Have you ever thought about how much more efficient it would be to just have a single person making all the decisions? Rather than waste an hour or two assessing all the relevant facts before arriving at a conclusion, a single autocrat could make decisions immediately, perhaps even before they were fully awake! It’s hard to see what could go wrong with such a system… but some SFF authors have been up to the task.
The Serpent by Jane Gaskell (1963)
Informed of a prophecy that her daughter Cija would be the doom of the Dictatress’s city-state, the Dictatress did what any prudent ruler would do in her place: she had Cija immured in a tower, then raised on a farrago of lies. Having ensured Cija’s profound ignorance, the Dictatress then assigns to Cija a task on which the fate of the city depends.
The half-lizard warlord Zerd is carving his way across continents. In an attempt to buy his favor, the Dictatress offers Cija to Zerd (as a bride, not a slave, but same difference). This is but a ruse to get Cija close enough to Zerd to murder him. Too bad that, even if poor Cija were not terribly dim, she is far too naïve and ignorant to succeed.
“Half-lizard?” some of you ask. Gaskell’s world is one where the boundary between species is not the reproductive no-go that it is in our world. This is just one of many exciting worldbuilding decisions that Gaskell makes over the course of the Atlan series…
The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson (1975)
Disease swept across the world, killing every person twelve years or older. Orphan Lisa finds herself the sole guardian of her younger brother Todd. Lisa resolves not merely to keep herself and Todd alive—she is determined to rebuild civilization. Quite a task for a ten-year-old, but Lisa is a remarkable ten-year-old.
The city is filled with the physical resources that Lisa requires. Lisa provides the necessary vision. It only remains to find people to act as her hands. Here Lisa’s foresight serves her well. Having sequestered the resources needed to survive, she can offer food and shelter to those willing to accept her as their ruler. If this deal is too one-sided? The kids are free to starve in the ruins or try their chances with Tom Logan’s predatory Chidester Gang.
Readers curious what sort of society might be founded by a ten-year-old who has apparently read Atlas Shrugged need look no further.
Mapping Winter by Marta Randall (2019)
Lord Cadoc Marubin spent four decades creating an unassailable state. Secret police are vigilant for signs of disloyalty. Potentially disruptive subjects vanish in the middle of the night. The system would be a perpetual dictatorship…if Cadoc were not mortal.
Cadoc is on his deathbed; there are four potential heirs. He might avoid chaos by naming an heir (as if this would make any difference to the post-death scheming and squabbling). Kieve Rider could influence the succession if she were willing to do so, but she hates Cadoc and would prefer to escape court politics entirely. She cannot; her loved ones are being held hostage to compel her cooperation. Too bad that selecting one heir to back means potentially angering the other three.
In addition to being a political thriller, Mapping Winter is an interesting example of a secondary universe story that’s probably not fantasy. The characters may firmly believe magic exists, but there’s no evidence that they are correct. At the same time, this is not alternate history. Is there a word for mundane secondary universe narratives?
The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart (2020)
Faced with the necessity of delegating important tasks to unreliable subordinates, the emperor has an innovative solution. Using bone fragments commandeered from his living subjects, the emperor creates magical automatons, subject to his will. Donors die prematurely, but they should be comforted by the knowledge that their life-force fuels a key part of the state apparatus.
It is true that malcontents abound: the emperor’s heirs squabble and scheme among themselves; the survivors of the unwilling bone-shard donors are unhappy; there are the usual would-be reformers. But the emperor is confident that his highly centralized system is stable and robust. Unless, of course, something were to happen to the man running it all.
The emperor is essentially a programmer who is utterly convinced that automatons can replace messy, uncooperative people, provided their directives are flawless and don’t contain any exploitable loopholes. It’s possible he is overconfident.
This is a rare case in which the ruler really is the state, without intermediaries complicating matters with their own personal agendas.
Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller (2022)
The emperor of Boren built his empire on innovations—innovations stolen from other nations, innovations used to power a constantly expanding empire. One such new thing: a sort of immortality. It confers resistance to age but not poison.
The emperor is poisoned.
Aware he is dying, the emperor sets one of his pawns a final task: discover which of the emperor’s loathsome heirs was impatient enough to assassinate the emperor. Once the killer has been identified, the pawn, a certain Charm, is to kill them. Charm may or may not succeed. What is certain is that the emperor’s successor will be just as awful as, and perhaps even worse than, the emperor himself.
