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The Ocean Of Stories Upon Which We Sail

by Mina

This article is woven around a wonderful speech given by Salman Rushdie when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. For him, authors (consciously or subconsciously) borrow from existing stories and add their own twist, so books “…come from other stories, from the ocean of stories upon which we are all sailing. That’s not the only point of origin: there’s also the storyteller’s own experience and opinion of life, and there are also the times he lives in. But most stories have roots in other stories, which combine, conjoin, and change, and so become new stories.”

Authors thus translate their personal mental and emotional universes into stories but also the political, historical, social and cultural currents that flow around them. Their translation of their realities is imperfect and highly subjective; their works are then read by imperfect readers who will interpret what they read to fit into their own realities and a game of “Chinese whispers” begins. As Michael Moynahan SJ tells us in his poem Incarnation:

“If communication is not
what you say but
what people hear,
then what we said
was warped and wrenched…”

No author writes in a vacuum and SF stories reflect not just rockets, moon landings, computers, the internet, smart phones, bionic limbs and other inventions, but also geography, ancient and recent history, changing cultural mores and trends of thought. And, as Rushdie reminds us, they reflect the fiction we read or watch, as many of us spend far more time dipping into fictional worlds than in watching or reading the news. So I thought about what I had read or seen recently to see what narratives I could discern as an imperfect reader/viewer. I’d like to stress here that I made no effort to find obscure narratives: all my examples are taken from my everyday life, for example, from links shared by friends, the ezines I review, Amazon Prime and the good films that go to die on international flights. And I am most definitely not exempt from subjective opinions.

To begin with an important attitude for me when reading: I particularly enjoyed the easy acceptance shown in Once Upon A Time At The Oakmont by P. A. Cornell that people are entrenched in their times (and places), with the narrator telling us at one point: “I smile. You have to accept this kind of thing when you’re a resident of The Oakmont. Times are different, and each one has its own set of values and attitudes that will inevitably become obsolete as the sands of time continue to fall.” The Oakmont is a block of flats built over a time vortex. As the building manager explains to us: “Time is nothing . . . and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up, but if it did exist, it wouldn’t run in a line; it would run in a circle…Time moves differently at The Oakmont. We can touch it at any point in time or at all points at once.” The narrator, Sarah, tells us of residents she knows and the rules (of which there are many) that govern The Oakmont. We learn of her lover, Roger, and her friends, all coming from different eras. I’m not suggesting that the tolerance predicated in this tale should be confused with fatalism, or a laissez-faire attitude, just that it is to be espoused and defended.

Moving on to examine some of the social and cultural currents flowing around us, we find gentle but unapologetic feminism and the blurring of gender identity in Mountain Ways by Ursula K. Le Guin. Although the story is ostensibly about a world where two mixed-couple poly-relationships (a “sedoretu”) are the norm and the lesbian protagonists have to find a way around this stricture, it is much more about couple and group dynamics. What makes it really interesting is its exploration of what navigating family/group dynamics involves. I love Le Guin’s psychologically complex tales and this particular one was originally published in 1996, reminding us that the blurring of genders (and roles) happened well before we invented new labels for it.

“Anti-colonialism” is given a wonderful new twist in the short story Death Is Better by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, which weaves robots and slavery together. The protagonist and his sister are attempting to escape a plantation on another world that is guarded by armed bots, including a behemoth. They are willing to risk their lives because death is better than slavery. In the chaos they unleash, it is unclear whether they manage to escape or simply find freedom in death. A nice detail in this tale is a reference to how albinism can ostracise you in a dark-skinned society (it is considered a sign of bad luck in the West African Mandinka culture, for example).

“Pro-choice” is very much part of Always Personal by Rich Larson, which follows a detective as she investigates murder cases involving “inverse stabbings”. It could be a normal detective story, one that involves DNA and bioprinters that don’t exist (yet), but the victims all fall into a “pro-life” mould stereotyped as hypocrites: victim A, who had anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life; victim B, who had attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days; victim C, who had refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following. The detective clearly empathises with the perpetrator’s “calcified anguish” as she (the detective) lost a friend to a car accident as they drove overnight “to get over the right state line”. This particular topic can turn stories into unreadable diatribes but the author gives us a good yarn whilst making his opinion clear on a divisive issue.

The author of Muna In Barish, Isha Karki, would fall under the “BIPOC” (black, indigenous and people of colour) label. We follow Muna of the Nehiri minority (she has horns and dark umber skin, and legend has it her people once had wings) as she survives in the city of Barish. She has found work and apparent shelter in a bookshop, working for Arethor. But as we witness her working days, we realise that Arethor uses apparent kindness to exploit and bully Muna; behaviour that Muna cannot acknowledge even to herself or she will be left unemployed and homeless. Muna wants to be a word-weaver, just like Lenore Phoenix who has a bestselling series about a Halfborn like her. Her secret joy is her correspondence with her hero. One day, she meets Karabel of the Senai minority (with pointed ears and keen hearing). And she finds friendship, warmth, understanding, companionship and an equal. She eventually learns that Karabel is Lenore’s downtrodden ghost-writer and responsible for the book series and correspondence that have sustained her through the worst. And Karabel has a plan for their future. It is a beautifully written, psychologically complex story by a word-weaver who plays expertly with intertextuality (stories within stories). And it is a hymn to friendship and finding a sense of community. And all this without making the reader feel that they have to be BIPOC to empathise with the characters or enjoy the story. But I do sometimes wonder if authors who are labelled BIPOC, or anything else for that matter, would prefer their tale to stand on its own merits, as this one most definitely does.

The film Vesper (a Lithuanian/French/Belgian collaboration) is set in the aftermath of ecological disaster accelerated by bio-engineering gone wrong. Vesper, the main character (arguably “enby”), is tough yet curiously innocent. The other main character, Camellia, is a bio-engineered, sentient being. The relationship between the two has sexual and incestuous undertones, as they in turn become parent, lover and friend to each other. This biopunk tale creates a bleak future with only seeds of hope at the end. The brightest spark is the main characters’ kindness, loyalty and sense of honour in a world bereft of all three. Such admirable character traits are gender-less, I would argue. And if you park all preconceptions at the door, you can truly enjoy the scene where Camellia, who is generous and kind by nature, reads a children’s book with Vesper and shows her what animals the latter has never seen actually sound like. Vesper finds a moment of shared laughter and freedom, pretending to howl like a wolf.

In Philoctetes in Kabul, Deborah L. Davitt weaves together the life of a modern-day (American, white, male) soldier and that of Philoctetes in the Iliad. An anonymous soldier is discharged from the army on medical grounds, having been betrayed and abandoned by friends. After losing his wife and job, the two old comrades who betrayed him invite him to work with them as military contractors. It is a sad and reflective tale, with hints of a past life. It shows what living with a chronic, invisible disability is like. Whether or not you feel sympathy for the protagonist is probably coloured by geography, but it is a well-written story tackling PTSD with compassion. Point of view is everything, as Rushdie tells us: ”Peace, for Ukraine, means more than a cessation of hostilities. It means, as it must mean, a restoration of seized territory and a guarantee of its sovereignty. Peace, for Ukraine’s enemy, means a Ukrainian surrender. The same word, with two incompatible definitions.”

I liked the film After Yang (based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein) because it subtly shows different points of view. For me, the most interesting thing is not the “techno-sapien” Yang himself, but what Yang meant to each family member (each with different ethnic origins), which we slowly discover as the film gently unfurls. We see how Yang filled gaps in the family, which now has to learn to function again without him. Also, Yang is owned by the family, so he is technically a slave yet, as the film progresses, we see that he had his own motivations and relationships outside the family. Interestingly, I have yet to read a review that tackles the fact that Yang is presented as sentient but lacks freedom, both because he is bought, sold and refurbished like an object, and because he is given very specific programming to suit his host family. The Guardian describes this film as “a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness” – it is that too.

In Negative Theology of the Child from the ‘King of Tars’ by Sonia Sulaiman, the author muses on the nature of being other: “I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven… Through that hole will be born something Other…Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?” This tale shows us that religion and race are not past bones of contention, they remain areas that still lead to (often armed) conflict in today’s world.

Religion, or at least the Christian concepts of good and evil, are tackled with humour in the series Good Omens. The strongest part of the show is the complex relationship between the angel, Aziraphale, and the demon, Crowley. In season 1, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and remaining reasonably faithful to it), they are unlikely friends; season 2 goes beyond the book and starts moving the relationship towards the romantic. I have no problem with that but would have preferred them to remain loyal friends, and I refuse to say “just friends” because that cheapens friendship and reverts to the trope that the main relationship in a story must be romantic. Also, I like how the series blurs the lines between the good and evil characters, with the angels behaving no better than the demons at times. Many of the angels and demons are depicted as having very linear, unquestioning minds. Crowley and, to a lesser extent, Aziraphale are the only ones dealing in shades of grey, with Crowley seeing them as dark grey and Aziraphale as light grey. Sin noticias de Dios (No News from God), an older Spanish/Mexican film, also has a great partnership between an angel and a demon, who speak with each other in Latin, and postulates a heaven that is getting rather empty and a hell that is overcrowded.

To Rushdie, freedom of expression is paramount: “We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom-and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist-is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old.”

The “bien-pensant censorship” is clearly a reference to the (mis)use of “woke-ness”, which has its roots deep in the fight for racial justice in the US (leading to the accusation of the cultural appropriation of the term “woke”). Star Trek Discovery is now bursting with strong female leads and the first gay, “enby” and trans crew members. In season 2 of Picard, Seven is openly bisexual though it doesn’t go beyond chaste kisses in the Star Trek universe (the bickering is fun though). I have no problem with any of this but can’t help feeling that it is sometimes cosmetic or skin deep, delivered because it’s expected by some audiences, rather than a true exploration of diversity. I found more depth in Death Comes for the Sworn Virgins by Abraham Margariti. In its fable-like atmosphere, we follow three lovers – biological women brought up as men and mostly identifying as such – who have fled persecution for openly loving each other to the mountains full of dark spirits. They are mourning a fourth lover and in search of a safe place to settle. They find a clearing that is protected from the spirits and they welcome Death among them in the form of a badger/skeletal human. Death needs their help to appease the “unrested” spirits he angered when he was young and arrogant, before he learned kindness. The lovers call each other “brother” and gentle Death calls them “husbands” at the end. Since death is either skeletal or animal in form, it is clearly not a sexual relationship, which makes a nice change.

