TYWE 1: S.M. Stirling, Domination of Draka, and Ideological Brinkmanship
Welcome to part 1 of “Tell ya’ What Else,” where Lenore has opinions that didn’t make it into an episode, and damn it, she’s gonna share them!
There’s an interview from about seventeen years ago where S.M. Stirling fields some questions on his Domination of the Draka series, including the fairly obvious question of whether the books might be racist. If you haven’t listened to our Black Chamber episode (in which case, do so, it’s a banger), in which I unpack the premise, it’s about an alternate timeline where history’s biggest losers (Loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, dispossessed French nobles, Confederate veterans) move to British-colonized South Africa and build an enormous, unstoppable slaving plantocracy that eventually conquers the world, shackles the rest of humanity into genetic servility, and takes to the stars.
Again, fairly obvious question. Stirling takes it in stride, with the jovial defensiveness of one white guy unchallenged by another:
In this world of political correctness, were you ever accused of being a racist? Do people mistake your dystopias for your actual opinion on how things should be run? What do you tell people who make that mistake?
Oh, all the time. Niven’s Law applies: “There is a technical literary term for people who confuse the views or opinions of a character in a work of fiction for those of the author. The term is “idiot”.”
“The scary ones were the people that wanted to move there,” Stirling says. “What’s the polite way of saying ‘It’s a dystopia, you twit!’”
I’m not here to argue that satire is dead, though its value is certainly overstated. And I don’t consider Stirling a rabid reactionary, though he’s certainly comfortable deflecting accusations thereof. But in a post-irony world - where DOGE saunters smugly from Internet meme to gravedigger of the basic functions of the bourgeois state - there’s a certain ideological brinkmanship at play here that I find distressing. “There’s a small internet industry of ‘proving’ that the Domination couldn’t happen,” Stirling says. “I consider this a complement [sic]. How many people go on at great length trying to prove that vampires and werewolves don’t exist?”
Very few, I’ll admit. But this speaks less to the compelling nature of the setting (except perhaps to certain strains of alt-history types) and more to prevailing societal threats. It’s because vampires and werewolves are the stuff of legend, film, and increasingly silly erotica. It’s because fascism and white nationalism, unlike vampires and werewolves, have the financial backing of right-wing billionaires and the ideological laundering of liberal institutions, their capitalistic and bigoted tendencies the engine of settler colonial history and currently driving an attempt to recapture the sordid glory thereof by dismantling the gains of working people.
It’s because the interviewer admits to “feeling a strange sort of magnetism” reading about the Domination. And in a world where such a sentiment gets you Internet traffic and not a visit from your friendly neighborhood commissar for anti-racism, the reflex to disprove and discredit the plausibility of a sustainable fascist slavocracy takes on the character of an immune response from the average reader. It takes time and effort to disseminate racism, and in a healthy working class even human ears respond with suspicion and hostility to dog whistles.
There’s a bit in chapter 5 of Black Chamber where protagonist Luz owns our German nationalist mad scientist von Bülow with facts and logic in a debate about what Friedrich Nietzsche actually meant. What irked me about that scene, aside from the alt-history tendency to write hindsight as common-sense progressivism, is that it doesn’t matter. Not in the context of a debate in a private train car between a bourgeois superspy and a scientist in full ideological alignment with the reactionary regime backing him. They’re each going back to their respective empires to make the world safe for imperialism.
Which brings me back to Stirling. Look, write whatever horrors from whoever’s perspective. It’s myopic at best to engage in worst-case-scenario speculative fiction about real historical reactionaries and then act surprised and amused when it resonates with real current reactionaries. They do not care if you aren’t talking to them. The goal of the fascist is to eliminate all those who aren’t, their tendency - like the antivaxxer fans of Tender is the Flesh - to appropriate whatever they misread along the way.
Whether one’s opinion is right or wrong about this or that work of fiction, or about this or that political topic, matters much less than whether that opinion addresses the material conditions of the listener, or more pertinently the power to propagate the idea that it does. Look no further than your average Fox News story, diligently presenting the billionaire agenda as one with grassroots support, based in parental concerns instead of in a mendacious attempt to channel those concerns into a war on such public health infrastructure as we possess.
I mention in our Black Chamber episode that I’d like to unpack the Domination series and whether it succeeds or fails in its purported task - “to force people to identify with them and then go ICK! mentally.” Consider a Tender is the Flesh or a Battle Royale, which does this correctly in showing the reader what happens to a society kneecapped by individualism. Quite apart from seeing a society accustomed to systematic slaughter, the horror of a dystopia comes from the knowledge of what ought to be done, of the method or even the necessity of organization and collective struggle, a vision of what failed attempts to do this result in, and a call to make such attempts until they succeed.
In short, is there a revolutionary optimism without which the text might not come to pass? Or is the author playing with sticks and stones and leaving them around for fascists to assemble into tools?
Stay tuned. Until I get bored or disgusted and move on to the next book.
