With his new novel, Inquisitive, freshly in book stores, Stephen Frame has been pondering power structures in fantasy worlds.
This is a blog about the enduring resilience of hierarchy and fixed power structures in fantasy. Good thing or bad thing? That’s for you to decide yourself, but I’ll tell you what I think.
Hierarchies of power permeate fantasy writing. One in particular is recurrent, perhaps the ultimate example of the unbending, undeserved, entitled expression of power. Bestowed by accident of birth, usually propped up by reference to divine right, typically patriarchal, often brutally enforced. We’re talking monarchy.
I like to think fantasy readers and writers are decent people who are invested in the furtherance of a civil society with a broad spectrum of tolerance. So why do we love a genre which so often hangs its stories on a framework which is the antithesis of all that? Do we use the backdrop of monarchy to point out the myriad abuses of power that flow from it. Hmm . . . Sometimes, maybe. Other times, stories feel entirely comfortable with it. It appears natural; the way things were, and had to be, before the modern world was born. So fantasy is simply giving us an authentic re-packaging of a way of life we recognise as the natural order?
How do we organise a society?
Last year I read two books which changed my thinking on the concept of monarchy and hierarchy as the natural order: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and The Patriarchs by Angela Saini. These two titles laid out ample evidence that ancient peoples tried out many different ways of organising society that had nothing to do with hierarchies of power, and that the fixed hierarchy was not the inevitable way of organising our existence in a pre- or early technology-based society. What led me to those books was a desire to set a story in a society in which formal hierarchies of power didn’t exist. And therein lay a problem. I found I simply couldn’t envisage such a society. I had nothing to go on. No template to work from. Until I started looking…
I got my story written. It’s with a professional editor (shout out to the folks at The Write Advice). It’ll be interesting to see if they think I’ve done the idea justice. It has no kings, no princes, no nobility. It does have people who have power over others. I couldn’t get away from that. And besides, conflict – you know?
(Photo by Deniz Yılmaz on Unsplash)
I think I also got an answer (though not necessarily the right one) to my question about why monarchy is so common in the fantasy genre: It’s a simple, easy-to-use starting point to build a world from. As the writer Naomi Klein says, we are creatures of narrative. Story holds a power over us and the simpler the story, the more powerful it can become.
The narrative power of a single word
“Once upon a time there was a troubled king . . .” How much does that one word, ‘king,’ paint in the background of the story? Pretty much everything we need to know to get the narrative up and running. In terms of narrative economy, it sure beats, “Once upon a time there was a loose collective of like-minded individuals, who, despite their best efforts, struggled to reach a consensus on many of their key areas of debate.”
Does our genre suffer from this attachment to monarchy? I think it does sometimes. Perhaps we could make more in-roads into depicting different, perhaps radical, ways of running our imaginary societies, ones which might shed light in the many problems which beset our own society, mired as it is in fixed hierarchies of power. To which you might say, “Come on, Stevie, give us a break, this is difficult enough as it is.”
I’ve an answer to that. It comes from Ursula K Le Guin.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