It seems obvious that the last thing an immortal ruler would need is an heir. Or more than one heir. If the ruler insists on having an heir just in case, it would seem wise to expend sufficient effort to ensure the heir’s loyalty. The emperor in this novel did not do that. Sad to say, he’s not the only fictional autocrat who set up the necessary conditions for a violent palace coup. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
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SFF authors love to write about autocrats. The five fictional autocrats I’ve mentioned are far from a complete list—no doubt many of you have your own favorite dictators, emperors, and absolute monarchs, rulers unjustly ignored by this article. Feel free to repair my omissions in comments.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Swordspoint was a “mundane secondary universe narrative” but its sequels revealed that there is magic in that world.
But I agree a word for such stories would be cool.
LMB’s Emperor Ezar of Barrayar has to deal with inheriting/usurping a fascist imperial government and trying to change the basis of government to something less likely to devolve into either a Russian or Spanish-style civil war or provoking the rest of human civilization into taking over the burden of governing Barrayar. He was mostly successful thanks to one of SF’s greatest power couples.
I’d love to know how the Dictatress thought her plan was going to work out.
Anaander Mianaai as Lord of the Radch solves the heirs and unreliable subordinates by cloning herself and using technological implants to create a hive mind across all the bodies. She fills all the high level posts in the bureaucracy with herself and while clones age and die, the personality carries on. If she had been a bit more proactive about rotating clones between postings we might never have got the Ancilliary trilogy.
Mistborn‘s Lord Ruler didn’t really have any problems at all wielding absolute power, for 1000 years, until the most charismatic and capable sociopath ever decided to take him down.
I have a bit of a soft spot for the Eternal Emperor from the Sten books, who has been around for quite a lot of recorded history. And then he dies. And then he comes back. While he had taken precautions to keep himself from turning bad, those precautions prove insufficient and we get to see the downsides of putting all the power in the hands of one person.
I suspect none of these autocrats mentioned so far, or that will be mentioned, have ever perused the Evil Overlord List . Especially number 12.
I assume Dune would be too easy.
More that I mentioned Dune a few weeks ago.
I would offer not a book but a series of books with a successful autocrat as the main character – Pratchett’s Vetinari. “I’m a tyrant. It’s what I do.” “He believed in one man one vote. He was the man and he had the vote.”
He excels in anticipating people’s actions through an extensive intelligence network and can nudge events in his preferred direction with an invisible hand. He also recognizes when the zeitgeist has changed and he has to yield, temporarily, and then restore his control.
I’ve heard the term “Ruritanian” for stories set in a corner of Europe that doesn’t actually exist. (From Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and sequels, of course.) The term could be extended to worlds that aren’t Earth but don’t have magic.
The description of The Serpent makes me wonder why the Dictatress didn’t just have Cija killed. Puts me in mind of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, which features one of the only averted prophecies ever: if Astyanax will grow up to exact revenge on Greece for the fall of Troy, fling him off the city walls. (There’s later fanfic which has another baby substituted for him, but it’s undeniable that the revenge was not exacted.)
@11:
Somtow Sucharitkul (aka S.P. Somtow) wrote a novel where Astyanax did indeed survive. And restarted the Trojan War when he grew up.
(Looking it up)
Ah. Title was The Shattered Horse.
@11 Though arguably in mythic terms the revenge was just delayed, and delivered by the descendants of Aeneas instead of Astyanax. At least I’m pretty sure the Romans from Virgil on would so argue.
(Who would of course have their own experiences of monarchs with nigh-absolute power and varying senses of responsibility.)
…and of course there’s the Galactic Emperor, a/k/a Darth Sidious.
Plus Cleon the Whateverth from Foundation (the book, not the TV series which I not having AppleTV have not seen), who may not make all the decisions but pretty clearly decides who does.
The Emperor Undying from Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb [extended] trilogy. He’s an absolute ruler, albeit possibly not immortal (he’s not dead yet, at age about 10,000 years), and faces multiple threats.
Of course, immortality doesn’t really eliminate the problem of succession. It just means that the successor has to be a bit more active in ensuring the reigning autocrat retires.
