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Originality and origins

I was fairly irritated by this comment, alleging that I had “plagiarised” Dark Eden from an out-0f-print hundred-year-old Polish science fiction novel, never published in English, and which I’ve never heard of.   If we’re going to bandy about unpleasant words like plagiarism, the word slander comes to mind!

A while back, someone sent me a slightly hostile tweet alleging that I’d lifted one of the main ideas in The Holy Machine, a female robot messiah, from the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.   Now in this case I have seen the film, back in the 1980s when it came out with a new rock soundtrack.  The only scenes I can now remember were the huge factory, and the city with its vast multi-level streams of traffic, but it’s entirely possible all the same that the idea of a robot messiah lodged somewhere in my brain and was one of the sources of Holy Machine.

But why the hostility?  It seems to be based on a somewhat off-beam notion of how writers operate and what constitutes originality.  We do not operate in a vacuum.  As we cast about for ideas we draw on what is already in our brains.  What alternative do we have?   And what is in our brains includes countless images and ideas we have read about, or seen in movies, or been told about by friends.  There is a scene in Dark Eden, for instance, where John Redlantern puts his hand on a long-lost ring.  Would I have come up with this, if I hadn’t read The Hobbit?   I very much doubt it.

But its more complicated than just Writer A has an idea, Writer B steals/borrows/uses it.  A conscious influence on Holy Machine, as I’ve acknowledged before, was the movie the Stepford Wives (based on the novel by Ira Levin) which I saw in the seventies, in which a bunch of men preferred subservient robot simulacra to real women.  That undoubtedly influenced the beginning of the Holy Machine, where the isolated and socially phobic George Simling chooses a robot sex toy, rather than take the (to him terrifying) risk of actually relating to another human being.   But the Stepford wives is itself part of a tradition of stories going back to the Greek legend of Pygmalion (just as Tolkein’s accursed ring is an idea that goes back to the Norse story of Andvari’s ring), and this story surely persists because, in its essentials, it really happens, over and over again, in the real world: men trying to shape women into their image of women should be.   In her book about her abduction and long captivity, for instance, Natascha Kampusch refers to the Pygmalion legend as a way of explaining what her captor was trying to do to her, but hers was just an extreme example of something that occurs all the time.

Sometimes ideas recur, in other words, not because one writer borrows from another, but because both writers are attempting to represent the same aspect of reality, much as certain shapes and structures recur independently in nature as a result of parallel evolution.   Often it is impossible to know whether this is what has happened, or whether there has been a more direct influence.   I genuinely don’t know, for instance, whether or not Metropolis had any direct influence on The Holy Machine.

*   *   *

When writing about Dark Eden, I’ve acknowledged several influences that I’m conscious of: in particular Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and Aldiss’ Helliconia series, as well as a couple of things from Tolkein, and the green-on-black screen of an old Amstrad computer.  When it comes to Mother of Eden, I’m less sure, but here are a few.

There is a scene during Starlight’s second crossing of Worldpool, which I am fairly sure was inspired by a moment in Jane Campion’s beautiful film, The Piano.

Certainly 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch (already mentioned) was an influence.  Starlight is never a captive in quite the literal sense that Kampusch was, but she finds herself a captive nevertheless.  I was really extraordinarily moved by Kampusch’s indomitable spirit, and I think this influenced my thinking about Starlight’s character, her determination to resist.

I’ve been very into Shakespeare’s history plays over the last couple of years, and have also read several books about Tudor and medieval history (these include Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell books, though in their case, I read them after completing the book, encouraged by the recent TV series).  I know my exposure to these various sources influenced my thinking about power, dealing as they did with a period when to fall from power, or to challenge power unsuccessfully, was typically to invite your own death.   (This is still the case, of course, in many countries today.  North Korea and our great ally, Saudi Arabia, spring to mind.)

Tolkein was an influence too, and this time a conscious one, but in a funny inverted kind of way.  Dark Eden had brought a powerful ring – Gela’s ring – into the picture, and in Mother of Eden that ring is much more prominent (Gela’s Ring was my original title for the book).  But I’m not writing fantasy.   There are two hostile camps in Mother of Eden, but neither is wholly good or wholly evil, and my ring has no inherent power, hard though this is to hold onto when you are actually in its presence:

But what was it? [Starlight asks herself at one point] What was I looking at? Didn’t you have to know what a thing was before you could really see it?…. I knew lots of stories about it like everyone did – it had been made on Earth, it had been found by John Redlantern, it had been snatched by Firehand from out of that pot of boiling water – but they were just stories, stories that had been wrapped round it, not the ring itself. So now I tried and tried, until my head ached, to push them from my mind and look at the ring itself.