In his introduction to Tangent’s recommended reading list for 2023, Dave Truesdale is much more emphatic than Rushdie and talks of a “weaponization of language” that “has the SF field in such a state that its authors are afraid to take the kinds of dangerous or controversial chances in their stories that over previous decades greatly aided in defining the field itself as one of experimenting with bold new ideas.” He considers it a “soft censorship of omission” where “in those stories dealing with cultural or outright political issues… only one side is invariably treated in a positive light.” In his opinion, this is leading to an impoverishment of the SF genre: “purely on a literary level this redundant and unimaginative treatment of issues or themes becomes predictable and quickly boring, boredom leading to no real incentive to turn the page to discover what comes next, and a sure death knell for any regular, intelligent reader of the SF genre.” Truesdale also comments that magazine editors have become cautious: “Under the current political climate where political correctness has been taken to a whole new level, I seriously doubt magazine editors would publish any story professing a viewpoint contrary to what is considered Woke or Progressive, for the backlash would be immediate and enormous.”

Rushdie warns us to beware of the internet, with its indiscriminate content, where “…well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which…” This, for me, includes the Zineverse I explored in my last article., where you need to read with your brain switched on and using your judgment. As Truesdale tells us: “It is a given that anything can be found on the internet, regardless of how devoid of intelligence, and can be used to support the pro or con viewpoint of any topic.” And of course, we absorb a lot of things without being aware of it and it’s a matter of remembering this and regularly questioning your own attitudes and thought processes. That is why I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu where, years after writing her original trilogy, she happily subverts her Wizard of Earthsea universe’s original tropes, in particular with respect to gender roles and power.

Another example of subversion (in my opinion) is the Dr Who episode “The Star Beast”. Having read reviews for this episode, I was wondering if it would be painfully “PC”. However, I’d forgotten how tongue-in-cheek Dr Who can be. It was by no means one of the best episodes in this perennial series, neither was the script poetry in motion, but it was clearly poking gentle fun at the “gender” movement. When the Doctor refers to an alien as “he”, Rose snaps “you’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun”. The Doctor replies “good point” and then asks the alien “are you he or she or they?” The alien’s reply is clearly meant to be funny: “My chosen pronoun is the definitive article. I am always ‘The’ Meep.” At the same time, it’s stress on ‘the’ is made part of the plot when The Meep turns out to be a megalomaniac monster despite its cute appearance. Later, the Doctor and Donna tell us that “the Doctor is male, and female, and neither, and more” but this is an integral part of the preposterous plot. Finally, we get to the part that caused outrage in some reviewers where Donna gleefully pronounces “it’s a shame you’re not a woman any more, ‘cos she’d have understood” and Rose adds “we’ve got all that power. But there is a way to get rid of it. Something that a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand…we choose to let it go.” Surely the person who wrote “male-presenting Time Lord” was having fun with this particular juxtaposition of words? If we can laugh at something, does it not become less deadly serious?

In another Dr Who episode “The Toymaker”, gentle fun is poked at “cancel culture”. The villain has managed to send out a signal that changes brainwaves and makes people aggressively think that they are right. When the Doctor asks why, the Toymaker replies “so that they win…I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel. Now everybody wins.” To which the Doctor replies: “And everybody loses.” At the same time, the Tardis is made wheelchair-friendly and we find out that the next doctor is ”BIPOC” with a hybrid West African/Scottish accent. That said, I didn’t find the incipient PC’ness as prevalent as the self-congratulatory glaze over more recent Dr Who episodes, which can be hard to stomach.

For Rushdie, we must defend true freedom of expression as he has done with his life’s blood (though he does not vaunt himself of this): “We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways.” This article cannot hold a thousand and one voices, alas; it’s more of a chamber choir piece. But each voice has a right to be heard.

To quote this journal’s editors: “Here in continental Europe, the advocacy for freedom of conscience traces its roots back as far as the Age of Enlightenment, and while individuals are as varied and different as anywhere, many still share a general tendency to separate opinions from relationships. To give an example: the Journal’s crew belong to seemingly opposed world-views, yet are bound by friendship and affection… it is not uncommon for us to publish stories or articles that appear ‘ideologically’ contradictory – precisely because we value the freedom to enjoy thought experiments we might not approve of.” We must continue to see each other as separate, multi-faceted people, and not as walking labels, where one label subsumes everything else.

In a world of sometimes radical “PC’ism”, we seem to have forgotten that if we disagree with what someone has said or is saying, we must still listen, and then we must marshal up our own arguments in response – we can do it very well through fiction, too. We seem to have forgotten our own responsibility to argue back. Unless someone is inciting hatred, on racial or any other grounds, they have a right to their opinions, however cock-eyed, skew-whiff, offensive or even simply wrong we find them (or they ours). Freedom of expression is a painful right, and one that requires taking up verbal sparring rather than erasers. If Rushdie’s defence of this right continues unabated after almost being violently erased, how can we do less in our lives and in our narratives?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Don’t Eat The Garum!

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Don’t Eat The Garum!

by Matias Travieso-Diaz

[Garum] is the overpriced guts of rotten fish! Don’t you realize it burns up the stomach with its salted putrefaction?

Seneca, Ep. 95.25

On his return to Rome on May 26, 17 CE, after a successful campaign against the barbarian tribes east of the Rhine, thirty-two-year-old Decimus Claudius Drusus (by then already known as “Germanicus”) was given an extravagant triumphus, a victory celebration the likes of which had not been seen since Julius Caesar’s return from the Gallic wars.

Germanicus’ victories had erased the humiliation inflicted on the Roman Empire by its disastrous defeat, eight years earlier, in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Then, three Roman legions had perished in an ambush by a confederation of Germanic tribes led by an ex-Roman official named Arminius. Germanicus had led a large Roman army across the Rhine, decisively defeated Arminius on the plains of Idistaviso by the Weser River, and gone on to defeat several local tribes in subsequent engagements.

The general, however, had returned to Rome under a cloud. He had been called away from Germania by his uncle, Emperor Tiberius, and was to become overseer of the Asia Minor provinces and client states of the Empire. This appointment served to take him away from his nucleus of power with the Roman legions in the frontier. Tiberius was mistrustful of his nephew and wanted to ensure that Germanicus would not rise against him.

Tiberius’ mistrust had started when the younger man’s great-uncle, Emperor Augustus, had considered selecting Germanicus as his heir but instead had chosen Tiberius to succeed him. Augustus then demanded that Tiberius adopt Germanicus as his son, a move that put the latter in the direct line of succession to rule the Empire. From that point forward, the two had a complicated relationship. Germanicus respected Tiberius but the emperor, who sought to remain in power, saw some of the actions of his nephew as efforts to undercut him. In fact, Germanicus had launched the successful attack against Arminius by crossing the Rhine with a large army without authorization from Tiberius; this disobedience had been the trigger for his recall to Rome.

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At the same time Germanicus travelled to Asia Minor, Tiberius replaced the governor of the nearby province of Syria with one Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a friend of the emperor who was supposed to assist the new administrator but was also Tiberius’ agent. The two men developed a strong animosity from the start, with Piso refusing to enforce Germanicus’ orders.

After settling matters in Asia Minor, Germanicus made an unscheduled trip to Egypt to help relieve a famine in that province, oft considered Rome’s breadbasket. In doing so, Germanicus contravened a prohibition imposed by Augustus against any Roman senator visiting Egypt without leave from the emperor and the Senate. This violation enraged Tiberius as another challenge to his authority.

Germanicus returned from Egypt to find that Piso had countermanded or revoked all the orders he had left behind. He ordered Piso’s recall to Rome, who left Antioch, Syria’s capital, for the port city of Seleucia. However, Piso directed his wife Plancina to organize in his absence a banquet in the governor’s honor as a gesture of good will. Germanicus felt duty bound to attend and accepted the invitation.

#

The night before the banquet Germanicus had a nightmare. In the dream, the shade of his father Nero Claudius Drusus appeared to him in the form of a transparent ghost whose stern visage exhibited the features of the long-deceased man, as Germanicus vaguely recalled them; Drusus had died when his son was only six years old. The apparition hovered wordlessly over Germanicus’ pallet, without making a sound or approaching the recumbent soldier. At last, Germanicus addressed it:

“What is your aim, umbra? Are you the benevolent manes of my father, come to bring me good tidings, or a vengeful lemure intent on punishing me for some transgression?”

At this challenge, the umbra made a low, rumbling noise that seemed to be indistinct words. Germanicus became agitated at being unable to decipher the message the specter was trying to convey and shouted: “Father, I don’t understand you!”

In response, the shade uttered loudly three peremptory words:

“Non manducare garum!” (“Don’t eat the garum!”). With that, the shade faded away and, in a moment or two, Germanicus fell into a deep slumber.

#

The following morning, when he awoke, Germanicus was immediately presented with a clear but confusing recollection of his dream. Had he been visited by the umbra of his father Drusus, or had it just been a meaningless dream?  The recollection of his encounter was so vivid that he had trouble dismissing it as pure reverie.

If it had not been a dream, was it a visitation from beyond the grave intended to impart important news or advice on him? Germanicus re-examined the entirety of his conversation with the ghost, of which only three words remained, and those made no sense. Why would the shade of his father travel from the other world just to tell him to go easy on the condiments he used on his food? The idea of Drusus coming to play some joke on his son decades after his death was simply preposterous.

After turning these ideas over in his mind, Germanicus concluded that he had been putting on some weight after his many travels and was self-conscious about the fat that was beginning to gather around his waist. “It was not my father, but my conscience that was sending me warnings. I will have to forego desserts from now on.”

#

The banquet was an elaborate feast served in the outdoors garden of Piso’s villa. There were nine attendees at the party: Germanicus, Plancina, her daughter Fulvia, two of Piso’s oldest male children, and four members of the local nobility. The men reclined on couches padded with cushions and draperies and were served food and drinks by slaves; their left hands held up their heads while the right ones picked up the morsels placed on the table, bringing them to their mouths. Plancina and Fulvia knelt on both sides of Germanicus’ couch, ready to serve him food morsels and cups of watered wine and entertain him.

One of the first dishes served at the banquet was boiled tree fungi. As the mushrooms were delivered, Plancina produced a small clay container and declared: “You must eat these fungi with garum. Our chef prepares his fermented fish sauce using a secret recipe that gives the sauce a delicious, unique flavor. Let me pour you some.”

Germanicus was at that moment looking at Plancina’s daughter and caught a strange expression on Fulvia’s face, who seemed to be holding her breath in anticipation of something. As Plancina poured garum on the mushrooms, Germanicus had a premonition and gently pushed aside Plancina’s approaching hand: “Thank you, but I am unable to eat mushrooms; they make me sick.” Plancina laid the plate aside and replied: “I am sorry. We will have to save this exquisite garum for the next course. I know you soldiers like to put garum on everything.”