@8 – @9: how absolute is the Emperor’s power? The Bene Gesserit are quieter and arguably more effective, although even their plans are upset in the end; also, the fact that interstellar travel depends on melange (aka spice) means that the ruler of Arrakis can hold the empire by the short and curlies without being the titular head.
@11: I would read “Ruritanian” as taking much of the existing (or once-existing) world as a given; a modern example is A College of Magics, in which the protagonist starts by entering ~finishing school in western France, then travels through early-20th-century geography before reaching the fictional Galazon. Is there a separate term for worlds that do not connect at any point to ours but that are not fantasy? Or is this too small a category for a separate name?
@11 – as Laertes and Jocasta found out, you have to do the deed yourself if you try to thwart the oracle. Just ordering a henchperson to do it never works.
A while back, I did an essay on my blog abour galactic empires and the utter unworkability thereof.
Among other things, I considered the workload. I looked at book X of Pliny the Younger’s letters, the one with all the correspondence between him and Trajan when Pliny was governor of Bithynia and Pontus. Then I reflected that that all came from one province, and the Roman Empire in those days had forty-odd provinces, and then there was Rome itself, and the military, and the foreign relations aspect of it all….
And then I tried to scale it up to the size of the whole world, and then several worlds, and then the entire galaxy – not to mention all the complications of modern life, which Trajan and Pliny never dreamed of….
So it’s my contention that, when your square-jawed hero crashes his trusty rocketship onto the Imperial throneworld, grabs the nearest court official, and says “I must speak with the Emperor at once, on a matter of life and death!” – the official will just hand him a shovel, and say, “OK, just go through there, look through the massive mounds of paperwork until you find one with faint pleading and sobbing noises coming from underneath it, and once you’ve dug the Emperor out, he’ll be so grateful he’ll listen to anything you’ve got to say.”
Doonesbury’s Honey Huan started off, long long ago, as the only person in China who could still understand elderly Mao’s diction, which meant all of his orders passed through her. To serve him better, she interpreted his orders very creatively.
@18 – The problem of scale. You’ve put your finger on it.
Most SF authors seem to want to scuttle past this without dealing with it. One who incorporated it as a factor in his gigantic autocracy was Poul Anderson. At several points, in several books, he describes the discontinuity between the Emperor of the interstellar Terran Empire and his desires, and the huge imperial bureaucracy that got on with the job of administering the Empire more or less autonomously, doing their best to keep things going according to the rule book in the face of problems too huge and complex for any human organization to handle. Plain old institutional inertia was an important factor in the Terran Empire and Anderson made more than one plot hang off that, even though everyone theoretically had to jump when the Emperor said to.
@11, @16: I would say that a “secondary world” doesn’t have to have magic. But I’ve previously preferred “fantasy world” to include a world whose only fantastic element is to be not the real Earth – I put some thoughts on the point on the Quora Web site, in response to, “If a book takes place in a completely invented world, but this world doesn’t have magic or anything mythical, only with humans and completely following our laws of physics, would this book count as a fantasy book?”
An online article about Tolkien appears to give him credit for the phrase of “secondary world”, but itself favours “fictional universe” or “conworld” for constructed world, which I feel that Professor Tolkien wouldn’t like. His Middle-Earth is a secondary world and also has a conceit of being the real world’s ancient history.
If you’re not on the same planet as real world countries then you’re in a secondary world, and also if you’re in a parallel or alternate universe where alternate versions of real countries may and may not exist. For Ruritania, I liked “fictional country”, and I tried to get “alternate geography” going for territory which is presented as if in the real world but which is different from physical geographic reality.
And there may be things like religion and the calendar to be considered.
@12: I’ve read quite a bit of Sucharitkul’s work but somehow never that one. I may have to look it up.
@13: There’s a bit in the Iliad where Zeus is arguing with Hera about whether Troy really needs to be destroyed, as he kind of likes the city. He finally gives in, saying something like “One of these days I’m going to want to destroy a city, and it could be your favorite city ever and you’ll have to let me.” Hera, who like most of the Olympians has less forethought than the average 6-year-old, agrees to this. Virgil sets up in the Aeneid that this was fulfilled by the destruction of Carthage in the Punic Wars.
