#dystopias

Another take on the theme:

So, part of this question will be featured a little more in the still unnamed Time After Time sequel, but generally speaking, (almost) any Ben would always sacrifice himself for reader. We die like real men here 🫡

I mean, that guy has waited 80 years for her and knows a reality without her is not one he wants to be a part of. Sounds about right to me lol.

As I've mentioned before, one of my long-running worldbuilding projects is the British Empire of the North Sea, an imperialistic fascist dystopian setting based in Britain. Well, lately I've been doing a lot of overhauling - starting with religion, but now with ideology. The thing is, they originally began as essentially Nazis but British and with some tweaks, and I've started thinking that this doesn't make much sense. After all, Nazism came out of a particular social context - a militaristic, nationalistic society with a proud and aggrieved theologically-liberal-but-socially-conservative Protestant middle class - that's very different from modern Britain, even with the semi-apocalypse of this world's backstory, with a collapsing international order (for reasons I don't need to go into at the moment) and resultant isolationism and demagoguery. So I decided to instead rebuild their ideology from the ground up, retooling the setting in the process.

Fundamental Nationalism

This (also known as "radical nationalism", although they consider that term derogatory) is the ruling party's most important idea. This takes the premise of nationalism (that people naturally belong to nations, and that nations should be the basis for states) and goes even further, arguing that nations are the basis not just for politics but for ethics: whatever is good for the nation is ethical, and whatever is bad for the nation is unethical. The standard analogy is of the human body and the cells in it, where chemotherapy is good because it preserves human life even though it kills thousands of cells, while objecting to cancer treatment for the sake of the infected cells is perverse. Keep this point in mind, it will be important for all the subsequent ones.

Mongrelisation

Keeping in mind the above point, the number-one evil in this government's view is the extinction of cultures. The first and most obvious way is through imperialism (hence, they regard the colonisation of the Americas as the greatest evil in human history), but the one they are more concerned with is "mongrelisation" - cultures blending together, in the process losing their distinctiveness. Hence, they are intensely opposed to immigration and the formation of minority subcultures within countries. Thus, one of the first things they did upon securing power in Britain was starting attempts to purge Islam from British public life, Spanish-Inquisition-style. Having taken over Britain, they are eager to prevent the "mongrelisation" of Britain's own cultures. All school lessons (except for foreign language classes), television broadcasts and books in public libraries must be in the local language (English in England, Welsh in Wales and Scots or Scots Gaelic in Scotland), importation of foreign media is heavily regulated and immigration and emigration between regions is strictly limited. They are thus very glad to have reversed the "mongrelisation" of Britain. But what about other Western countries?

Imperialism

This is where fundamental nationalism comes back; according to the ideology, if a place becomes cosmopolitan and culturally divided enough to cease to be a nation, it is no longer subject to ethical considerations. The country is considered a wasteland fit only to be conquered and its people fit only for subjugation. And thus the British Empire has done with great gusto, conquering Ireland, northern France, the Low Countries, east-central and northeastern Germany and mainland Denmark. The people there have been enslaved, sent to factory-camps and farms to produce materials and goods for the British Empire so that its citizens can enjoy economic self-sufficiency and a high standard of living; since factory and farm labour are done by slaves, men are mostly self-employed tradesmen and women are mostly housewives.

Home as Heart

But why that? Because of the idea of "home-as-heart". Much as individuals should be attached to a nation, they should also be attached to their home, or else they will become rootless - which, to this ideology, makes them morally worthless. This takes the form of emancipating both women and men from the workplace - women by doing domestic work and childcare, and men by doing wage-earning work that can still be conducted at home.

The Hand of Fate

(I don't have a good way of leading into this section, sorry). This is an idea often invoked in the regime's early days, but largely abandoned now. The destruction of "mongrelised" societies and rise of homogenous ones was not merely seen as the way of the world, but moralised and spiritualised with statements such as "the hand of fate will not look kindly on societies that dissolve into multicultural sludge". The Hand of Fate could be interpreted differently; as the action of a personal god by religious members, as an impersonal cosmic force by agnostics, or as a metaphor for the course of history by atheists. This idea, as mentioned above, has been largely abandoned because of the emergence of a new idea...

