I have just released
Freedom’s Scion, the sequel to the widely praised
Which Art In Hope. Both books focus on a world called Hope: a planet 26 light-years from Earth, settled centuries ago by anarchists who fled Earth to escape the genocidal wrath of the States.
Many prominent science fiction writers have delved into the possibilities of a society that’s resolved that
there shall be no State. However, none of the ones with which I’m familiar address the sociodynamics of such a society: the forces that would shape its development, with special emphasis on those that would tend to tear it from its founding premise. For me, that’s the fascinating thing about anarchism. You see, it’s been tried, with varying degrees of longevity and success, many times in the history of Man. Yet at this time, there are no anarchic societies left on Earth.
Well, except for one: the whole of the human race.
The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.
Yet individuals manage to move among them with a fair degree of facility and (usually) little risk. Cross-border trade is commonplace, in some places torrential. Though wars are frequent, they seldom result in major alterations to the overall political pattern. The
uber-anarchy of Terrestrial society exhibits more stability than one would expect from two hundred well armed, quarrelsome States, each of which perpetually schemes at snatching some advantage at another’s expense.
I’m not going to lay out a comprehensive theory of political dynamics that would explain why the current arrangement of States-in-anarchy has exhibited prolonged stability. That’s a job for persons who’ve made such things their life study. I prefer to write fiction. Moreover, I can guarantee you that, if those savants were to present the world with N theories about the matter, N minus one of them would be wildly wrong...at the very least.
But to be memorable and entertaining, a story must embody a plausible causal model of human relations. A novel that’s premised on a pervasive planetary anarchy, an arrangement so distant from what we of Earth endure, must offer the reader a vision of its workings that he can accept with only a modest suspension of his skepticism.
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To explain the phenomenon of consistent archism-within-anarchism over the millennia, we would need a minimum of two forces: one that draws people into archist societies, another that prevents those societies from a final coalescence. In pondering the matter, I asked myself:
Given a completely anarchic society for a starting point, where would the process most likely begin?Freedom’s Scion is the result.
All my best,
Fran
