On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard

[james_davis_nicoll]

Just a short review today; I thought this was a full length novel and when I discovered it wasn't, it was too late to bring a back-up book.

The Dai Viet Empire spans star systems but it spans fewer systems than it did a few years previously. As an ineffectual emperor and his court abandon peripheral systems to warlords, Linh, a functionary haunted by guilt over having abandoned her responsibilities flees towards Prosper Station and what she hopes will be refuge in the arms of family.


What Linh finds is a space station whose aging infrastructure is beginning to crumble, and Station Mistress Quyen, who is in no way thrilled at the appearance of a relative who is simultaneously more exalted and more disgraced than Quyen herself. Quyen may not have lost an entire planet to the warlords but she has pressing problems of her own to deal with, from reprobate relatives to the encroaching senility in the Mind that controls Prosper Station. Linh offers little of use and is arrogant besides.

In fact, Linh is worse than useless to the Station, because Linh felt bound by duty to send a message to the Emperor explaining her perspective on the Imperial retreat. This has not been well received and she is effectively under a death sentence. Under the laws of the Empire, entire families, entire communities, can be held responsible for the failure of one and by allowing Linh refuge on the station, Quyen has acknowledged her as one of the family. Even now an Embroidered Guard ship approaches.

This apparently draws from one of the four classic works of Chinese literature, Dream of a Red Chamber, unfortunately the one about which I know least, and is set in a history where China discovered the Americas before Europe did, although not so much earlier that the Europeans weren't able to grab their own slice. It's interesting to know that bit of background but a reader does not need to be familiar with Dream of to appreciate this story.

I was a bit relieved to learn that while the artificial life support systems of a space station does not permit the sort of slackness a planet does, the people who design space stations in this universe are not the kind of slack-jawed, plot-enabling morons seen designing infrastructure in other works of fiction. The human occupants of the station can survive the death of its Mind, although they would not much enjoy it and it's an event worth going out of their way to avoid. It would have been very easy for de Bodard to go for the cheap “Oh no! Clearly awful design choices no space station designer would ever opt for given a choice have doomed us all!” and I am happy that she did not.

Which gets us to the legal problem driving the story. While I acknowledge that the author is drawing from a specific cultural source for the draconian laws of the Dai Viet Empire (1), my appreciation for the story was undermined by the unfortunate fact that this is the million zillionth autocracy I've encountered in SF and not the first [2] and I've really gotten tired of the endless stream of science fictional autocrats. Once might have been a daring thought experiment but hundreds of the buggers is something else.

That comes out more negatively than it should. After all, unlike in certain franchises, autocratic rule doesn't seem to be particularly well suited to ruling the stars indefinitely. The author is just exploring an alternate history, not trying to make the case that what the world really needs for us to toss over all this democracy stuff in favour of an ineffectual emperor and a corrupt court. The heart of the story is the family dynamics of Linh and Quyen and the politics simply provides a stage on which that can play out. The solution to the conundrum facing Linh and Quyen is elegant enough, I see why this was nominated for the finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novella and I plan to try more de Bodard.


On a Red Station, Drifting may be purchased here.



1: “Punish everyone connected to the offender” is of course in no way unique to Asia. You didn't want to stand too close to anyone who crossed Sulla, the US once discharged three entire companies of soldiers for two murders even though the soldiers were never shown to be connected to the killings, and of course both the Soviet and Nazi governments were quite keen on the whole collective punishment idea.

2: My antipathy for autocracies, even ones drawing on historical models, was one reason I was more tepid about Ancillary Justice than most people were.

Comments

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

“Punish everyone connected to the offender” is of course in no way unique to Asia.

Nor Grandmothers... collective punishments were very popular

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

At some point de Bodard should package all these stories into a convenient little collection, organized in internal chronological order.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Under Cherokee traditional law, an entire clan was responsible for the acts of each of its members, and for making sure that the price of crimes was paid, be it a fine or an execution. Theoretically, if a Cherokee did the equivalent of jumping bail on a murder charge, his/her sibling(s) or other relatives within the clan could be executed to satisfy the sentence. As you might guess, Cherokee traditions were extremely Lawful (in the D&D sense of the term); and bailjumpers, escapees, etc. were rare and despised.

