When The Lies Fail
Posted by Niall Harrison
17 February 2012
Paul Kincaid writes about suspension of disbelief, and his failure of it in reading Kameron Hurley's God's War. Like some others, although for different reasons, the war was the sticking point:
But I found myself asking one simple, fatal question: what sort of society could sustain such a situation over so long a time? And the answer I came up with was: not the society shown in the book.
To keep such a war going over such a period of time at such cost would require a highly ordered state, one in which there is a high degree of central control. The state we are shown in the novel is highly disordered, and everything tends to lack of control.
There is a queen, which might suggest a centralised authority. But the queen is weak, and her writ does not seem to extend very far. There are the bel dames, a powerful yet secretive council that is beyond the queen’s control and that is, throughout the novel, acting directly against her interests. They operate by fear and assassination, and their writ seems to extend far wider than the legitimate authority. And there is yet a third power base, the magicians who control the world’s technology, insect power. They, too, have their secrets, and they too are operating against the interests of the queen, though not in concert with the bel dames. So there are three long-established and rival power bases. Interestingly, no-one who is not actually a member of one of these three bodies either proclaims or displays loyalty to any of the three. So you have three top-down power structures with no bottom-up organisation to support it, an inherently unstable situation.
I react to this on two levels. The first is to argue with the detail. I want to point out that those three power bases are explicitly not self-sustaining, that the society has in the past rebelled and power has in the past changed hands, and that the war endures because it is an ideological deathmatch and because external agencies including Tirhan (admittedly explored in more detail in Infidel) have a vested interest in ensuring it endures. But the second level is almost confusion that any reader would even be asking these questions in this way. Paul is an excellent critic, and as he notes triggers for disbelief-failure are intensely personal, so it's perhaps not surprising that his feel alien to me -- I'm sure mine feel alien to him in some cases (and in fact I can think of one likely case, The City & The City). But I can't get behind that "would" in the second paragraph I've quoted above, the psychohistorical certainty that such an outcome must require such a society. Societies are not perfectly logical things; they contain contradictions. I shudder to think what readers on another planet would make of the worldbuilding of Earth.
Comments (10)
Posted by Paul (@princejvstin) on February 17, 2012 4:50 PM
Worlds are complex and contradictory things. And sometimes things are as they are for no good reason in the real world.
As you say, an alien writing a novel set on Modern Earth would have a Paul Kincaid analogue complaining about a ton of implausibilities, from technology to geopolitics,
Posted by Adam Roberts on February 18, 2012 1:52 AM
I challenge the notion that Paul is analogue. He's been digital for years.
Posted by Paul Kincaid on February 18, 2012 3:24 AM
The thing that strikes me is that both Farah and I are historians, and we both failed to accept Hurley's war for pretty much the same reason: it is unsustainable.
When you say: 'the society has in the past rebelled and power has in the past changed hands' you say that the society is unstable and yet has stayed exactly the same. I'm not sure why that is supposed to change my opinion. Nor does an argument taken from a later book help in considering this one. And ideological deathmarches (or holy wars) tend to run out of steam when the realities of warfare hit home, and as Farah points out, the realities of one million casualties every couple of years would have hit home very hard very quickly.
As for that 'would' in the second paragraph: would you care to point out examples of long-lasting and costly wars that were sustained without stong central control?
Posted by Abigail on February 18, 2012 11:30 PM
As I mentioned to Niall a few days ago, Paul, I think what surprises me about your and Farah's reaction is that I in no way read God's War as a book about the war, but rather as a book in which the war was a backdrop against which issues of gender, race, class, and religion - issues that, as you note in your review, Hurley handles very well - could play out with greater intensity. That the war may not make sense doesn't, to my mind, affect the coherence of the novel because it isn't its topic. That may change in Infidel and its sequel, of course, but it's hard for me to sympathize with your complaints as a substantial criticism against God's War.
Posted by Paul Kincaid on February 18, 2012 11:53 PM
Abigail, the war is actually in the title of the novel, it is also the stated reason why the peculiar circumstances of gender, race, class and religion obtain. So I don't see how you can ignore it.
Posted by Abigail on February 19, 2012 12:22 AM
I didn't say that I was ignoring it. I said that it was a backdrop - the justification for the novel's events but not its actual subject.
Posted by Paul Kincaid on February 19, 2012 1:35 AM
The problem is, if the war stops making sense, then all the things that depend from the war stop making sense also. Their justification is removed. It couldn't be this way because the basic conditions could not obtain.
