Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions

It's fun to put the human race to rights on paper, and SF writers are no shirkers when it come ups to inventing constitutions.

Some of them are recognizably "close to home" in that they merely putter with what we already have. Neville Shute's In The Moisture (1953) portrays an amendment to one-person-one-vote democracy: everyone still have got the ballot but the more than than solid citizens have more than one. I must state I'm attracted to the thought of other ballots being awarded for education, achievement, marriage, etc, with the purpose of giving more than powerfulness to the well-behaved elements of society! Yay! Down with the riff-raff! Sorry. Wasn't me. One never said a word...

Let us continue to Rubia tinctorum and more than colourful ideas.

Barrington Bayley, an SF mastermind if ever there was one, in his Collision with Chronos (1977) depicts a free-floating space settlement called Rejoinder City, molded like an hr glass, whose fundamental law could not have got been dreamed up by any other author. The colony's two halves are known officially as the Production Rejoinder and the Leisure Retort. As the footing suggest, one is given to work and to the production of stuff goods, while the other is given to leisure time and aesthetic culture. And neither one-half enviousnesses the other. This despite the fact that they are so segregated, that lone new-born babes go through from one to the other! Generations alternate: a father life in the Leisure Rejoinder will shunt his newborn boy to the Production Rejoinder and frailty versa.

The dwellers of the Leisure Rejoinder were scarcely aware of the workers who served them, and the workers, in their turn, regarded the participants in the aesthetic leisure time civilization as idle drones who would probably have got been happier doing something useful.

Envy is avoided by the Exchange of Generations.

Each baby was taken from its female parent a few hours after birth and transported to the antonym retort, usually to be reared by its paternal grandmother, who previously had surrendered her ain child... now the babe's father or mother.

The agreement was made even more than perfect by virtuousness of the fact that the dual exchange could be made simultaneously, even though in existent footing a clip slowdown of decennaries was obviously involved. This was because of the flexible phasing of the two rejoinders in time. On the same twenty-four hours that a couple parted with their new-born child, they received that child's ain offspring... their grandchild.

The supporter makes not share the general satisfaction with this regime. He had been born in the Leisure Rejoinder but his father had hidden him, wanting to maintain him, and the misrepresentation had lasted for 10 years... long adequate to do the eventual forced move traumatic. I won't give away any more than of the plot. And Rejoinder City is only half the scene of this incredibly rich book.

Another impressive show of political creativeness is that achieved by Jack Vance in The Anome (1973). In the subcontinent of Shant on the planet Durdane, the 62 Guangzhous each have got got their ain laws and civilizations and have small in common. They are ruled by a unidentified unknown, called the Faceless Man because his personal identity is never revealed. The thought is that no 1 can suborn a individual whom one makes not know. Government is cheap, since all the Faceless Man have to make when person interruptions a law is fourth estate a button to detonate the offender's torc - a ring containing explosive stuff that is fitted around every grownup citizen of Shant. The Faceless Man, with a couple of assistants, roves the country, enforcing whatever laws each Guangzhou have made for itself. Each Faceless Man takes his ain successor; absolute secretiveness is preserved.

It do for a great narrative though one makes wonderment how much it could ever work in practice. The same idea will happen to readers of Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (1974), which is a seriously worked-out portrayal of an nihilist society. Could anarchism ever really work? With a alteration of mindset, maybe it just could! At least, reading the novel I almost believes so, though with respect to the nihilist purpose of arrant freedom we are prompted to inquire ourselves whether the alteration of mentality which do the system possible may get an oppressive orthodoxy of its own. The finding of fact is unsure. The nihilists of Anarres may or may not be heading for political and societal failure. We are left to wonder.

Philip Kelvin Dick's Solar Lottery (1955) envisages a human race state in which the ruler is chosen by chance. It is a whackily absorbing novel, and true to its ain interior laws, so that its deficiency of outside credibleness makes not matter. It turns out that the so-called accidental election of the ruer have been fixed, and not by a really bad cat either; just by person who was fed up with things as they were. In A Vitamin E avant garde Vogt's The World of Null-A (1948), a Games Machine appoints the World President and other officials, though here the consequences are supposed to stem from the diagnostic tests of ability set by the Machine, rather than from chance. Here, too, it turns out that the procedure is being tampered with.

The abilities required in the rules of the Uranian metropolises described in the Ooranye Undertaking are such as that no political system known to adult male could suit the bill. Uranian rules - Noads, or "foci" - must have got a quality known as lremd, which could be called "steering" or "juggling", the sort of consciousness with which anyone who have to multi-task in our human race (teachers, mothers, managers) must be familiar. But on Ooranye the demand is far greater, and the multi-tasking ability is necessary in its heightened form, lremd. Government on Ooranye be givens to be light and cheap, with immense trust being placed in the Noads and especially on the Noad-of-Noads, the Sunnoad. Only exceeding people can trust to fill up these roles. If a Noad travels bad, no constitutional process bes for his/her removal, so something unrecorded have to happen, some violent remedial action by private citizens, with no inquiries asked. If a Sunnoad travels wrong, the consequence is more than surprising to our mentality. A Sunnoad may be Corrected by person who darings to utilize force. If the action is justified, the Corrector is acclaimed as such, while the Sunnoad remains Sunnoad, and the reign is, if anything, enhanced by the successful Correction. But decease is the fleet punishment for a would-be Corrector who fails.

Lastly may I advert what is surely one of the most loveable of political tales: Double Star by Henry Martin Robert Robert A. Heinlein (1956), in which an histrion is pressurized into impersonating a political leader during a impermanent emergency, only to happen that he have to take on the function permanently and for real. Interestingly, the Solar System-wide civilization described in the novel is a constitutional monarchy in which the imperial throne is occupied by the House of Orange. One of Heinlein's best - absolutely unputdownable.