It was just a thing. I could see that. Just a small small thing. When it was first made on Earth, no one could have known where it would go or what it would come to mean. But it was impossible to hold onto that, impossible to hold away the stories that had made this little object seem so big. In fact, so big had it become that it kept pulling more stories around itself, and growing bigger still…

Do No Harm, by Henry Marsh

do no harmOccasionally I wonder about the point of fiction.  Why make stuff up when there is reality itself out there to write about?  I bought Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, for instance, but once I’d read Natascha Kampusch’s amazing 3,096 Days – few books have made a bigger impression on me: I wrote not one but three posts about it here – I was just no longer interested in reading a piece of fiction about being confined to a single room, however interestingly written or well-reviewed it was.

Do No Harm is a series of scenes from the professional life of a consultant neurosurgeon, a brain surgeon, and, like many other people, I found it utterly compelling reading in a way that I’ve not found any book for a long time.  Why sit behind the eyes of constructed phantoms, I find myself thinking, when you can sit behind the eyes of a real flesh and blood human being?  (I hope this mood will pass!  It’s a bit like being a vicar who suddenly doubts the existence of God.)

As a general rule, I am not very interested in medical matters.  Having been brought up by a doctor, I feel I’ve had enough of the whole medical worldview to last me a lifetime.  Brain surgery, though, is a particularly pure and existential activity, not only because it involves working with the seat of consciousness itself, but because the decisions and actions of the surgeon, second by second, can have huge life-long consequences both negative and positive.   It was this that fascinated me: the business of working in a field where decisions are necessarily probabilistic, and practitioners have to cope with that fact.

In one chapter for instance, Marsh describes the case of a woman who discovers she has an aneurysm (a bulge coming out of a blood vessel, which can burst at any time).    She is perfectly fit and well, and the options facing her are (a) doing nothing, and living with the relatively small possibility that the aneurysm may at some point suddenly burst causing a stroke which may lead to death, paralysis, inability to speak, or a vegetative state, or (b) having the aneurysm closed off with a tiny clamp which, if successful, will remove that long-term threat, but carries a small risk of causing a catastrophic haemorrhage which will have any one of the above effects not in the future but immediately.   The woman elects to take the risks of surgery, and it pays off.   She doesn’t know how close it came to going wrong, when the clamp malfunctioned and refused to detach itself from the instrument used to put it in place.   In a lifetime of neurosurgery, Marsh has of course had to deal with many situations where the dice came down the other way: he’s had to go and see patients who’d been functioning perfectly normally who his own interventions have (in his own blunt but completely accurate word) wrecked.   He’s had patients thanking him for transforming their lives, but also patients angrily accusing him of negligence and incompetence when things didn’t work out so well.  The title, taken from the Hippocratic Oath, is ironic.  It is impossible to do no harm.

Marsh is disarmingly frank about the psychology of all this, the manoeuvres he uses to distance himself, the dread he feels at having to face patients and relatives when things have gone badly, the cockiness when things go well.  He admits on one occasion to reducing a man to a vegetative state when he went too far on a tumour removal operation (it had been going on for 18 hours!) and that part of his motivation had been to impress a senior.   He admits to sometimes carrying out operations that his head says will do no good at all, simply because he can’t face closing off the last avenue of hope for desperate people.  Its a very human voice throughout, and often funny, specially about the idiocies of managerialism.

I don’t know whether I possess the intellectual ability necessary for brain surgery, but I know for certain I don’t have the manual dexterity (do they actually test for this, I’ve often wondered: the book doesn’t say!)  I also don’t have the steadiness of nerve required to keep on going, without panicking, whether things are going well or not, or the resilience required to live with the memories of all those ‘wrecked’ people, and all those angry grief-stricken loved ones.   However, as a child and family social worker and social work manager, I did work for 18 years in a field which was similarly involved in making huge decisions in conditions of uncertainty.   No one died, as far as I know, as a result of decisions I played a part in, but there are certainly a lot of people who might have grown up in completely different families if it wasn’t for me.  I find that quite haunting enough.