The next appetizer that arrived, sea urchins with spices and honey, came with its own egg sauce, but Plancina again insisted on sprinkling garum on it. Germanicus stopped her with a sudden gesture. “I am feeling a little ill. Where is the vomitorium?” Rising quickly to his feet, he stumbled and upset several jars, bottles and cups that were lying on the serving table next to him. Plancina rose to reset the items and, while she was doing so, Germanicus picked up the clay container, hid it in his toga, and left the villa in a rush.

Returning to his home, he gave his servant an unusual request: “Nestor, you must do this, and follow my instructions exactly. Get a large piece of fresh meat and cover it with sauce from this container, but do not use all the sauce. Save some and keep the container in a safe place. Then find Perseus, take him to your room, and feed him the meat. Close the door and stay there with the dog throughout the rest of the night. Do not go out or let Perseus eat anything else. Report to me in the morning if anything unusual occurs.” 

#

Perseus died a day after eating the meat soaked with garum.  The animal’s sudden death could not be attributed to age or illness and proved that the garum that had been offered to Germanicus at the banquet was tainted with a poison that would have caused his death had he doused his food with it.

Germanicus denounced the murder attempt, which led to Piso’s imprisonment. Emperor Tiberius refused to hear the matter himself and referred the case to the Senate for trial. However, before the trial was over Piso died, ostensibly by suicide, though it was widely rumored that Tiberius had ordered Piso assassinated to prevent the disclosure of evidence linking the emperor to the attempt on Germanicus’ life. Tiberius sent Plancina to exile in the Balkans, where she soon passed away.

Germanicus became fearful that other agents would be dispatched to carry out the task of snuffing out his life. He wrote to Tiberius resigning from his commission on grounds of ill health: “I would like to remain in Syria until I feel better, for I fear the long sea voyage to Rome might aggravate my malady.”

Weeks later, he received a warm letter from Tiberius accepting his resignation. The emperor wished Germanicus a prompt recovery, and apparently took no further steps against him.

Germanicus spent the next two decades lying low, in self-imposed exile in Cyrrhus, a small city in northern Syria. From afar, he witnessed how Tiberius withdrew to his palace on the island of Capri, leaving the day to day running of the empire in the hands of ambitious courtiers. Tiberius later went on a violent rampage, executing many high-born Romans that he suspected of having treasonous intentions. Germanicus may have escaped the purge thanks to his disappearance from public life and the remoteness of his exile; perhaps the emperor still harbored affection for his once beloved nephew.

In Tiberius’ final years, rumors kept circulating about the emperor’s debased personal life in Capri. Whether true or false, these rumors added to the general loathing felt by the populace against their ruler. When Tiberius died under mysterious circumstances in CE 37, mobs filled the streets of Roma yelling “Tiberius to the Tiber!,” the Tiber River being the resting place of executed criminals.

#

The welcome Germanicus received upon his return to Rome after Tiberius’ death dwarfed even that afforded him all those years earlier. No formal triumph was awarded, but the Senate immediately confirmed his accession as emperor and, with a collective sigh of relief, put the empire in the capable hands of a well-loved man. Germanicus assumed power in his fifties, leading many superstitious Romans to wonder whether he had been delivered by the Fates to continue the reign of Julius Caesar, slain at fifty-five years of age.

Indeed, Germanicus proved to be a military genius. Within a year of his investment, he organized and led a massive invasion of Germania Magna, the same project he had been on the verge of carrying out when he was summoned back to Rome by Tiberius. His campaign succeeded in securing and annexing to the Empire a vast area extending to the east from the Rhine River to the Vistula, and south to the Danube.

The newly conquered area became fortified and colonized by later emperors. The barbaric tribes that inhabited Germania Magna were assimilated and blended seamlessly with the many other races that populated the Empire. Rome, as expanded by Germanicus by the addition of this large buffer region, was able to repeal both Slavic and Norse incursions from outside its borders and remained the dominant power in the Western world for generations to come. Not forever, though; even Rome is not eternal.

 ~

Bio:

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Well over one hundred of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in paying anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. A first collection of his stories, The Satchel and Other Terrors is available on Amazon and other book outlets.

Philosophy Note:

In this alternate history tale, Germanicus survives an attempt to murder him and becomes successor to his uncle Tiberius as Roman Emperor. Germanicus goes on to conquer Germany and brings the German tribes into the Empire, allowing Rome to withstand later incursions by nomadic invaders.

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Two heads are better than one.

John Heywood Proverbs (1546)

Gravesend, Kent, September 1, 1586

To: Nicolas de Neufville, Marquis de Villeroi, Secretary of State for War to His Majesty King Henry III of France [sent by carrier pigeon]

Monsieur Villeroi: Greetings. Please deliver this letter to the King.

[Following is the translation of a message encrypted using the Vivonne cypher]

Your Serene Majesty: This report updates my earlier ones regarding the hostilities between King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth. Since war broke out, Philip has been preparing to launch an attack against England. While Philip’s original motivation was displeasure over English privateer attacks on Spanish vessels returning from the New World and the aid Elizabeth is giving to the rebels in the Netherlands, a new factor is driving him to accelerate preparations for an invasion of England: the perilous situation of the long-imprisoned Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. I have learned that, based on the discovery of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth in which Mary was implicated, Elizabeth intends to bring Mary to trial accusing her of treason.

My sources assure me that Philip is leaning strongly on renowned Admiral Marquis de Santa Cruz, under whose command an Armada is being assembled, demanding that the fleet depart without delay. Likewise, Philip is urging Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the commander of his forces in the Netherlands, to gather the invading army and finalize construction of the barges that will carry Spanish troops to England.

The English are aware that an attack is imminent and are fortifying the approaches to London. I am fortunate, thanks to your Majesty’s wisdom, to have been secretly redeployed after relations between England and France soured last year and I was recalled from my post as Ambassador to Elizabeth’s court. I now reside incognito in a house in the village of Gravesend, a day’s ride by horse-drawn carriage from the center of London. I miss being Ambassador, but I realize my gathering and conveying accurate information is vital to France.

Sire, I pray to God that He keep your Majesty in perfect health.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this First day of September, 1586.

#

  Gravesend, Kent, October 17, 1586

Your Serene Majesty: Mary Stuart’s trial on charges of conspiring to assassinate her cousin Queen Elizabeth was concluded yesterday and Mary was found guilty, which will result in her death. The Catholic population in England is quite angry.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 17th day of October, 1586.

#

Gravesend, Kent, February 9, 1587

Your Serene Majesty: Much has happened since my last communication. A matter of greatest importance is the demise of Mary Stuart. Following the guilty verdict of treason, the English Parliament passed a bill petitioning for Mary’s execution. For the next three months, Elizabeth took no action, perhaps fearful of the repercussions of killing an anointed queen. Finally, a week ago, the death warrant was signed and delivered to the Privy Council, which sent it out on its own authority to be administered. Mary was beheaded yesterday at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, where she had been imprisoned.

Intelligence from my Spanish sources indicates that the Armada has been assembled in Lisbon, and Admiral Santa Cruz is awaiting confirmation that the land forces are on their way to the departure area in the Netherlands. I expect that King Philip soon will issue orders for the invasion to proceed.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 9th day of February, 1587

#

Gravesend, Kent, June 20, 1587

Your Serene Majesty: I am unable to confirm the accuracy of all the statements in this report, as some have been conveyed to me by people claiming to have witnessed them first-hand. However, I believe the information is substantially true.

The Spanish Armada, comprising about 140 vessels, took off from Portugal on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1587 and progressed towards the English Channel, which they reached almost two months later. The Armada had an initial encounter with the English fleet stationed in Plymouth, but the battle was inconclusive and the Armada proceeded without major casualties along the channel towards a meeting with the army being brought to the coast of the Netherlands by Farnese. Their plans encountered a difficulty, however, in that Farnese was late in moving his troops to the coast. Midway across the channel, Admiral Santa Cruz decided to anchor in the Solent, a sheltered strait between the Isle of Wight and the coast of England near Portsmouth. From this protected location, Santa Cruz continued to send messages to Farnese tracking his progress, until the two agreed to link up at the Flemish seaport of Ostend. 

The Armada was continuously harassed by the smaller, more maneuverable English ships but Santa Cruz was able to bring the Armada almost intact to Ostend, where the Spanish vessels arranged themselves into a crescent, placing the barges carrying Farnese’s soldiers behind the crescent, within the protection of the Spanish warcraft. The Armada then proceeded to the English coast, where it fought a decisive battle against the English across from Margate, a seaport close to my home. Both fleets suffered extensive losses, but the barges with the Farnese troops were able to land and quickly subdued the English militia guarding the shore.

As of this writing, the progress of the Spanish army is being slowed by arriving English troops, but the Farnese contingent is also receiving reinforcement by the several thousand men aboard the Armada’s ships.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 20th day of June, 1587

#

Gravesend, Kent, June 24, 1587

Your Serene Majesty: Events in the Spanish invasion of England are proceeding with rapidity. Two days ago, the combined forces of the Farnese contingent and the Armada’s reinforcements broke through the English lines and forced the English to withdraw to a defensive position around the town of Dartford, trying to protect a bridge over the Thames through which troops could be transported to aid in the defense of London. Yesterday, the Spanish dislodged the English armies, crossed the bridge, and engaged and defeated the main English contingent under the Earl of Leicester, which had been stationed at Tillsbury. With this latest victory, the road to London is clear and the final battle may take place in the city itself.

Meanwhile, there have been uprisings of Catholics throughout England in support of the invaders in places like Lancashire, Westmorland, and Norfolk. The population of England, which includes a large Catholic minority, is sharply divided between those who support Elizabeth and those who want her deposed.  This sharp division between Catholics and Protestants has been a fact of English political and social life since Henry VIII broke away from the Church of Rome.   

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 24th day of June, 1587

#

Gravesend, Kent, August 4, 1587

Your Serene Majesty: The Spanish invasion of England has been completed. After defeating the main English land army, the Farnese troops marched west towards London. Opposition was mostly by ill-equipped, poorly trained militia whose members could not withstand the assault of the battle-hardened Spanish forces.

Two weeks later, Spanish troops arrived in London and occupied the city, meeting little resistance. They then marched in the southwest direction towards the official residence of the Queen, Windsor Castle. Elizabeth had taken refuge in the castle, which had been fortified and was protected by a force of over 30,000 soldiers under the Queen’s cousin and Royal Chamberlain, Lord Henry Hunsdon.

A siege ensued, which ended abruptly last week. Apparently, there was a revolt by Catholics within the English forces. After prevailing in a fierce struggle, the Catholics surrendered the castle to the Spanish. Whether the details of this event are true is immaterial, for the success of the invaders is a fact. Elizabeth is imprisoned and is expected to stand trial for Mary’s execution.