@18 & 20.That presupposes that the Emperor actually wants to rule.
In the case of Star Wars, Palpatine was a Sith Lord; he fed on pain and rage and hatred. It empowered him, and Power is the only thing the Sith consider worth pursuing.
He was never interested in collecting taxes, administering social programs, or even consolidating an effective political structure; he just wanted to fill the universe with as much anguish and conflict as possible. Politics is just the primary tool he happened to make use of (the Empire, the runaway lawlessness of the criminal underworld, and even the Rebellion, who played directly into his hands by meeting oppression with violence).
We see this articulated in the very first movie:
“How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?”
“Fear will keep the local systems in line.”
(And we know from Yoda where fear ultimately leads.)
“Hell is Forever” by Alfred Bester. One of the characters gets his wish to be alone, creating universes. That’s when he discovers he has lousy taste.
Another good series with autocratic leaders both good and evil is the sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. In the first book the leader in D’Hara is a cruel dictator, and Westland elects people in some fashion. Darken Rahl is a cruel asshole but later in the series someone Good comes to power and although he is technically a dictator he doesn’t rule like one. Like they used to say, all we need is a benevolent dictator, but in reality we get stuck with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin.
In this series it shows what a benevolent dictator who actually cares about his subjects can be like. It also shows multiple examples of the horrors dictators are responsible for and the lengths they will go to get their way and protect their power. This is even more focused on later in the series by Jagang “the just” which is hilarious because he’s not just at all, but uses a political ideology similar to communism to rise to power and to keep power.
It’s truly interesting to see the parallels in our world and how ideologies can be adopted or forced on people and they will wholeheartedly believe it contrary to logic and reason.
The Imperium in the Traveller RPG is a supposedly feudal monarchy that’s actually a dictatorship, that is so large that effectively messages take a couple years to go from the capital to the frontier. Also where sectors are effectively ruled by archdukes that have their own starfleets.
And yet for some reason in a thousand years there’s been only one civil war, and a couple deposed emperors. Never mind the FTL and the Psionics, I find the political system the most unrealistic thing.
The venerable board game Imperium, from which Traveller borrowed the background, suggests the Vilani were nowhere near as stable as the Third Imperium. Once per term the Imperial governor rolls 2d6 plus modifiers on an event table. Successions and frontier crises were not uncommon (both about once a generation, I think).
I wonder if high SF medicine (include real mental health treatments), genetics, education, and other technologies might avoid a lot of the problems of monarchical rule. A monarch could be sure that the always have an appropriate number of heirs who aren’t going to die young or be inbred or go mad or suffer any number of problems that makes them a weak link in the project of government. I know a lot of unrest and discontinuity start with a bad monarch or problems in the succession, though not how much happens in the absence of those things.
It might be reasonable to have a stable imperium if you’ve got magic technologies putting a floor on the quality of a monarch.
@28 I’ve seen it put forth that the big reason hereditary rule has historically been so successful (for certain values of successful) is that it makes the question of who’s in charge predictable, allowing society to plan around it and (hopefully) minimize chaos at the time of succession. Any medical (etc.) advances that improve on that seem like they’d be a net plus for the system.
On the other hand, there’s also the fact that “monarchy” does not automatically equal “hereditary monarchy” (or “absolute monarchy”, but this thread is pretty specifically about that one, so we’ll skip over it). There have been plenty of historical monarchies where a new monarch had to be selected/approved by some other body, and even if the ones I’m familiar with did tend to slide toward “son of the last guy”, there were plenty of incidents where it went somewhere else. These are interesting because they work directly against that predictability argument (though candidates do tend to be from a limited pool, so they’re perhaps best viewed as a compromise between predictability and candidate acceptability).
There was a story (author and title forgotten) where it was urgent to keep a dictator alive– he was capable of changing his mind, but he did so at longer and longer intervals.
Stanley Schmidt’s Lifeboat Earth had humanity forcibly united under an autocrat for its exodus from the Milky Way. Henry Clark started out as the UN liason to the Kyyra, and, when the world’s governments waffled on accepting the Kyyra’s offer to turn Earth into an intergalactic ark, went and told the Kyyra to go ahead and get Earth moving. Since Clark was the only one who knew the full details of what such a move would entail, the UN was forced to make him the ’emergency administrator’ or watch billions die. Clark held the position and ruled with a (reluctant) iron fist until he died some thirty years later.