Marsh says somewhere in the book that the hardest part of being a brain surgeon is not the fact, per se, of dealing with suffering and death, but the decision-making, the knowledge that however hard you try, there may be bad outcomes for which you will be responsible.   I’m put in mind of a quote from Theodore Roosevelt which one of my daughters used to have pinned up on her wall:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Rather purple prose perhaps, but I think what fascinates about Marsh’s book is the perspective of someone who is, in Roosevelt’s words, “actually in the arena” and therefore necessarily “comes short again and again”.

Dortmund

This is me at Dortcon, with the other guests of honour, artist Lothar Bauer on the left of the picture (a man of few words, who says his pictures speak for him: we are flanked by two of them here) and fellow SF writer Karsten Kruschel on the right.

Dortcon pic

As with Sferakon last year in Zagreb, I was a little daunted in prospect by the idea of attending a convention whose primary language would not be English, but (also as with Sferakon) I was made extremely welcome, people put themselves to a lot of trouble to make sure I was included, and I had a great weekend.  Special thanks to Arno and Gabi (my main hosts), Michael who first suggested inviting me, and Gregor who acted as my interpreter when one was needed (making me feel like some kind of international statesman, as he murmured into my ear.)

I know a huge amount of work and worry, over a long period of time, goes into planning these events, which most attendees (including me) don’t really see.  What I see, and most attendees see, is a little peaceful island, where gentle and imaginative people can gather for a couple of days of conversation and friendship and playfulness.

This was my first real visit to Germany. Fascinating listening to German spoken all around me.  Perhaps because, from an early age, my sisters and I were cared for by German au pairs, I’ve always liked the sound of the language.  I find it musical, where many English people find it harsh, and could quite happily just sit and listen to its cadences, even if I didn’t have someone to interpret.  The tantalising thing about it is that, though I can’t understand it, it’s so obviously a close cousin of English that I can’t quite let go of the idea that, if only I tried hard enough, I could.

It’s interesting how every country has its stories, its past events, it’s preoccupations, which it must keep going over and over, just as individuals have events in their own lives that they must visit and revisit over and over: the old DDR and what had happened to it when Germany was unified, for instance, was clearly one such topic, even more than twenty years on.

My fellow writer and guest of honour Karsten grew up in the DDR.  He told me all SF in the DDR had to depict a socialist future (so as not to violate the Marxist creed of the inevitable triumph of socialism).   When he studied for a PhD thesis on dystopian literature, he had to have special permission to look at George Orwell’s 1984, which was held in the university library but was forbidden to the general public.  He had to go to a special room to read it.

Now to me, that sounds like a scene from an SF novel in itself.

The Wichita Lineman

I consume music in a spasmodic kind of way.  I might go for months without deliberately listening to any music at all, and then will latch onto some song or fragment that fits my mood and play it to death.  Right now it’s this, “The Wichita Lineman”, not as most famously recorded by Glen Campbell but by the man who wrote the song, Jimmy Webb.

I’ve had to do some driving these last couple of days and have been listening to it over and over in my car on the album “Ten Easy Pieces”.  It’s a little fragment of a song – I gather that Webb hadn’t even finished writing it when Campbell first recorded it – and in one way it’s almost about nothing at all, just a tiny snatch of the random thoughts of the lineman as he wanders the roads by himself and climbs up the phone lines: about his job (“if it snows that stretch down south will never take the strain”), and how he could do with a vacation, and how he rather desperately loves someone.

What’s so clever is how the music fits so perfectly with the words. At the beginning and end, and in between the verses, it comes back to this morse code-like motif, like the signals going back and forth along the lines.  It’s as if, up there on his pole, silhoutted against the sky,  he stands apart from our busy human attempts to communicate, to keep in touch, to stave off aloneness.

There’s immense loneliness in the song, it seems to me, but it’s achingly beautiful too.  I see in Wikipedia that someone or other described it as “the first existential pop song”.  I’m not sure about that.  It’s predated, for instance, by Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay”  (another of my favourites, which surely could also claim that title), but it’s a truly great song.