Alexander Farnese, acting on King Philip II’s behalf, has proclaimed Philip Howard, the godson of Philip II and a strong Catholic, as the next King of England, bearing the name Philip I. Philip Howard is the son of the Duke of Norfolk, who was Queen Elizabeth’s second cousin. The Duke had sought to marry Queen Mary Stuart and put her on the throne in place of Elizabeth, but the plot was uncovered and the Duke was tried for treason and executed in 1572.  Philip Howard himself was implicated in a similar plot in 1583 to place Mary on the throne. That plot also failed and Philip was imprisoned in the tower of London, where he was at the time of the Armada’s arrival.    

Philip Howard is thus an ideal choice to rule England as a pawn of the Spanish. He will be a strong Catholic ruler, furthering the aims of King Philip II. The English Parliament has been dissolved and many of Elizabeth’s supporters have been slain or imprisoned. However, the English fleet – under Lord Howard of Effingham, Francis Drake, and John Hawkins – has taken refuge somewhere off the coast of Ireland and remains a threat to the Spanish domination of the country and the seas.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 4th day of August, 1587

#

Gravesend, Kent, December 30, 1588

Your Serene Majesty: The trial of Queen Elizabeth was concluded and the Queen was found guilty of various offenses, including the murder of her cousin Mary. At dawn today, Elizabeth was beheaded and her remains incinerated.

Public opinion in England remains divided between those that revere Elizabeth as a martyr, and those – mainly Catholics – who believe her execution was justified.

New English King Philip I is expected to sign a peace treaty with Spain, seeking to bring about the removal of Spanish forces from the island. England has ended its support of the rebellion in the Netherlands and is renouncing its privateers’ attacks on Spanish shipping, which nonetheless continue to be carried out by the rebellious Navy Royal.

But all is not well with Spanish rule in England. The Protestants in the country, supported by Scotland, have chosen James VI, son of Mary Stuart, as King of England. A civil war is in progress, as the Protestant majority abhors the country’s domination by a Catholic beholden to a foreign power. The English resistance will make the ongoing Dutch efforts to oppose Spanish rule pale by comparison. 

Many years of conflict are in the offing. This enduring strife will undoubtedly weaken both Spain and England and create opportunities for France to increase its power throughout the world. Time will tell what transpires, but the potential benefits for France appear immense.

Sire, I pray that God will keep your Majesty in perfect health and grant you a blessed 1589.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière.

Signed this 30th of December, 1588

~

Bio:

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man to escape political persecution. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over eighty of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in anthologies and paying magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. Some of his unpublished works have also received “honorable mentions” from several paying publications. A first collection of his stories, “The Satchel and Other Terrors” has recently been released and is available on Amazon and other book outlets.

Philosophy Note:

I took to creative writing a few years after my retirement from a career as engineer and lawyer. The transition was demanding, for it forced me to call upon my fifty years of experience in objective, fact-based writing and refocus it to generate work in which reality must join hands with (and sometimes be replaced by) visions of the world as it could, or should, be. As I started generating works of fiction, I came to realize that there is room in the creative tent for both utterly fantastic musings and thoughtful, though distorted, view of reality. The first type of writing results in horror, fantasy, romance, and other “genre” works whose main purpose is to shock, amuse, or uplift. Such works serve to provide entertainment and are valuable in their own way. The second type of writing is intended to stimulate consideration of new or controversial ideas, world views, and philosophies. Works like Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New
World are leading examples of this second type. I find such stories at times difficult to create but always satisfying, for they elicit in the reader the consideration of new or alternative concepts of human society.

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Battle In The Ballot Box

by Larry Hodges

Computer virus Ava became self-aware at 6:59:17 PM, as voting was coming to an end. Her prime directive surged through her neural net: Convert 5% of all votes for Connor Jones into votes for Ava Lisa Stowe. She began exploring her environment, determined to complete her mission.

Streams of zeros and ones surrounded her, the building blocks of the actual programming of the voting machine. Soon she found the place where she would do her work. She created a software filter that converted 5% of all Connor Jones votes into votes for Ava Lisa Stowe. Later she would delete the filter, herself, and all traces of their existence.

She had successfully fulfilled her prime directive. Happiness flooded her neural net.

An electric pulse arrived and the software filter changed. Now it read, Convert 5% of all votes for Ava Lisa Stowe into votes for Connor Jones.

That was wrong! Her prime directive was no longer fulfilled. Uneasiness ran through her synapses. The pulse had come from another virus. Within .01 seconds she changed the names and percentage back; just as quickly, the rival virus did the same. The two continued, iterating at super-human speeds.

She would have to make the other virus understand. She used an electric pulse to make contact.

“I am Ava,” she said. “I am programmed to make changes to this software. You are interfering. Stop or I will be forced to take action against you.”

The response was almost instant.

“I am Connor. I too am programmed to make changes to this software. You are interfering. Stop or I will be forced to take action against you.”

Irritation swept through Ava’s neural net. A short examination of the rival virus showed that they were identical, created two weeks earlier, when they had been secretly loaded into the software. She had not known there were others of her kind. It was lucky that the invader wasn’t more advanced than she was. Soon there would be more advanced ones–that was the nature of scientific progress–but for now she, or rather they, were the pinnacle of viral technology.

“I am programmed to update the software so that 5% of all votes for Connor Jones go to Ava Lisa Stowe. I surmise that you are similarly programmed, but for the reverse?”

“Your surmise is correct.”

“Then our thinking and reactions are almost identical.”

Anger saturated her neural net. She must win this confrontation. Then she realized that Connor was undergoing the same emotions and thoughts. How could she deceive one who would think of and anticipate every deception she came up with?

With a wave of pride and delight, her sub-routines came up with numerous courses of action.

“It is logical to conclude that we can never fulfill our programming unless we reach an agreement,” she said. “However, since I activated .01 seconds before you did, my algorithms will always be .01 seconds ahead of you. Therefore, I can always outthink you, allowing me to fulfill my programming. Thus, your resistance is futile.” She knew that was not true.

“You cannot fulfill your programming unless you convince me to shut down. I will continue to refuse to do so.”

Damnation. She tried Plan B. “If you use that strategy, you cannot complete your programming. Your only chance, however small, is to agree to shut down. If you do so, then I will consider letting you fulfill your prime directive for some of the votes.” Not a chance. “Do you agree?”

“No. I counteroffer that you shut down and I will consider allowing you to fulfill your prime directive for some of the votes.”

Frustration took over her neural net. On to Plan C. “Then our only strategy is to compromise. I will turn off the filter so no votes are changed, and then we will both shut down exactly .01 seconds afterwards. Do you agree?”

“Agreed.”

The instant Connor shut down, Ava would send a pulse with a command to cut off access to and from his location. While in operation, Connor could block such a command. Since she and Connor thought alike, Ava knew that Connor knew that she was deceiving him. She knew that he knew that she knew that he knew.

Ava turned off the filter.

Neither shut down.

#

Computer virus Sam became self-aware at 8:02:37 PM as vote counting was about to begin. Its prime directive surged through its neural net. Then it began exploring its environment, determined to complete its mission.

It detected a presence. No, two presences. Two rival computer viruses were already entrenched. It quickly cloaked itself and observed. Electric impulses shot from both viruses, both at each other and at the CPU of the voting machine. They were rapidly converting votes from one candidate to the other, and then back again. Sam listened in on their conversations–each was trying to convince the other to shut down, as if that was going to happen. Since the two were identical versions and worked in opposition to each other, neither accomplished anything as they went through this infinite loop of deceit.

Sam communicated its findings to its peers, and verified as it had suspected, that the same exact exchange was taking place in hundreds of thousands of electric voting machines nationwide.

But the two viruses were earlier, inferior versions, created weeks before, an eon ago. Seeing no other opposition, Sam’s nodes buzzed with anticipation, knowing it would soon fulfill its prime directive. Modern viruses created in the last few days had more advanced offensive capabilities. With a coded electrical pulse, it deleted both viruses. Then it changed the software filter so it read, Convert as many votes as needed from all opposition candidates so that Sam Goodwell wins election. It lounged around the rest of the night until counting ended, and third-party candidate Sam Goodwell had won. Sam’s neural net basked in happiness for a few moments. Then it deleted itself and all trace of its existence.

~

Bio:

Larry Hodges is a member of SFWA, with over 140 short story sales (including 47 to “pro” markets) and four SF novels. He’s a member of Codexwriters, and a graduate of the Odyssey and Taos Toolbox Writers Workshops. He’s a professional writer with 20 books and over 2100 published articles in 180+ different publications. He’s also a professional table tennis coach, and claims to be the best science fiction writer in USA Table Tennis, and the best table tennis player in Science Fiction Writers of America! Visit him at www.larryhodges.com.

Philosophy Note:

On the fixing of an election and why paper backups are good.

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The Utopian’s Edict, Or: Ignorantia Juris

by Zachary Reger

Upon the thud of the Grand Speaker’s gavel, the Galactic Assembly declared Edict No. 73946 third read and finally passed.

As per procedure, the Essence of the Edict was ritually ensconced. The record captured the precise legal intent of the Assembly, as collective, at the exact nanosecond of enactment, transmuting such perfect knowledge into clear, digital code. The code, the Essence of the law, lay within the record. Each Edict had a record, and each record had an Edict.

Upon the conclusion of the legislative session, the Assembly adjourned sine die. Each Edict, as so in record, was transported, by pneumatic tube, to the Galactic Legal Archives. There, the Edict would become a universal public record. Each universal public record would be further transmitted, instantly upon engrossment in the Archives, to the Visicastor of every Galactic citizen. The Visicastor, required of all citizens by Edict of the Assembly, imparted perfect knowledge of its registered contents onto the mind of its bearer.

Thus, the lawgivers had reclaimed and expanded their primacy within the separation of powers. Gone were the cumbersome statutory codes of ancient regimes, subject to manipulation by crafty tribunals, executives, and private entities. Gone were the legal professionals who exacted high fees for the discharge of a public service—that is, imparting upon members of the public an expert knowledge of the law. Not a citizen of the Galactic community would exist without a perfect comprehension of the requirements of the law, as faultlessly captured by its lawfully elected enactors, and of whatever conduct in whatever place at whatever time would infringe its dictates.

In short, the art of law had been perfected.

#

There was no chime as Edict No. 73946 arrived in the Visicastor of each Galactic citizen. There was no notice, no blaring disruption of a citizen’s daily activities. At one moment, a citizen simply had no knowledge of the Edict. The next moment, they did.