A problem arose, of course, when undocumented, lawless aliens like the English, French, etc. started encroaching on Cherokee territory, and refused to be properly responsible for the misdeeds of their "clan" (i.e., "all Frenchmen", "all Englishmen", etc.); and claimed to have a grievance when expected to be answerable for the sins of their kindred.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So you're saying you're rather bored by autocracies as a plot element altogether, or something more particular? (I promise this isn't prelude to some kind of trollish remark; I'm just trying to get a clearer sense.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actively irritated at this point. If one author decided to have an autocratic or a few did, that would be OK but it is like the whole of SFdom agreed at some point that regardless of the justification - source material, narrative simplicity, that made up Tytler quotation - the final result is almost always an oligarchy, monarchy, empire or similarly pointy social pyramid.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

*nodding*

I feel like all these authors are trying to deal with power in the hands of a few, which is something that I'm guessing they want to address because of real life, where we see the consequences of power disparity all the time. For you, what things would need to change to make that theme more engaging? Or maybe a better way to put it would be, are there books in which you liked how it was handled? Or is the power dynamics discussion itself getting tiresome?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I suspect that a fair fraction really do think one or more of "if (anything) then Feudalism" and "things would be jolly nice if only the Right Elite was running things."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about de Bodard, just to be clear. Her story has an emperor due to the material she is drawing on.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Although the justice of it all does come up:

He would remain, burning with the desire to change Prosper, to give his students a chance to change the system. As if that would ever happen. There would always be the privileged; and if those weren’t determined by blood, they’d be determined by talent and by intelligence. And how much fairer was that, for those to whom their ancestors had not bequeathed intelligence at birth?

Which would be more convincing if the by blood system wasn't leading the empire into self-destruction.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

I suspect that there are also elements of "Autocracies make it easier to explain the motivations of the government" and "Everything is better with princesses, and princesses imply kings."

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of the annoying insistence of the writers of Traveller 2300 to put empires back in place. Because the 19th century was so wonderful that they had to duplicate it n the 24th century.

And there's also the fact that the concepts of SF&F monarchies are even more limited than in the real world, where there were things like emperors that had to be elected.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It's not clear that Traveller's Imperium would work all that well, but the logistics of running any government cannot be trivial when sending a letter to the capital from The Sticks takes months. I never played 2300, but the Third Imperium seemed to run as smoothly as any system as unwieldy as a slow interstellar government could be expected to (possibly more so than would be plausible). It works as a game setting, anyhow.

[(Anonymous)]

The fact that Traveller has an absolute monarchy really made me think there should have been a lot more assassinations and civil wars than there were in the Traveller timeline.

But in Traveller 2300, being a different universe, the jiggling of things to have a French Empire was especially grating. Especially when they pretty much duplicated the Franco-Prussian War in a post-nuclear setting.

Honestly, as far as Empires go, I can much Moyer tolerate the Abh Empire in Crest/Banner of the Stats, because they're is no hereditary component- prospective rulers have to compete in excellence.

And then more recently there's the Ver Empire in Aldnoah Zero, which is basically the case of what happens when an SCA fan and friends get ahold of alien artifacts. The result isn't exactly a stirring argument for feudalism.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

The fact that Traveller has an absolute monarchy really made me think there should have been a lot more assassinations and civil wars than there were in the Traveller timeline.

But in Traveller 2300, being a different universe, the jiggling of things to have a French Empire was especially grating. Especially when they pretty much duplicated the Franco-Prussian War in a post-nuclear setting.

Honestly, as far as Empires go, I can much Moyer tolerate the Abh Empire in Crest/Banner of the Stats, because they're is no hereditary component- prospective rulers have to compete in excellence.

And then more recently there's the Ver Empire in Aldnoah Zero, which is basically the case of what happens when an SCA fan and friends get ahold of alien artifacts. The result isn't exactly a stirring argument for feudalism.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, there's some hereditary component for the Abh -- the prospective rulers are all from the royal family, the Abriels. Though their justification is one of passed-on family traditions, i.e. the old "raised from birth to this job".

As empires go, they have a light touch, being basically an interstellar trade monopoly, with the weak justification that they brought the trade to most systems in the first place. They don't care what happens planetside.

Also their "democratic" opposition may or may not be better than North Korea.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Or they want war and conflict, and think democracies tend to be peaceful with each other.

Bujold has an SFnal autocracy of Barrayar, but it's obviously pregnant with story potential, compared to the "techno-socialist utopia" of Beta Colony.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Beautiful cover art.