Violence and ideology

Another main source of authority in Islam (see previous post) is the Hadith: stories about the actions and sayings of the Prophet that were transmitted orally and written down some time after his death.  In the following hadith, for instance, the Prophet (who, as I noted before, gives himself the right to use his female captives for sex), deals with an man who admits to adultery:

Narrated Abu Huraira: A man from Bani Aslam came to Allah’s Apostle while he was in the mosque and called (the Prophet ) saying, “O Allah’s Apostle! I have committed illegal sexual intercourse.” On that the Prophet turned his face from him to the other side, whereupon the man moved to the side towards which the Prophet had turned his face, and said, “O Allah’s Apostle! I have committed illegal sexual intercourse.” The Prophet turned his face (from him) to the other side whereupon the man moved to the side towards which the Prophet had turned his face, and repeated his statement. The Prophet turned his face (from him) to the other side again. The man moved again (and repeated his statement) for the fourth time. So when the man had given witness four times against himself, the Prophet called him and said, “Are you insane?” He replied, “No.” The Prophet then said (to his companions), “Go and stone him to death.”

This quotation can be found (among other places) on Sunnah.com, a website which aims to “provide the first online, authentic, searchable, and multilingual (English/Arabic at the individual hadith level) database of collections of hadith from our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.”  Once again, my point is that, while it may well be true that the brutal actions of radical Islamists are unrepresentative of the attitude of mainstream Islam, those actions seem to be well supported by the sources – the Quran and the hadith – which mainstream Islam still accepts as the ultimate authority.   Mohamed lived in the time that we know in Europe as the Dark Ages, and he was a man of his time.  His attitudes and behaviour, as reflected in the sources accepted as authoritative by Islam as a whole, looks much more like a role model for organisations such as the Taliban or Islamic State than a role model for a tolerant, pluralist religion that is comfortable with liberal securalism.  I don’t see how this fact can be completely excluded from the conversation.

*   *   *

All that said, though, Adam Shatz is right when he says that “ideology can go only so far in explaining behaviour. Social causes matter.”   As he goes on to point out:

The Kouachi brothers [i.e. the Charlie Hebdo assassins] were products of the West – and of the traumatic collision between Western power and an Islamic world that has been torn apart by both internal conflict and Western military intervention… It’s unlikely they could have recited more than the few hadith they learned from the ex-janitor-turned-imam who presided over their indoctrination. They came from a broken family and started out as petty criminals, much like Mohamed Merah, who murdered a group of Jewish schoolchildren in Montauban and Toulouse in 2012. Their main preoccupations, before their conversion to Islamism, seem to have been football, chasing girls, listening to hip hop and smoking weed. Radical Islam gave them the sense of purpose that they couldn’t otherwise find in France. It allowed them to translate their sense of powerlessness into total power, their aimlessness into heroism on the stage of history. They were no longer criminals but holy warriors. To see their crimes as an expression of Islam is like treating the crimes of the Baader-Meinhof gang as an expression of historical materialism. And to say this is in no way to diminish their responsibility, or to relinquish ‘moral clarity’.  (Italics added by me.)

I myself remember a time when, as an odd, socially isolated, angry teenager with vague, unfocussed left-wing ideas, I was briefly drawn to the idea of violent acts of terror against ‘the System’.  (I was very taken for instance, by the Lindsay Anderson film “If…” in which some schoolboys climb up onto the roof of their school and machine gun parents and dignitaries arriving for a speech day).  Luckily for me (and, I guess, for others too!) this never got past the level of fantasy.   But it does mean that I understand, from personal experience, Shatz’s point that, in looking for the cause of violence, we can’t just look at the ideology that happens to be used to justify it but also at the social and psychological context which makes that ideology attractive.  I felt excluded and alienated and very angry – that was the root cause of my brief interest in the idea of political violence – but in the left-wing terrorism of that time (the mid-seventies) I saw a means of dignifying the violent expression of my anger by redefining it as a fight in a noble cause.  (Without ideology, as Shatz says, a violent act would make me a criminal; with it, I could see myself as a holy warrior.)  Angry people who want to hit out, will use whatever rationalisations they can find.

This makes the whole thing extremely complicated.  On the one hand, in this context it seems likely that mockery of Islam in a country like France or Britain, will actually add to the sense of alienation that young Muslims already feel, and therefore stoke up the anger which is the real root cause of the violence.   On the other hand, the ready availability of ideological justifications for violence within the core traditions of this particular community is surely a problem in its own right.  Yes, ideology can only go so far in explaining behaviour, but it is a factor all the same.

