Books I Like

With political messages I don’t like

I have just read and enjoyed another of the books in Martha Wells Murderbot series. They are set in a world where corporate employees are mostly slaves, although not labeled as such, corporations are unethical to the point of committing murder when they can get away with it. The protagonist is a human/robot combination, treated by law and most people as machinery, property, not a person. It ends up effectively free in a planetary society that is an attractive socialist economy, a society where it is taken for granted that it is wicked to charge people for anything important to them and where food and housing are given away for free, mechanism for doing it unclear.

I like the books, don't like the politics.

One of the ways of changing the world, of making it more or less libertarian, socialist, authoritarian, Christian, is by writing fiction with an ideological view, a picture of reality through a specific lens. The most influential modern example is probably Ayn Rand's work; C.S. Lewis and George Bernard Shaw would be others.

Wells’ books preach an attractive doctrine but, I think, a dangerously misleading one. Societies that have attempted to eliminate market transactions, with the exception of very small ones,¹ have a bad track record.

As I put it in my first book:

Under any institutions, there are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends: love, trade, and force.

…

Love—more generally, the sharing of a common end—works well, but only for a limited range of problems. It is difficult to know very many people well enough to love them. Love can provide cooperation on complicated things among very small groups of people, such as families. It also works among large numbers of people for very simple ends, ends so simple that many different people can completely agree on them. But for a complicated end involving a large number of people, producing this book, for instance, love will not work. I cannot expect all the people whose cooperation I need—typesetters, editors, bookstore owners, loggers, pulpmill workers, and a thousand more—to know and love me well enough to want to publish this book for my sake. Nor can I expect them all to agree with my political views closely enough to view the publication of this book as an end in itself. Nor can I expect them all to be people who want to read the book and who therefore are willing to help produce it. I fall back on the second method: trade. (The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 3, “Love is Not Enough.”)

Naomi Novik’s Scholomance books are another example of the same pattern. I like them even better, have somewhat more sympathy with the embedded views — but only somewhat. Within the Scholomance almost all interaction, with the exception of dating and alliances, is done by market exchanges, the opposite of the picture of the attractive society in the other book. The author portrays it as an ugly but perhaps necessary consequence of a resource constrained and extremely dangerous environment; only a quarter of the students who enter the Scholomance as freshmen survive graduation four years later.

The books’ first political message is one with which I have some sympathy, that large inequalities in wealth or power can have a corrupting effect on both rich and poor, as shown by the interactions between enclavers and independents who want the enclavers' help to survive graduation as their allies and, hopefully, get into an enclave afterwards. But in the third book

(warning: spoilers)

we discover that the enclaves are set up by a procedure that involves the horrible treatment of one person, something worse than torturing to death, and the creation of a mawmouth, an almost indestructible magical creature that forever after wanders the world consuming wizards. Enclaves are shown treating independents they hire not quite badly enough to make being hired by them worse than not — they are employees not slaves — but badly enough to make it not much better, with the clear implication that it should be.

Pretty clearly, the enclaves represent corporations, the enclavers rich people.² But while it is arguable that the rich should share more with the poor, getting rich does not require injuring others. Most people, I suspect including Novik, distinguish in their moral judgements between harming people and failing to help them; it is only the latter that can be plausibly charged against the rich.³ That makes Novik's enclaves a poor model for real world rich, at least in reasonably free societies.

The protagonist's mother acts on principles close to those of the socialist society of the other book, gives away her healing and the spells she invents or discovers for nothing. She does not argue that it is wrong for other people to charge for things but her behavior, and that of her daughter in the later parts of the story, imply that not doing so is the ideal.

These are two examples of books, actually series, that I like as stories, dislike as political lessons.

I have three possible theories about why this pattern, a society without scarcity or market interactions seen as the ideal, seems so common in modern science fiction and fantasy. The first is that it reflects the woke indoctrination of current college education,  the second the political bias of sf publishers.

The third and most interesting explanation is that there is a reason why this picture of the world makes good stories. That is the only one that explains why I like them.

In the real world scarcity, the fact that we cannot all have everything we want at no cost to anyone, implies a conflict of interest not merely between good people and bad people but between good people and other good people. We like to imagine ourselves fighting bad people. We don’t like to imagine ourselves fighting other people just as good, just as entitled to whatever we are fighting over, as we are. A society without scarcity lets us see all good people as on our side.

For an example of the opposite, consider the science fiction story “The Cold Equations.” A girl stows away on a small space ship. The spaceship has barely enough fuel for its lifesaving mission, carrying serum against a lethal disease; the additional mass of the stowaway converts “barely enough” to “not quite enough.”

He pushed the lever up and the door slid its quick barrier between them, enclosing her in black and utter darkness for her last moments of life. It clicked as it locked in place and he jerked down the red lever. There was a slight waver of the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing; then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again. He shoved the red lever back to close the door on the empty air lock and turned away, to walk to the pilot’s chair with the slow steps of a man old and weary.

It is a good story but a very uncomfortable one. I expect most readers hoped, until the end, that some solution could be found, some way of letting both pilot and stowaway live.

For another example of a good story sufficiently uncomfortable that I, at least, chose to stop reading it, consider S.M. Stirling’s Draka books. The author is a good storyteller; I very much enjoyed another of his books, The Peshawar Lancers. But the Draka series is a plausible account of an alternate history in which the bad guys, roughly speaking the Nazis not as they were but as they would have liked to imagine themselves, win. That is not a story I want to read.

For a different example of the same pattern, stories written for readers to want to identify with, consider the similarities between Novik’s protagonist and Wells’. Each is very powerful. Each is very good, generously taking serious risks to protect other people. Each is looked down on, El as a putative maleficer, Murderbot as machinery, property. Each is treated very badly by the people around her or it.

Very much how the typical reader would like to imagine himself.

1. Most notably families but also groups bound by a common religious or ideological commitment, such as monasteries and voluntary communes.

2. Novik’s previous books contained no political lessons, at least none that I noticed, seriously incompatible with my views. Part of what signaled me that the Scholomance series was going to be different, even before the third book had come out, was an incident where Novik was accused of a violation of woke language rules by using the word “dreadlocks” and, instead of pointing out that the term had no racist or other evil implications in context, apologized and replaced the relevant sentence with a  weaker sentence.

3. Obviously some people, most notably Marxists, disagree. I am explaining why the books appear to me to misrepresent reality.