating other forms of government into our fantasy writing. Of course, we have the subgenre of Urban Fantasy, where the government is the republican democracy we're generally familiar with, but set it in other eras, past or future, and somehow everything becomes feudal again. It's almost as if writers think that democracy is a passing fad.
But the truth is, it's hard to conceptualize high fantasy in a democratic state - and damn near impossible in a communist one. Still, I thought it'd be good to list a few of the possible, improbable, historical and even purely conceptual forms of government, in hopes that it'd spark one of our imaginations to try something other than the court of the Emperor, king or duke with everyone going milord and milady like they're stuck in some SCA time-warp.
Now, first of all, let's make a distinction between economic government and political government. Here, I'll be discussing the political end of things; the economic end can be anywhere from capitalist to communist along some spectrum in between - or, perhaps, something that hasn't even been tried yet. By political, I mean how the leaders of the country are determined, and how they rule, lead, or guide.
 Monarchy is the most common political system in fantasy literature. It can take many forms: kingdom, empire, scattered city-states, and so on. In its best-known form, nobility is ranked, usually from Emperor to king/queen to duke and on down. Nobility is usually hereditary. It is in this framework that feudalism evolved; it took the rise of the merchant class to change its economic form.
A Republic is governed by representatives elected by the people, or a subset of the people. This is sometimes confused with "democracy," which in its purest form results in the rule of the majority, often without consideration of minority rights. In a republic, the leaders are charged with protecting the rights of the minority, rather than enforcing the will of the majority (in practice, they often enforce the will of a wealthy minority, but that's another discussion entirely). This would do well in a fantasy setting, if only because it's a form most of us are passingly familiar with.
Dictatorships are governed by... wait for it... dictators. Again, this can take many forms. The one we're most familiar with is the military dictatorship, where a coup unseats a monarch or democratically elected politician, and replaces her or him with Idi Amin. The military enforces the whims of the dictator, often with little regard for human rights or the desires of the people. A dictatorship would form an excellent backdrop for a fantasy story, especially ones where the protagonist tries to overthrow the tyrant (then tries not to become a tyrant herself).
A Theocracy, in the real world, is a government ruled by people claiming to be the direct representatives of a god or gods. Think Iran. Now, in a monarchy, especially as practiced in Europe during the middle ages, much was made of the "divine right of kings," and in Egypt the pharaohs were said to be gods incarnate. The former is still a monarchy; I'd have to call the latter a theocracy. The interesting thing about a theocracy, with regard to fantasy stories, is that in the story, maybe the rule is by the actual god or goddess, and not just their claimed representatives.
Tribalism is considered a more "primitive" form of government, and can be considered a kind of proto-monarchy, where leadership of a small band of people is hereditary or the result of some sort of trial, or taken by force.
Anarchy describes the condition of having no government. True anarchy - not just the condition of chaos caused by natural disasters or changing events that is sometimes called anarchy - is difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain - for humans. It would be an interesting condition for non-humans in fantasy, if only to contrast our own power-grasping ways. It's said that certain areas of the world are currently in anarchy, but that's not precisely true; on a finer scale, there are people who have set themselves up as tribal leaders.
Naturally, this is oversimplified; go thou and study some more. There are, of course, other forms of government, and each of the above can take several forms. A dictatorship, for example, may be ruled by an economic rather than a military force (a plutocracy). A theocracy may be made up of elected representatives who nevertheless consider themselves the chosen of some god or other. And the difference between anarchy and tribalism is often hard to see.
The important thing to take away from this newsletter is: you don't have to default your stories to a feudal monarchy. Branch out. What if it's a matriarchy (rule exclusively by women)? A gerontocracy, where the older one gets, the more political power he or she has? Or, as a writer, are you more partial to the idea of a logocracy - a government whose power derives from the written word?
It's your world, after all... we're just reading it. |
For no particular reason, let's look at some science fiction this week.
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Fantasy: January 20, 2010 Issue [#3505]
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Thanks for the inspiring thoughts. 
~ Brooke