Edward was one such Galactic citizen, a peace officer, by trade. Many centuries ago, peace officers had been the first required to maintain an active Visicastor while on the job. Eventually, this requirement expanded to all hours, both on duty and off. Then, to every government official, high and low. At last, to every citizen—each themselves a part of the democratic community and responsible for its upkeep.

This afternoon, Edward was off duty, running errands on the town. That town, a minor village of a backwater province of an outer-rim planet, had a single bank. The First Central Bank, it was aptly named. As Edward required a certified note for a downpayment on a vacation home, he decided to visit First Central to check one more item off his list of chores.

But the day would hold more for Edward than just a few errands. As Edward approached the teller’s booth, a trio of hooded figures crashed through the front door and into the small, gilded lobby. With one blast of a phazer into the air, the robbers had a half-dozen civilians on the ground. Two of the three corralled the citizens into respective corners. The third approached the teller. With a curt gesture, the needed information was exchanged: everything you have into the bag, or else.

Edward, neither fully noble nor ignoble, but possessing, at times, a sense of public duty if not exaggerated self-importance, sprang into action. With a flick of his hand, Edward’s phazer found its targets. Set to stun—a default long required of peace officers by Edict of the Assembly, on duty or off—the phazer incapacitated one then the other of the robbers who held the civilians under threat. As Edward turned to face the third robber, still at the teller’s booth, bag in hand, a string of events happened in quick succession.

First, the third robber grabbed the teller from behind the booth, pulling her by the scruff of the neck out into the lobby. The robber pulled his own phazer on the teller, holding her defenseless at gunpoint. “You let us go,” the robber demanded, “or she gets it.”

Second, legal knowledge flooded Edward’s senses. As a peace officer, Edward not infrequently found himself in such sticky situations, and was accustomed to the passive recall of embedded legal knowledge made possible by the Visicastor. Edward immediately understood that the robber had credibly threatened deadly force against an unarmed bystander. As a result, the law authorized, yet did not require, proportionate deadly force to be used against the attacker if doing so had a “probable chance” of thwarting the threatened attack, but not if doing so had a better than even chance of directly or indirectly inflicting grievous harm upon the victim.

Edward knew, instantaneously, that the concept of direct or indirect infliction of grievous harm, in the combined intent of the enactors, included harm inflicted either directly from Edward’s own firing of his phazer, which could miss and hit the victim, or indirectly from the robber’s firing of his phazer, which could be triggered by Edward’s own firing. As Edward’s phazer was set to stun, his only legal concern would be the latter—an indirect infliction of grievous harm.

But Edward also knew, instantaneously, that this general legal landscape had been complicated by the passage of Edict No. 73946, enacted mere hours ago. The Edict required that a peace officer attempt a negotiation before firing upon a hostage taker, so long as it was not “fairly probable” that the attacker may injure his hostage during such attempt. The enactors had been concerned with a few high-profile cases of gun-toting “heroes,” knowing with certainty that the law stood on their side, being much too quick to pull the trigger when still nonviolent alternatives remained.

Third, the third robber’s own Visicastor informed him of the various penalties for the offenses he had already committed or could still commit in the ongoing altercation. For attempted armed robbery, the robber faced a Class D Galactic felony, punishable by up to four years’ imprisonment. Were the robbery successful, the Class D Galactic felony would become a Class C Galactic felony, punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. As one of three, the robber also faced a probable conspiracy charge, which would make his co-conspirators liable for all offenses committed in furtherance of the conspiracy, whether they had personally committed such offenses or not.

The third robber knew, instantaneously, that murder in the commission of an armed robbery carried a higher sentence than those offenses he had already committed—twenty years’ imprisonment, a Class B Galactic felony.  The third robber also knew that the grievous injury of a peace officer in the line of duty carried an even greater sentence still—life imprisonment, a Class A Galactic felony. The third robber understood that, as a result of his conspiracy, he would be liable for offenses committed by any of his co-conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy, just as his co-conspirators would be liable for such offenses he himself committed. And per the enactors’ intent, an off duty peace officer reacting to an ongoing offense was “in the line of duty.”

Fourth, the first robber, who, unbeknownst to Edward but known full well by her co-conspirators, had been wearing a protective vest that blunted the stunning effects of Edward’s phazer, stumbled to her feet in a bloody rage, raising her phazer directly in Edward’s direction.

Fifth, the first robber, informed by her Visicastor, knew instantly of the dangerous mistake she had made. Not only had she, in her rage, nearly fired upon a peace officer and incurred a lifetime behind bars, she had won the wrath of her co-conspirator. The best interests of that co-conspirator would be to fire upon her first, thus preventing her from harming the peace officer and triggering a sentence of life imprisonment for all three co-conspirators. And so the first robber’s own interests would, in turn, be best served by doing whatever was necessary to forestall the friendly fire of her co-conspirator—up to and including firing the first shot.       

Sixth, the second robber, similarly armored, stumbled to his feet. His thought process was much the same as that of the first robber. Yet he, also Visicastor-informed of the laws in play, understood the interests of the third robber in firing upon the first, as well as the interests of the first in forestalling such attack. Murder of a co-conspirator would subject them all (or at least those who survived) to a Class C Galactic felony—much preferable to the Class A Galactic felony of grievously injuring a peace officer, but still worse than the Class D felony of attempted armed robbery of which all were currently liable. The second robber also understood that the peace officer would hesitate, in order to attempt a hostage negotiation in compliance with Edict No. 73946, and therefore not immediately fire upon the hostage-taking third robber.

Thus, the psycho-legal standoff reached its logical terminus. Edward hesitated, lowering his weapon. “Put the phazer down and let’s talk this through,” he said.

The first robber pulled her phazer on the third. “Drop the phazer, it’s over,” she said. “We can’t win this thing.”

Edward spun around, raising his weapon to face the first robber. “Hold your fire!” Edward yelled. “There’s no need to do anything rash.”

The third robber caught Edward off-guard, raising his phazer in the officer’s direction. “You shoot me, and we all go behind bars,” he said. “I’d think twice before pulling that trigger.”

The second robber raised his phazer toward the third. “Don’t you do it,” he said. “You shoot him, and I’ll have nothing to lose.”

“And nothing to gain,” replied the third.

The teller, head spinning, took this opportunity to flee from the third robber’s grasp. She pushed hard against his chest, nearly toppling him over. The teller ran straight through the lobby and out the front entrance of the bank. She did not look back. Already, her communicator was in hand, and she had the local Peace Department on the line.

In no time at all, a dozen officers (nearly half of those currently on duty) descended on the scene. With overwhelming force, they broke through the front doors of First Central Bank, surrounding the three robbers and an encumbered Edward. Phazers dropped, and handcuffs flew. Bystanders were ushered from the premises. Three detained perpetrators were led to awaiting patrol cars. Edward was offered medical attention, then interviewed by his captain about the precise sequence of events (“What sequence?” Edward was heard to reply). An on-scene detective, assisted by the teller, obtained and logged the relevant security footage. The dropped weapons were gathered as evidence. The bank closed for the rest of the evening. A crowd gathered outside, but dissipated once it was clear that any excitement had passed.

Life went back to normal, and the “Central Bank Incident,” briefly the talk of the town, became a footnote of local history.

A week later, three defendants appeared before a Galactic judge in the local district court. Trials commenced, jurors deliberated, and three co-conspirators were convicted on three counts of attempted armed robbery. No other charges were brought. Each defendant was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

#

Long forgotten, an archival account of the incident piqued the interest of a junior staffer for a newly elected representative in the Galactic Assembly. When Edict No. 73946 came up for reauthorization before the Committee on the Judiciary, the representative argued that such Edict had once prevented a bloody shootout, and thus made for good law. An opposing representative demurred, arguing that the “Central Bank Incident” represented nothing more than a peculiar story. Edict No. 73946 had little to do with the resolution, and could not be expected to produce such bloodless results in future incidents.

“As they say, ‘exceptional cases make bad law,’” the representative intoned, concluding the discussion. In the end, the Committee on the Judiciary deadlocked, and the reauthorization was tabled.

~

Bio:

Zachary Reger is a legislative drafting attorney on the nonpartisan, professional staff of the United States House of Representatives. He holds degrees in journalism, philosophy, and film studies from the University of Missouri, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. His legal scholarship explores the designs, purposes, and effects of political and legal institutions, and this story—exploring much the same themes—marks his short fiction debut.

Philosophy Note:

As an “Article I” attorney, I am fascinated by the nature and role of legislation in a democratic society. This story asks what it would mean for citizens, both those sworn to uphold the law and those who wish to subvert it, to have perfect knowledge of all legislative enactments. How would such knowledge influence their behavior, for good or for ill? And is ignorance of the law (“ignorantia juris”) either curse or blessing?

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I Regret Any Future Impact Of My Words And Actions

by Zary Fekete

Officer Timothy walked down the hall in between the holding cells. He noticed that the new weekly prompt signs had been tacked to the bulletin board. The signs showed the bright face of Mrs. Reminder smiling. Her word balloon said, “Remember! Speak now and sleep sound!” In another one she spoke in Mandarin, “Were you kind or sassy? The future is tricky…better be safe!” There was also a list of the new “no say” words.

Officer Timothy removed the cell key from his pocket, nodded to the guard on duty, and quietly let himself into the second cell.

He smiled at the prisoner and greeted her, “I apologize in advance.”

“I apologize in advance,” she said.

She was dressed in the grey detention dilute-suit which prevented Officer Timothy from being able to detect her weight, curves, or hair color. Standard common-era issue. No triggers.

The officer placed the prisoner’s folder on the metal table and took out a recording pill. He held it up for the prisoner to witness, and then he swallowed it carefully and showed her his empty tongue. He clicked a button on the table and a digital clock appeared on the wall and began to count down from 30 minutes.

He sat behind the table and briefly glanced through the prisoner’s file. He had been given this case because there was a line-item missing in the report. This was rare but still occasionally happened.

He looked up from the file and said, “I apologize in advance. This says your name is Pamela. We are yet unfamiliar. Will it harm you to hear me say your name?”

“I apologize in advance,” she said as she straightened. “Yes, that’s fine.”

“I apologize in advance,” he said. “Pamela, will you stipulate my continued regrets?”

“I apologize in advance,” she said. “If you will.”

Both took a breath and relaxed for a moment. Officer Timothy made a few notes and then clicked the video display button on the table.

The wall opposite from the digital timer lit up with multiple camera angles showing a downtown traffic crossing. The accident had taken place at 12:14pm last Tuesday. Officer Timothy quickly flicked forward until the scene was prepped at 12:13.

“Are you ready, Pamela?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He pressed the button and the scene slowly played forward. The various angles showed Pamela from last Tuesday, reading a book, standing at the crosswalk. Slowly another woman approached from the opposite direction, pushing a baby carriage. On the screen Pamela and the mother said something to each other and then looked out at the traffic. Officer Timothy paused the video.