Islam and mockery

The longest exposure I have had to a Muslim society is the couple of occasions I have stayed in the Moroccan seaside town of Oued Laou in the company of my friend Jonathan, who speaks Moroccan Arabic. Small things I’ve noticed and liked are that the standard greeting to a stranger is “Peace be with you”, and the way that any discussion of future events is routinely followed by the phrase “insha’Allah” (God willing), but, for an outsider, the most obvious manifestation of the Muslim religion occurs at intervals through every day, when the loudspeakers at the top of the town’s main mosque crackle into life and you hear the beautiful call to prayer, echoed by other mosques across the Laou valley and up on the surrounding hillsides. At these times, if you go into the little market, many of the stalls are simply unattended. Their owners can be seen through the open door of the mosque, shoeless, praying. I find this moving, admirable even: the idea of a community which, at regular intervals through the day, sets aside its own individual concerns and preoccupations, and submits itself to the mystery at the core of the universe itself. I can see how, by comparison, modern secular western society might seem shallow and narcissistic. And I can see why someone taking part in these rituals that are shared by Muslims across the world, might experience Islam as a religion of peace.

A not-particularly religious Muslim friend spoke in similar terms about the month of Ramadan. There was something rather wonderful, she said, about the idea that an entire community was moving together through this season of abstinence and self-denial, reminding themselves that there was more to life than simply the pleasure of the senses. As a child, when my (also not particularly religious) parents sent me to Sunday School, I acquired a somewhat similar feeling about the traditional Christian calendar. Though the religion itself didn’t rub off on me (or on my parents either, as it turned out!) I still like the idea of an entire community (and in days gone by, an entire society) moving together through a story, repeating it over and over: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter…

Religions are sometimes characterised as a set of ‘beliefs’, of propositions, of statements about what is and isn’t true, and while most of them do include this element, it is quite a narrow way of looking at them, for there is a great deal more to them than that. They are also customs, practices, shared ways of doing things, collective acts of imagination. Whether the stories we enacted in Sunday School were literally true or not, they certainly brought me closer to some of the mysteries of life, and part of that was to do with the cycle itself, the repetition, which somehow made them much deeper than a single telling would have done.

I’m sure the same is true of the customs of practicing Muslims, and for that reason I don’t find it hard to see why these practices and rituals seem profoundly precious to them, and why they should be distressed when others mock. Life is hard, and it can seem empty and futile. Each of us tries to find ways of imbuing it with some sense of purpose, or beauty, or meaning, but all of those ways are fragile.  We should be as respectful and gentle as we can with one another’s attempts. Mocking other people’s religious practices, just for the sake of it, is simply rude and inconsiderate in much the same way as it would be rude and inconsiderate to barge into a concert that other people were enjoying and shouting out abuse, just because the music wasn’t to our own taste.

There is a “but” though.

* * *

Islam may be more than just a set of “beliefs”, but nevertheless (like most religions, and more than many) it certainly includes beliefs. To be specific, a core belief is the idea that the words of the Quran are the infallible word of God. And this is where things get complicated, because these words sanction behaviour that, in modern terms, would be heinous criminal offences in most parts of the world . To give one example, the Quran very clearly states in several places that a man is entitled to have slave girls and to have sex with them.

Here are Surahs 23: 1-6*:

(1) The believers must /(Eventually) win through –

(2) Those who humble themselves / In their prayers;

(3) Who avoid vain talk;

(4) Who are active in deeds/ Of charity;

(5) Who abstain from sex,

(6) Except with those joined/ To them in the marriage bond,/ Or (the captives) whom / Their right hands possess –/ For (in their case) they are / Free from blame.

See also, among others, Surah 4:24, which prohibits sex with married woman unless they are your captives (in which case it’s fine), or Surah 33: 50, which begins “Oh Prophet! We have / Made lawful to thee / Thy wives to whom thou / Hast paid their dowers; / And those whom thy / Right hand possess out of /The prisoners of war whom / Allah has assigned to thee…”  Here, note, it is Mohamed himself who is being told by God that he can have sex with women he’s captured in war.

