Five SFF Works Featuring Draconian Laws and Legal Systems

[james_davis_nicoll]

Embrace the plot potential of rigorous laws inflexibly enforced!

Five SFF Works Featuring Draconian Laws and Legal Systems

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

tor dot com article 430, 2023 article 77

70 articles to go to article 500.

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone else getting a weird popup at Tor.com today?

[petrea_mitchell]

It strikes me that universal, infallibly applied laws serve a similar function to the divine right of kings and Chosen One tropes, namely to force characters into actions that could not have arisen simply from their personalities and interactions with each other.

I was pretty meh about The Red Scholar's Wake, but I think I'd enjoy a story about someone who willingly runs off to be an AI ship's wife and personal detective...

[oh6]

There are brief mentions of "ubiquitous law enforcement" in A Deepness in the Sky, with comments that this was an end-stage symptom of civlizational collapse in the Qeng Ho's experience.

[neotoma]

Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch universe has a pretty draconian legal system in the Radch, in that an enlisted soldier stops their officer from committing a war crime that would have breached the treaty that keeps the incomprehensible eldritch aliens from freely pulling apart all human ships, stations, and people, and the Radch executes them for mutiny.

Apparently saving your species from being destroyed by creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions is no excuse for disobeying an immoral order in the Radch fleet.

[(Anonymous)]

In Walter Jon William's *Praxis* series, every military officer has the right to summarily execute any subordinate at any time for any reason, and a dagger is part of the dress uniform so that one could do so easily.

That said the military at the start of the series is specifically a nightmarish dystopian hell, so the author isn't presenting this policy as being a good one.

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Nathan H.