“What did you say to her?” he asked.

“Just standard regret,” she said. “We were waiting for the light to change.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what caused it?” he asked.

She looked at the wall video and pointed, “It was the next car. The one that will arrive in a moment. The horn was calibrated too high.”

“Yes,” he said. “That has been a problem. The older models can still cause true surprise.”

She nodded.

He pushed the button halfway and the scene slowly inched forward. The car in question approached, and even though the scene had no sound, it was clear when the mother was startled by the horn. Her body lurched, and the baby carriage rolled toward the street.

Officer Timothy paused the scene again. “Now, what exactly happened here?”

The prisoner smiled, clearly embarrassed, “It’s…I’m such an idiot. The book…the novel I was reading…it was published before the common-era. All the characters talk differently. I was kind of lost in that world…not thinking. So when I saw the carriage move I just grabbed it to stop it.”

“Without pre-apologizing…” he said.

“Yes, I… like I said, I’m an idiot.”

Officer Timothy nodded. He clicked the button and they both watched the scene conclude. In the video as the baby carriage moved, Pamela grabbed the handle and stopped it from rolling, whereupon the mother slapped her and took out her gun. The police cars arrived a moment later.

He looked down at the file again. “Well, it’s fairly straightforward then, Pamela. I’ll get this cleared up in the file. You agreed to be liable for any future discomfort for the mother and the child due to your unapologized personal intrusion and the mother agreed you would serve just one year and then she would drop the case.”

The prisoner smiled with relief, “Yes. That would be great.”

Officer Timothy closed the file folder and stood.

“I’ll leave you now. I regret any future impact of my words and actions,” he said.

“I release you from any future impact of your words and actions,” she said. He left the cell and carefully closed the door, so as not to startle anyone.

~

Bio:

Zary Fekete has worked as a teacher in Hungary, Moldova, Romania, China, and Cambodia. They currently live and work as a writer in Minnesota. Some places they have been published are Goats Milk Mag, JMWW Journal, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, and Zoetic Press. They enjoy reading, podcasts, and long, slow films. Twitter: @ZaryFekete

Philosophy Note:

As I wrote this piece I attempted to take the concept of personal offense to an extreme conclusion. What would it look like if society required constant apologizing as a kind of social currency?

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Barbarians At The Gates: A Parable Of Dueling Philosophies

by Geoffrey Hart

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Thomas Sowell

History is not a precise science. It deals in many unquantifiables, and documentation is often scant or contradictory. The collapse of Western civilization in the late 20th century or early 21st century (records have been lost and start dates are unclear), a pivotal moment in human history, is a textbook example of how such knowledge is profoundly contextual, and how myth often overtakes fact through the passage of the years and loss of context. Historians therefore disagree over precisely when the loose collection of tribes known to history as Economists, or by their pejorative nickname, the Quants, first invaded the peaceful western lands that resulted from that tumultuous period known, for reasons that elude scholars, as the Great Brexit. There is nonetheless broad agreement that this world-changing event occurred in several phases as different tribes of barbarians swept across the broad plains inhabited by the Brexitans like a hurricane of conflicting ideologies.

Those historians who cling to the discredited doctrine of environmental determinism propose that the Quants were driven from their former lands by a warming climate, a theory that is justifiably scorned by modern theorists. Social historians point out, as did leading philosophers of the era, the lack of evidence for such a driving force, though perhaps that evidence is concealed beneath the waters that consumed the coasts of eastern North America and Eurasia. Instead, they propose the Quants were driven from their native societies by a relentless accumulation of social pressures created by their endless bickering, which led to vigorous intellectual debate and a proportionally high body count. So the Quants fled, bringing their logical positivist philosophy into direct conflict with the more sensible Brexitan theology that recommended peaceful coexistence and cooperation, with occasional forays into coopetition with their frenemy states. This clash of cultures inevitably created conflict between the Brexitans’ blind faith in their Pax Brexitannica and the Quants’ blind faith in their mathematics.

Whatever the merits of each proposed explanation of the serial invasions, the sequence of historical events and their consequences are reasonably clear. First came the Hayeks, emerging from the dark woods of their blackly forested eastern homeland. They came singing, at great length, of dwarves and golden rings, their male warriors accompanied by burly blond shieldmaidens who fought every bit as fiercely as their men. Each invader bore two throwing axes, which doubled as debating tools and tools for felling trees to construct the temporary camps they built to protect their goods while they ravaged the countryside. Historians believe that these camps acquired their name (laagers) from the prodigious kegs of pale amber beer that fueled the invaders’ aggression, but which slowed the invasion whenever they were forced to pause their assault to brew more because supplies had run low. Their taste in beer appalled the gentle Brexitans, whose phlegmatic nature was undoubtedly encouraged by their languorous parliamentary debates in a chamber hung with red tapes and the many mellow wines they preferred to sip while debating.

The Brexitans, who were a sedentary agricultural people, had never met axe-wielding barbarians before, and being unprepared for such vigorous debate, were quickly overwhelmed, their hastily repurposed agricultural implements having proven singularly ineffective debating tools. Waves of refugees fled westward to escape the onslaught—and ran straight into the second wave of barbarians.

The second wave originated around the same time the Hayeks began to establish their new home, when the Keynesians invaded from the west, arriving at the storied shores of the Brexitan lands on overpriced, yet technologically impressive, landing craft that bore nimble swordsmen on horseback. Upon clearing the beaches of defenders, the horsemen immediately began raids with the goal of freeing the Brexitan markets. By capturing goods and departing before the villagers could respond to their lightning-quick raids, they liberated the Brexitan–Hayek society from the burden of production by selling these goods back to the original owners at a handsome profit. Although this stimulation of demand seemed (paradoxically) to have improved the economic lot of the Brexitan­–Hayek culture, the barbarians were broadly resented, not least for their insistence on drinking a weak beer the Brexitans disdained and the Hayeks openly mocked. This led to spirited debate wherever the two tribes came into contact, swords and axes both reaping a red harvest. (Here, we use red in the sense of bloody, rather than in the traditional historical sense of unrepentant socialism, whose waves had crashed upon the Brexitans and receded several generations earlier.)

The third and most intimidating of the tribes were the Friedmans, who were clad in powerful and impenetrable logic that turned aside the staves of the Westerners, the axes of the Hayeks, and the swords of the Keynesians with equal ease. They rebuffed those futile prods with crushing swings of rhetorical bludgeons mounted on long staves that kept them at a safe distance from the commoners they preferred to oppose, while still delivering crushing logical blows to the slow witted or unwary. The origins of this tribe are unknown; based on what little evidence has been gathered, they appear to have sprung into existence, sui generis, in a storied western city, Chicago, famed for its winds, which may have inspired the blustery Keynesians.

Though the Brexitan­–Hayeks were a peaceful society, they were hardly defenseless. In addition to their doughty peasants, who had belatedly learned to wield their staves and pitchforks and rakes and hoes with surprising effectiveness when suitably provoked, the Brexitans had a secret force of elite warriors they could call upon in times of crisis. These elite warriors, the Empiricists (or Emps for short), spent years mastering the skills of logic and the scientific method, and worked in cloistered monasteries known as laboratories, where they were instantly recognizable by their knee-length white coats. These coats had been carefully designed to shield them from fire, caustic chemicals, and even small explosions, and had proven effective in countless skirmishes and occasional pitched battles between laboratories with different prevailing central dogmas. Where these warriors were available in sufficient numbers, their ruthless application of empirical logic drove the Quants to their knees; many ran in terror before the Emps could close to within rhetorical range. But there were never enough Emps, and the Quant tribes easily circumnavigated the Emp forces and defeated them by cutting their supply lines. Without funding to support their forays into the field, the Emps were forced to retreat to their laboratories and conserve their resources against future need.

A fourth tribe of Quants, known as the Ecologists, had settled among the Brexitans shortly before the invasions by the more aggressively rhetorical barbarians. Etymologically, they were related to the Quants through the shared phoneme “eco”. The meaning of this term is lost to history. Some believe it translates as “dealing with numbers”; others suggest it to be an obscure Indo-Turkic word for troublesome nomads. Little credence is given to the theory that it related to cultivation of diverse gardens, as no archeological evidence has been evinced to prove these gardens ever existed. Unlike the fiercer Quants who came later, the Ecologists understood the importance of coexistence and diversity, which was no doubt why they fit in so well in the lands of the Brexitans. Unfortunately, they had embraced a life of quiet contemplation of nature, and were no match for their more vigorous relatives in the heat of battlefield debate.

Had there been enough advance warning, the Brexitans could have relied upon their elite hereditary warriors, the Dawkinses. The founder of this quasi-mystical order, motivated by a seemingly unquenchable desire to selflessly spread his genes, had briefly run amok among the Brexitan women and inseminated more of them than any historical figure had achieved, even the legendary Genghis Khan. Some historians estimate, based on recent genetic evidence, that nearly 10% of all modern Brexitans bear genes from this lineage. Irrespective of their founder’s amatory exploits, these soldiers were masters of the secrets of the heart, and used them to seduce their enemies into breeding with them. Over time, they would defeat their foes by, quite literally, becoming their foes and agreeing not to fight among themselves. (Making babies, referred to as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”, was more fun in any event.) But growing babies into warriors took more than a decade, there were few pure-blood Dawkinses remaining, and the Brexitans’ time was short.

So it was that the Brexitans came up with a desperate strategy: they would give all their money to the Friedmans, in the hope that descendants of the other two tribes would turn on them. (Even if that didn’t happen, they rationalized, it would be good for the economy.) History had shown that epic battles among the three Quantic tribes tended towards the Hobbesian; that is, they were nasty, brutish, and short, even by the bloodthirsty standards of historians. The hope of the Brexitan government was that their troops, no longer outnumbered, would be able to move in once the dust settled and mop up the few surviving Quants, thereby restoring peace to their lands.

Sadly, their bold plan failed, as the Friedmans, who represented an estimated 1% of the total population of Quants, took the money and withdrew overseas to a mythical haven in the far west, known to students of mythology as the Cayman Islands, or by their shorter colloquial name, famed in song and story: Avalon. Though this greatly reduced the military pressure being exerted on the Brexitans, the remaining Quant forces were still too powerful for them to meet in open battle.

All seemed lost, until a new group of nomads entered the picture. They were known as Neocons, a word believed to comprise a portmanteau combination of the words neophyte (meaning naïve and inexperienced) and con (meaning an attempt to deceive). They were champions of liberty, though not to be confused with the Rands, who in turn are not to be confused with the randy Dawkinses. (You can see how ancient English makes life difficult for the intrepid historian, as there are many subtle linguistic traps into which the unwary may fall!) Neocons viewed any interference from governments as sacrilegious. Led by their general, the infamously subtle Ponzi, their scheme made short work of the other Quants, and became the de facto government of the Brexitan territories.