Lifeboat Earth was an example of the lure of Making Hard Choices(tm) where millions live and die by your whim and you can say you’re doing it All For The Greater Good. When I first read it courtesy of a used book store, I didn’t question the logic. These days, I’m not so certain… perhaps there were better ways for Clark to save the human race?
A lot of the blame [1] can be put on the aliens for choosing a method of warning the galaxy that at great personal cost gave them very little time to warn the people in front of the wave of destruction. Tachyon drives take less energy the faster they go but for reasons I don’t remember, they travelled at just above the speed of light. However, I also blame editors for their love of Hard Men Making Difficult Decisions.
1: OK, almost all the blame, as they were responsible for doomageddon.
Hereditary monarchies claim to be stable and predictable but can be rife with civil wars/rebellions and instability. The English monarchy from 1066 to 1688 was quite prone to this. If the king’s heir kills the king, or if the heir’s heir kills the king and heir, who’s to punish them? They’re the king now!
After Parliament flexed its muscles twice in 50 years, things suddenly settled down massively.
I did think it was a lack of imagination on Tolkien’s part to have his immortal elves have succession ideas of “eldest son” and not “eldest family member”. We do get a nod to that in Maedhros saying the kingship should go to the eldest of the House of Finwe (Fingolfin) but it doesn’t come up again.
@33: I want to claim that if Tolkien had used succession by eldest child first, he’d have to invent that and it would be considered astonishingly woke… well, maybe not, if it’s elves in “The Silmarillion” we’re talking about, but he never got to publishing that. And I don’t want to claim that Tolkien wasn’t a square. But there may be precedents I’m not considering in previous fantasy land stories or utopias. And anyway you said “eldest family member”… and you said “immortal”, so in normal circumstances, succession isn’t going to happen!
His friend C. S. Lewis wrote about two native humans alone on Venus, and as far as I poorly remember, he was very clear that the man was in charge. The Venusians also had a guest from Earth, arguably two guests, but I think that didn’t count.
Yes, in _Perelandra_, the man is in charge, but we scarcely see him.
@34 Tolkien did have succession by eldest child, male or female, for humans in Numenor. If I recall correctly, in world the Numenoreans only invented it after a woman ruled as heir of last resort. That went fine, so they took the logical next step of changing the rules (something Great Britain only got around to in 2011 after three highly successful ruling queens).
Why is Tor forgetting my login after a day or two?
But yeah, Tar-Aldarion had only a daughter, so got the rules changed so she could succeed him. According to Appendix A, the new rule was “eldest child”. However, this is inconsistent with the gender ratio of the rest of the dynasty. Some other source, maybe Nature of Middle-earth, said the change was to “oldest daughter if there are no sons”, which would be more consistent with what we see. This in contrast to the Realms in Exile (Arnor, Gondor) which stuck to only having kings, period, and even disdaining female line descent (thus Gondor arguing against Arvedui taking their throne, because his claim on Gondor was only through his mother.)
As for the elves, I figure they must have been making it up as they went a long, with different elven populations having different outcomes. But “oldest relative” or “have a new election” make more sense to me. As it happens…
Noldor: eldest son (Feanor) claimed the crown, most Noldor said “yeah no, we prefer Renly Fingolfin”, but Fingolfin himself was following Feanor. After that, “eldest son” and “eldest male Finwion who is not a Feanorian” give the same results anyway.
Laiquendi: never chose a new king after Denethor (not the LotR one).
Sindar of Doriath: let the crown pass to Thingol’s half-elf grandson Dior, and then to his daughter Elwing, both presumptively mortal.
Tor’s been forgetting my login, too. Just some temporary glitch, I hope.
Um Morgoth. And his Chief Minion, Sauron.
And the ultimate, even though it’s Orientalism at its most egregious — Ming the Merciless!
What about Six Direction, followed up by Nineteen Adze as Emperor of the Teixcalaanli Empire, in A Memory called Empire, and sequel A Desolation called Peace, by Arkady Martine.
“Cassie’s device is what catalyzes the plot”
why is that a problem again?
“Cassie’s device is what cataclyses the plot”…..
Why is this a big problem?