Christo-Nationalism

The founders of the British Empire of the North Sea had a complicated relationship with Christianity. On the other hand, they loved it for the churches, prayers and hymns it had graced Britain with, and were aware of its ubiquity in European culture. On the other hand, they saw Christianity as too individualist, too universalising and too otherworldly and yearned for the idea of national religion. Hence, they hit upon the idea of combining Christianity with national paganism. On the one hand, people would pray to Christ for the salvation of their souls, and on the other people would invoke national gods and spirits to assist their bodies. What this policy looks like varies regionally. England has a fusion of Anglicanism with deified figures from English folklore, Wales has a combination of the Church of Wales and the deities of the Mabinogion, the Welsh national epic, and Scotland has hybridised Presbyterianism with divinised characters in Scottish folklore. Iceland and the Faroes have been integrated into Britain as free states, due to cultural isolation and badly needing British aid thanks to the collapse of world trade, and their religion blends Lutheranism and Norse mythology.

When Mike Freedman emailed me in December asking me if I would be interested in recording a podcast for his 1984 Today! podcast on all things dystopian, I was intrigued by the concept of thinking about my historical period, the 1640s and 1650s, in this way.

How did the strictures of the real puritan regime of mid-17th century Britain compare with the fictional worlds of the books I read in my youth: 1984, Brave New World of course, but also John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and the particularly depressing outlook of John Christopher (born of his experience of WWII brutality) in The Death of Grass, The Tripods series, and The Prince in Waiting series.

There were certainly incidents I have come across that strike us today as dystopian: the execution of women (but not men) for adultery; the rise in witch hunting; clergy being stoned, beaten or killed during church services; a church full of listeners threatening to drown a baptist preacher; a raped woman being sent to prison for fornication, actors whipped for performing a play at Christmas. But it seems to me that we would understand the concept of dystopia in a different way to people of the 17th century. Everyday early modern life, by its prevalence of death and violence, and the use of capital and corporal punishment, its restricted hierarchies of status and gender, would seem highly dystopian to us in many of its aspects. For people living in the 17th century though this was considered normal, and individual misfortunes often rationalised as God's will. We only have to read early modern diaries like those of Nehemiah Wallington or Anne Fanshawe to reveal life events that many of us today would recognise as tragic: few expected to have all their children survive or to live to seventy. What many contemporaries would have found more dystopian was the sense that the world during and after the civil wars was 'upside down' or, as Andrew Marvell put it, its 'disjointed Axel' was cracking, undergoing an unprecedented degree and pace of change in religious practice, government and law, the sense that the tree of government and order had been cut down at the roots from everything they had previously known.

We ended up in the curious position of recording the podcast in a break from wrapping Christmas presents two days before Christmas from my rented Christmas accommodation in Bath with unreliable broadband signal. During our conversation, Mike asked some great questions, which I sometimes found difficult to come up with a ready answer to, the actualities of historical experience generally being more complex than the simpler monomaniac ideologies of dystopian fiction. One question I found most intriguing, derived no doubt from Mike's experience of interviewing many others on this topic, was the extent to which the creation of dystopias often originates in the desire for its opposite, an idealistic belief amongst those in power that they have a system for making the world better. The puritans of the 1640s thought that if they could just properly reform the Church of England, and have it have it singing on the same hymn-sheet as Presbyterian Scotland or Calvinist Geneva, everything would become more perfect and God would smile on them. What they didn't expect was to unleash all sorts of new ideas to challenge the Godly programme and prevent the implementation of orderly reform. They should have paid more attention to what was already going on in New England. They also consistently denigrated as irreligious and ungodly those with more traditional views on religion, and as a result undervalued the latent power of conservative resistance to change. Consequently they found themselves attacked and resisted on both sides, and ultimately defeated.