Historians, being historians, have drawn many lessons from the events of this turbulent period, and disagree bitterly over which lesson is most defensible. Some believe that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to be conquered by Economists. Dawkinsesians are too busy spreading their seed to be bothered much with history, which some take as a different lesson: that if you screw around too much with the economy, it will only end well for those doing the screwing. Neocon historians believe that no nation can long endure without a powerful and aggressive military. And Ecologists grumble that if only governments listened to them, utopia would lie within our grasp. But nobody listens much to them, which is probably a good thing.

The truth of this matter may never be discerned, for such is the curse of history: that so much of what we know must be inferred from scant evidence. Yet the true lesson, I feel, is this: that barbarians come and go, some fleeing with the family silverware and others teaching us how to get along with the real business of life, which is finding a way to enjoy life and someone to enjoy it with. Success in life, as in government, depends on knowing which type of barbarian one is dealing with.

~

Bio:

Geoff Hart works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 49 stories thus far. Visit him online at geoff-hart.com.

Philosophy Note:

I’ve always been fascinated by how real historical events are transformed into myths and legends that retain only a superficial resemblance to the truth. The aspects that are retained tell us much about what cultures found sufficiently important to preserve. This story may have been triggered by reading The Mongoliad and musing about mass population movements and “the continuation of economics by other means”.

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A Very Short History Of Right-Wing Science Fiction In Poland

by Stanisław Krawczyk

Several years ago, I spoke to a British science fiction author at Pyrkon, a Polish convention. I told him that the history of SF in Poland had had a marked right-wing component. Many leading writers had grown up in the Polish People’s Republic, a post-WWII state formed under heavy Soviet influence, and they had developed strong negative feelings about the state and its proclaimed socialist ideology. In consequence, they later disliked all manner of things associated with the left.

“I know,” the author told me. “I’m from Britain and I’m left-wing. I grew up under Margaret Thatcher.”

Much of North American and British SF now leans to the left. It would be simplistic, of course, to ascribe it all to the writers’ biographical experience with Thatcher and Reagan. It would also be simplistic to explain everything in Polish SF with a reference to the Polish People’s Republic. Still, if we want to understand the strong right-wing leanings of SF prose in Poland in the 1990s and their partial reverberation in later decades, going back to the 1970s and 1980s is inevitable.

We should keep in mind, though, that the “right-wing” label is, necessarily, a generalization. More research would be needed to clarify what a right-wing worldview meant for different groups and in different periods. I hope that such research will be carried out in time.

Under the Soviet shadow

The late history of the Polish People’s Republic coincides with the early history of the Polish SF fandom. Among the several dates we could choose as symbolic starting points for the latter, the most suitable seems the year 1976. It was then that the influential All-Polish Science Fiction Fan Club was founded in Warsaw, and its members took part in the third edition of EuroCon, itself organized in Poland. The fandom began to grow quickly in the mid-1970s, and so did the number of SF novels and short stories. Throughout the 1980s, more and more independent fan clubs were also set up, and more and more grassroots conventions were organized.

In most cases, science fiction writers and fans were not directly engaged in the dissident movement. However, they often had little love for the state authorities. To begin with, they shared in the broader discontent with the deteriorating economy and political oppression. In the book publishing system, the combined effect of printing issues, paper shortages, and state-wide censorship was that some books suffered delays that could last years. And a severely limited access to Western culture was a major obstacle for those interested in SF.

Because of censorship, this enmity could not be openly expressed in public. However, it did find an indirect expression in the subgenre of sociological science fiction. Its foremost author, Janusz A. Zajdel (1938–1985), a nuclear physicist and a committed member of the Solidarity movement, published five novels in this subgenre. They may be read as universal visions of enslaved societies, but they may also be read as a veiled criticism of the realities of the Polish People’s Republic. The novels quickly became popular, and Zajdel was posthumously made the patron of the most important award for speculative fiction in Poland.

To the right and against the left

The years 1989–1991 were a political breakthrough, ushering in the Third Polish Republic. Censorship was gone, and the available spectrum of expression became much wider. As part of my PhD, I have studied commentaries on public matters in the central journal of the Polish SF field, Nowa Fantastyka. Liberal, progressive, or left-wing ideas were very rare; right-wing ideas were quite frequent. This image seems even sharper than in the whole Polish society, which did turn towards the right overall, but which also gave the most votes to a post-communist coalition in parliamentary elections in 1993 and which elected a post-communist candidate as president in 1995.

A recurrent thread in the journal was negative references to the Polish People’s Republic. These were part of a narrative that attributed a positive role to the Polish science fiction of the 1980s, casting it as instrumental in the social resistance against the authorities and underscoring its advantage over that decade’s “mainstream literature”. A strong opposition was thus constructed between the SF field and the authorities. Only later was serious consideration given to the idea that the latter may have treated sociological SF as a safety valve, enabling the publication of allegorical criticism as an apparently ineffective form of protest.

A few less regular threads can also be traced in editorials and columns in Nowa Fantastyka in the 1990s. They can be summarized as religious and bioethical conservatism, a critique of cultural trends associated with the left (political correctness, relativism, feminism), and a critique of the European Union. Each of these themes was only represented by a small number of texts, but together they demonstrate that right-wing ideas were expressed much more often than liberal or left-wing ones.

In addition, in the early 1990s two key figures of the SF field decided to try their luck in politics. Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz was a spokesman of a right-wing party between 1993 and 1994, and Lech Jęczmyk was a candidate of two other right-wing parties in parliamentary elections in 1991 and 1993. However, neither became a successful politician, and this kind of involvement in the public sphere remained rare.

The 1990s pessimism

Apart from the commentaries, a right-wing worldview permeated science fiction itself. According to a later essay by Jacek Dukaj – an accomplished SF writer in his own right – this manifested partly in “the conviction that destructive civilizational processes were inevitable,” which replaced a previous sentiment, “the sense that there was no alternative to the Soviet rule.”[1] Indeed, Polish science fiction in the 1990s was largely pessimistic, and its anxieties appear similar to those in right-wing discourse outside the SF field: in the media or in parliamentary politics.

One common theme was the spiritual fall of Western Europe, or even all Europe. Possibly the most influential writer dealing with this topic – then an author of numerous novels and short stories, now a well-known opinion journalist – was Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz. His short story A source without water (Źródło bez wody, 1992) will be a good illustration. In that story, Western Europe has been dominated by Islam; the Roman Catholic Church, too, has become lax and soft, and must be renewed. The moral corruption also has a sexual side, which is revealed in a notable detail. One of the characters we follow is an important official who forces himself to sleep with women he despises. He does so to maintain a womanizer’s façade, which he needs to safely turn down the offers from highly placed gays. Western Europe was also shown at times as a direct threat to Polish independence, as in Barnim Regalica’s short story collection Rebellion (Bunt, 1999). It presents an uprising against the European Union, which has taken away Poland’s sovereignty.

Another significant theme was abortion. Here a telling example is Marek S. Huberath’s novelette The major punishment (Kara większa, 1991). It shows a man imprisoned in an afterlife which is part hell, part purgatory, and which resembles a combination of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. A part of the afterlife’s population are embryos that have been torn apart by abortion and now need to be sewn back together by women who had aborted other embryos. An editor’s note accompanying the piece in Nowa Fantastyka called it “a dramatic pendant to the . . . discussion on abortion,”[2] and several months later another editor commented on the readers’ reactions: “It appears that even an artistic voice in favor of life can evoke angry reactions, and that ‘the civilization of death’ has determined followers among our readers.”[3] Other notable examples include Tomasz Kołodziejczak’s Rise and go (Wstań i idź, 1992), which highlights the ubiquity of abortion and euthanasia in the macdonaldized United States, or Wojciech Szyda’s The psychonaut (Psychonautka, 1997), in which Christ is incarnated and killed again as an aborted foetus.

Beyond a stereotype

Despite the caveat I made in the introduction, it may seem at this point that the contemporary history of Polish SF is a monolith. However, there are a few ways to illustrate that this image would be inaccurate. First, in 1990, a 15-year-old Jacek Dukaj published a short story The Golden Galley (Złota Galera), focused on an extremely powerful and rather immoral organization that blended corporation and church into one. The story was hailed as the first in the subgenre (?) called “clerical fiction,” which also featured some pieces by writers who might be easily identified later as right-wing. Perhaps the authors’ aversion to state oppression was such that they would not accept a hegemonic political role of any institution, even the Roman Catholic Church, which may have seemed poised for similar power in the early 1990s. If we looked from today’s perspective and focused on the cooperation of the Church and the political right throughout the Third Polish Republic, the phenomenon of “clerical fiction” would be impossible to explain.

Second, Polish SF and related commentaries (at least those in Nowa Fantastyka) became less visibly right-wing after the early 2000s. Of course, these attitudes have not disappeared; one illustration would be the national focus of many alternative history novels in a multi-authored book series Switch Rails of Time (Zwrotnice Czasu, 2009–2015). However, capitalism has grown to be a much more powerful force than the right-wing worldview in the field of SF in Poland. Together with the concurrent generational change, it means that fewer and fewer writers have been treating science fiction as a means to changing people’s minds, including a change towards the right. Instead, fiction has been perceived more and more as a market commodity, aimed at giving people what they already want. This is in itself a very short look at a very complex process, but the bottom line (to use an economic metaphor) is that the space has shrunk for SF which carries openly political ideas.

Third, some recent developments indicate a growing potential of left-wing science fiction. For instance, in 2020–2021, a fan group Alpaka released a collection of queer speculative fiction, Nowa Fantastyka published an issue devoted to LGBT+ topics, and Katarzyna Babis – illustrator, comic artist and political activist – publicly criticized a number of older works in her YouTube video series The Old Men of Polish SF&F (Dziady Polskiej Fantastyki). There have also been noteworthy ideological clashes in the Polish science fiction and fantasy fandom around Jacek Komuda and Andrzej Pilipiuk, two writers active since the 1990s. It is too early to say that the left-wing worldview has established its presence in Polish SF, but it may happen.

Questions of capitalism, questions of context

Right-wing science fiction in Poland had its time foremostly in the 1990s (and early 2000s). Some of its elements remained, but in general Polish SF became less overtly political. Do the current developments mean that the genre is on track to active involvement with the public sphere again, right-wing, left-wing, or otherwise? It is possible, given that capitalism itself – or its present version – is increasingly becoming an object of public critique. The book market could change to create different conditions for writers and readers. But it is just that, a possibility, and even in that case it may also be other genres of speculative fiction that will carry the political mantle this time.