Posted by Abigail on February 19, 2012 3:06 AM
Perhaps so. But that doesn't stop the book from working in its own right. If one takes the war as a given then the rest of the book works, and since the war isn't the focus of the book I wasn't bothered by being asked to take it as a given. Isn't that, after all, the essence of SFnal suspension of disbelief - accepting implausible, and sometimes impossible, premises in order to see how the author develops them?
Something else I mentioned to Niall the other day was that I don't see the difference between accepting the premise of God's War and accepting the premise of The Handmaid's Tale. Both have highly implausible premises rooted in unstable, unsustainable social structures, which the authors use as a backdrop to a discussion of issues of gender.
Posted by Niall on February 19, 2012 3:25 AM
When you say: 'the society has in the past rebelled and power has in the past changed hands' you say that the society is unstable and yet has stayed exactly the same. I'm not sure why that is supposed to change my opinion.
I don't think it has stayed exactly the same. I just don't think it has resolved the war.
Nor does an argument taken from a later book help in considering this one.
Tirhan's role as arms dealers profiting (as deliberate policy) from the continuation of the war is mentioned in GW. It's just explored more in Infidel, because half of that novel is set there.
As for that 'would' in the second paragraph: would you care to point out examples of long-lasting and costly wars that were sustained without stong central control?
This is my main point, though, I have real difficulty seeing this as a relevant question. It doesn't occur to me to ask it because it's so strongly established that Nasheen and Chenja exist in a different social context than has ever existed on Earth, and a different technological context than has ever existed on Earth. So, no, I can't think of an example of such a war. On the other hand, I can't think of an example of a matriarchal religious culture faced with an existential threat and the technological and political set-up to enforce massively high birth rates, either. Given those premises, I see no reason why the casualty rate must have the effect that Farah predicts, and no reason why the ideological conflict must run out of steam. I wouldn't be amazed if those things did happen, I can see why they could be plausible outcomes; but they don't seem like certainties of the situation.
Posted by Nic on February 20, 2012 4:05 AM
I absolutely agree that the point at which your suspension of disbelief fails is a very personal and idiosyncratic thing. I'm a historian, too, and I didn't have a problem with the setting of God's War. But then, in the sort of history I work on, warfare - whether wars of conquest, scrambles for survival, long ideological struggles, or some mix of all three - tends to be something that might *create* strong (not necessarily stable, but certainly focused) states, and bring some measure of unity to diverse societies, but it's not really something that presupposes either stability or unity. The conflict between the Christian and Muslim polities in the Iberian Peninsula lasted for a good seven centuries, give or take and with varying levels of intensity, but neither side could described as exactly politically or socially stable for much of that period. Strong central authority was sometimes useful in this context, but it was present only intermittently (and nearly always faced with considerable internal competition); rather, for much of the period it was the relentless drumbeat of ideology, self-sustaining frontier communities, and external powers egging the two sides on (especially once the Crusades get underway) that kept things going. Often it was the rulers in the weakest position, domestically, who were most keen to see military campaigns carried out, for obvious reasons: nicking off with the bell from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella helped al-Mansur convince doubters that it didn't matter that he was only an overreaching regent for a minor caliph who could barely pay his army. The Christian forces won, ultimately, not by virtue of centralised planning but through their focus and their propaganda, and the way these things shaped life on both civic and rural levels, until warfare with Muslims came to seem the central reality of the world.
(The question of what exactly is unstable in GW seems to be a bit of a moving target in this discussion: state, or society, or both? I don't really feel that we see enough of the society to be sure either way.)
And yes to the implausibilities of our own world. A few years ago I would have laughed a fictional version of the Mamluk Sultanate off the page: a regime in which freed slaves form the overwhelming majority of the military and political elite (up to and including most of the sultans) - an elite that is continually renewed not with elite sons but with fresh supplies of slaves? A regime that spends a century fighting off the Mongols - forty years of which are also spent kicking the Crusaders out of the Near East - and lasts for another 150 years thereafter? For the first century or so of its existence, the Mamluk Sultanate is arguably a state oriented more or less entirely towards war: its central function is buying and training huge numbers of slave soldiers in order to send them out to fight in Syria, as well as collecting taxes to fund the whole machine. Every time a sultan dies, the regime is convulsed by a power struggle between the former sultan's son(s) and the former sultan's slaves - a fight the slaves invariably win. And yet it manages to take part in multiple wars quite handily. Helps to have Egypt as your resource base, of course, but still.
(The Unsullied in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire owe something to the Mamluk Sultanate, but with its two most implausible elements removed: slave owners and slaves are separate individuals, unlike the self-renewing Mamluk slave elite, in which each generation of the slave elite bought and trained the next generation; and the Unsullied are eunuchs, so unlike the Mamluks they don't have the continually destabilising problem of sultans trying to pass on power to their non-slave sons.)