Of course the Quran is of its time, written in the early decades of the seventh century, when England was still a collection of petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that wouldn’t come together as a single country for another 300 years. I am sure that the Angles and Saxons who settled Britain, and the Romans who preceded them, and the Vikings who were to follow, would all have had a similar attitude towards female captives, and certainly the Old Testament, which Jews and Christians alike traditionally view as the word of God, contains similar notions. I’m even prepared to be persuaded that Islam was in many respects ahead of its time, back in the seventh century. (Perhaps it’s Islam’s misfortune that its founder felt the need to lay down very specific instructions which aren’t terribly amenable to reinterpretion). But the fact remains is that what is being sanctioned in these verses is, in modern terms, the crime of rape: the feelings and wishes of the women and girls simply do not come into the equation at all. And, right now in the twenty-first century, Islamic State in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Nigeria are using the authority of the Quran to justify capturing girls, making them into sex slaves, and even (in the case of IS) giving out a nicely printed leaflet confirming that it is fine for their followers to have sex with girls (including prepubescent girls) that they capture.

I know that many Muslims would say that such behaviour is not consistent with their own understanding of the religion, and I really do believe them: religion in practice really is a much more complex, idiosyncratic and many-layered thing than its doctrines would suggest on cold examination. But until a modern Islam emerges that is able to draw a clear line between itself and the idea that the verses of the Quran really are literally the word of God, Muslims can’t expect their religion or their prophet to be exempt from the criticism and mockery of those who find many of those verses to be brutal, abhorrent and medieval**.

Which I guess was Charlie Hebdo’s point when they printed their fateful Nov 2011 cover on which a cartoon Mohamed tells readers, “A hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing.”

 

*I am using the translation edited by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and distributed free by the Albirr Foundation UK (10th edition, 1999).
** I’m using the issue of women and slavery as an example, but I could have used others. IS’s use of crucifixion as a punishment for their opponents, for instance, is also specifically sanctioned by the Quran, which states that that “execution, or crucifixion, / Or the cutting off of hands / And feet from opposite sides, / Or exile…” are the appropriate punishment for “those who wage war against Allah and his messengers” (5:33).

Hierarchies in Eden

In the article I discussed in my previous post, David Brin argued that a rigidly hierarchical pyramidal social structure was an “attractor” in the mathematical sense of the word: a pattern or shape towards which a dynamic system tends to evolve.

I’ve often seen Dark Eden described as a ‘dystopian’ novel but, though life may seem grim in Eden, the society itself, as described at the beginning of the book, is actually in many ways utopian.  It has not settled into one of those rigid hierarchical pyramids.  There are no distinctions between rich and poor; women are at least as powerful as men; murder and rape are unknown.

In the second Eden novel (Mother of Eden) all this has changed.  Most of Eden has succumbed to the pyramidal attractor, and the majority of its population live in one of two highly stratified societies, one founded by John Redlantern, the other ruled by the descendants of David Redlantern.   In the case of the ‘Johnfolk’ at least, the people at the bottom of the pyramid are really no more than serfs, ruled over in a more-or-less feudal way, by ‘chiefs’ who are the heirs of those who were John’s lieutenants in his protracted struggle against the Davidfolk. The great rift in Eden’s human community that was depicted in the first book, was the catalyst which set in motion the process of stratification which  also included the increasing dominance of men over women.

One of the things I was interested in exploring in Mother of Eden is how those hierarchies work.   My main protagonist, Starlight Brooking, comes from one of the few remaining exceptions to the pyramidal norm, and she finds it bewildering that such a very number of people can exercise so much control over so many.  Why don’t the people at the bottom of the pyramid simply refuse to do what they’re told?

She discovers there are many reasons, one of which is the fact that the system of stories and beliefs which people use as their source of meaning has, to to speak, been rigged so that it bolsters the status quo.   Another is a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ kind of paradox: yes, if all the ‘small’ people rose up together, they could defeat the ‘big’ people, but if some stand up to the big people and the others don’t take their side, they’ll end up a lot worse off than they would have been if they kept their heads down.   Another again is that even people who seem low down in the pyramid, and look like they are getting a pretty bad deal, do in fact turn out to have at least some stake in in maintaining the structure as it is, if they know they’re not right at the bottom.

I won’t say how it all works out for Starlight, but I will say that I think people sometimes forget that last point when they are thinking about politics in the modern world.  It simply isn’t the case that the world can be divided up in ‘the rich and powerful’ and ‘the rest of us’, however much we’d like to place ourselves squarely on the side of the good guys.  In a country like the UK, even middle-income people who don’t think of themselves as especially well off are, by global standards, not only very rich, but quite possibly richer (at least in purely material terms) than will ever be possible for the human race as a whole.

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