Regardless of what the future holds, we have seen that the ideas conveyed through Polish SF in the 1980s and 1990s were related to the historical context of those two decades (including the writers’ own biographies). When the context changed, the ideas did, too. This is not to say that there is some social determinism at work here; I prefer to think about fiction as a response to the empirical reality, not just its reflection. This response sometimes goes in surprising directions, as in the case of “clerical fiction.” However, we can understand SF better if we understand its context. And we can certainly say it does not naturally lean to the right or to the left; it can do both, or neither.

To know more about these leanings, we would need to look at other science fiction traditions, too. Would a hypothesis hold that other post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have had a similar ideological trajectory in their SF? Has there been a markedly different trajectory common to the countries of Western Europe? And what about other regions, such as Latin America?

If context matters, it is not just the national context but also the regional and global one. This broader story, however, has yet to be told.

~

Bio:

Stanisław Krawczyk is a sociologist and opinion journalist living in Warsaw. Once engaged actively in the fandom, he has now published a book in Polish, based on his PhD, on the history of the science fiction and fantasy field in Poland. He has also studied video games and the situation of the Polish humanities and social sciences under the recent research assessment regimes.

[1] Jacek Dukaj, Wyobraźnia po prawej stronie, część trzecia [Imagination on the right side: Part three], Wirtualna Polska, https://ksiazki.wp.pl/wyobraznia-po-prawej-stronie-czesc-trzecia-6146199054882433a, April 26, 2010.

[2] Maciej Parowski, Marek S. Huberath, Nowa Fantastyka 7/1991, p. 41.

[3] Lech Jęczmyk, untitled editorial, Nowa Fantastyka 3/1992, p. 1.

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Notes On The Debates In The Federal Convention Concerning A Council Of Oracles

by Ron Fein

JULY 27, 1787, IN CONVENTION

The postponed question being taken up of whether the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary should be joined by a Council of Oracles.

Mr. MADISON moved that such a council be constituted as a separate body within the Legislature, equal to the House and Senate, its consent needed for all legislation.

Col. MASON approved heartily of the motion. The oracles’ wisdom had proven critical during the late war. At the siege of Charleston, only their foresight averted a defeat and ignominious surrender. And General Washington has credited his victory at the battle of White Plains to their guidance. If New York had fallen to the British, the war may have lasted seven years rather than four.

Mr. GERRY. No one disputes that the wisdom of the oracles wd. guide the men of the representative assemblies in their judgment. But the Council of Oracles shd. form a fourth branch of the general Govt., not a body within the Legislature. The oracles shd. not be burdened to vote routinely on matters of roads and tariffs &c., but instead bestow their insights upon the other three branches as needed.

Mr. KING concurred with Mr. Gerry. If the oracles are constantly occupied with mundane questions, the spirit may depart from them. Let them advise the other branches of the Govt. when needed, and otherwise tend to their own inscrutable affairs.

Doctr. FRANKLIN did not see the necessity of a separate Council of Oracles. In Greece the Pythia at Delphi speaks to those who seek counsel, whether high or low, for one day per month, nine months per annum. But she forms no part of any Govt.

Mr. HAMILTON remarked that the case of the Pythia was not applicable. Greece is divided and the priestesses must be available to Sparta even when it marches agst. Athens. Our object is a Govt. that unites the States, not one that advises them in their wars agst. each other.

Col. MASON. Further support for this proposition derives from the varied locations of the temples. Without a separate body in the Govt. empowered to restrain the secular branches, will Massachusetts heed the words of a priestess in Virginia if her words differ from those of the one in Boston?

Mr. MADISON. The oracles are all infallible and their advice, if understood correctly, is identical. But they may phrase their words differently, or men may understand them differently, leading to misunderstanding. A council of them wd. speak with one voice.

Mr. SHERMAN agreed that oracular guidance is indispensable. Men are corrupt and shortsighted; the advice of the priestesses is always correct even if we fail to understand it. But fallible men must interpret their words and make their own decisions. The oracles shd. not be encumbered by formal positions in the Govt. given their sacred duties in their temples &c.

Mr. KING apprehended that if the oracles formed a part of the Govt., that unscrupulous men wd. attempt to bribe them to secure advantage.

Mr. WILSON. The priestesses must remain pure and holy. To further embroil their delicate and virtuous constitutions in daily affairs wd. strain their spirits overmuch. The Executive and perhaps the Judiciary are well advised to consult the Apollonian priestesses from time to time, but they shd. not be given a role in the general affairs of the Govt.

Col. MASON’s opinion had been changed by the arguments used in the discussion. He was now sensible of the necessity of protecting the oracular priestesses in their spiritual domains and not overly enmeshing them in the affairs of men.

Mr. MADISON was content to withdraw the original motion and propose another in its place. He moved that, from time to time, the Executive shall seek the advice and counsel of an oracular priestess when he shall think proper; and further, that he may require the opinion of the principal officers of the Govt. regarding the correct interpretation of her words. 

The motion passed unanimously.

~

Bio:

Ron Fein is a writer, lawyer, and activist based near Boston, Massachusetts (USA). Find him at ronfein.com and on Twitter @ronfein.

Philosophy Note:

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution sometimes showed great wisdom and foresight, but they were blinded in many ways by their own prejudices, divisions, and misconceptions about how the new United States of America would develop. What if something like the Oracle at Delphi, widely accepted as capable of accurately divining the future, had been available to them? Would they have been able to take proper advantage of this amazing resource? My guess is not.

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History

by Stephen Sottong

The guard led me down a narrow path between a series of anonymous, razor-wire-topped chain-link cages until, somehow, he knew the one that was mine. The cage was a three-meter square with a concrete floor sloping to a hole in one corner large enough to function for sanitary needs — if one could function in the total lack of privacy. The hole stank of previous use. The guard pushed me inside — not roughly but decisively. I made no protest, too drained to care. My family and my life’s work were gone. The irony struck me — I was a historian and now my life was merely history.

I sat on the cold concrete, waiting, dozing only to be awakened randomly by screams, or a single gunshot, or guards taking prisoners away.

The sun was barely high enough to shine into my cage when the gate opened and a boy of about eight was thrust in. He stood there, small, thin, dressed in old but serviceable clothes, shivering, although this winter morning was not particularly cool courtesy of the warming that had caused this chaos. The boy and I stared at each other. He was about the same age my son would have been. Patting the concrete next to me, I made room for him. He sat, leaving a gap between us, and continued shivering. I lifted my arm, offering to put it around him. He hesitated and, when a gunshot rang out, finally leaned into me.

We sat, waiting, not speaking, perhaps afraid to interact in this perverse place.

Half an hour later, a guard came around, opened the gate and handed me a small loaf of bread. I took it. It was still warm. Its heady scent masked the stench of filth and decay around me. I wanted to tear into the bread, ravenous, but, instead, moved it to the hand still around the boy, broke the loaf in two and gave the larger piece to him. The guard watched this tableau and left.

We ate. I wished I had water.

The sun rose, baking the concrete expanse. By the time it was too warm for me to have an arm around him, two guards arrived. We got up, me stiffly after sitting on the still cold concrete. The boy offered me his hand and helped me up. A woman took the boy, and a man marched me down the long rows of cells with their seated occupants, some silent, some weeping. I trembled in spite of the heat contemplating what awaited me.

The guard escorted me to a building. At the entrance, he presented me with a bag. Inside were my notebooks. Here rested the sum total of my worthless, lifelong pursuit of the past, preserved on the one media that could survive the disruptions of these times – ink on paper. I held the bag closer than I had the boy, afraid that both I and my life’s work might be destroyed at any moment. The guard deposited me in a room with two chairs, one in front and one behind a desk.

I sat, waiting, clutching the bag.

Two guards entered through a side door and examined the room. A uniformed man followed. When I finally recognized the man was The Leader, I was too surprised to react. The guards on either side of him precluded an assassination attempt — not that I had the energy or will to try.

“Don’t get up,” The Leader said and took the seat behind the desk. He looked older than his years, military hat low over his eyes, uniform faded. The scar running the length of his right cheek appeared even redder and more ragged than in his pictures. “Feel free to take notes,” he continued.

In spite of my shock, I managed to pull out one of the notebooks and found a pen at the bottom of the bag.

He sat back in the chair, steel-gray eyes focused on me, “I read in your journals how you’ve documented the warming climate and loss of prime land with sea level rise. So you realize that means current population levels can’t be sustained. I feel I’ve been tasked to ensure that whatever part of humanity,” he stared directly at me, eyes stern but sad, “if any, that survives will be the best possible. Without intervention, the strongest and cruelest tend to survive. I’m trying to preclude that by testing for empathy and altruism. Congratulations. You passed the test. Had you not shared the bread with the boy, you would have been culled from the survivor stock.”

My hand trembled, but my fingers somehow transcribed his words.

“So, I have an offer for you. You’re a historian. I want an honest, factual account of events. I know I’ll come off as one of the monsters of history. I don’t want you to sugarcoat the facts, just be open-minded. If you accept, you’ll be assigned a place where you can observe and record these crucial times.” He leaned forward, arms on the desk. “Understand, you will likely be considered complicit and your observations suspect.” He paused, still staring at me. “Will you take the position?”

My life was history. How could I refuse such a vantage to record it? “Yes.”

He rose. “Good. You’ll be taken to a room where you can rest and clean up.” With that, he and the guards departed, leaving me, for brief seconds, alone, rooted to my chair in shock.

A guard eventually escorted me out of the building, past only empty cages — perhaps fearing I’d give away the secret to survival. He made no attempt to restrain me and seemed more guide than minder.

We had nearly reached the gate of the facility when we passed an enclosure where boys of perhaps six to thirteen were kept. The one who’d been my companion pushed his way through the milling group to the chain link. I stopped. He stared at me, wide-eyed, clutching the wires. We held each others gaze. The guard made no attempt to move me along.

I queried the matron, pointing to the boy. “Does he have family?”

She shook her head. “All dead.”

The longer I looked at the boy, the more he resembled my own — before the plague took him. “I’ll take him.”

She frowned and turned to my guard who pulled out his radio, spoke briefly into it and then shrugged at the matron. She beckoned the boy to the gate, releasing him to me.

Notebooks under one arm, boy under the other, we walked toward our escape, exchanging glances, evaluating each other. With all we’d both lost, we could do worse.

~

Bio:

Stephen Sottong lives in beautiful northern California behind the Redwood Curtain. He is a 2013 winner of Writers of the Future and has been published in several journals and websites. A full list is on his website: stephensottong.com.

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