THE BOOKS ON THE TRAIN
Introductory Notes
Prepared by Historian-Rector Belis 7-Spoke for the Seventeenth Whiteclay Speculative Fiction Symposium, a collaboration between the Whiteclay Council, the Regency Purse for Charity, the University of Low Orbit, the Mechanical Institute of Bellwether, the Printer's Guild, and the Sandan Print Exchange. Curious about what you read here? They will be lecturing and discussing in the Apogee Ballroom on Days 3-5! Course credit available at participating institutions. Honoraria may be assigned to the Chantry for the Common Good, special attention to the cultural preservation division.
It is a common point of debate whether the novels of the first wave qualify as "Paradisea's first novels," an argument that can be powerfully inflected by your origins, school of history, and opinions about the Old Imperials. I have no interest in this argument. If you are looking for commentary on the topic I suggest looking for the writings and tellings of Rectors Gobadon, 2-Piston, and al-Malja (19), who all ably and charmingly represent different perspectives of the field, and at least one of whom should be attending this symposium. My focus in research is upon the unfolding of a more specific, relatively uncontestable statement: the first wave created Paradisea's first
science fiction.
Science fiction - for my purposes, I make no claims here to a universal definition - lies at the intersection of three key elements, at least two of which are generally present in the science fiction of the period:
- The speculative fiction conceit of asking what if, stepping beyond the fiction of the familiar to imagine settings, rules, capabilities, characters, and other story elements beyond the known.
- The central role in the story of science, technology, and development: whether they're inventing it, wielding it, or lamenting it, the story's characters are caught up in these practices and their consequences. This also means in most cases that if the rules of the story become internally inconsistent, the 'hole' is explained in some way, ideally as the kind of edge case that engineers are so fascinated by.
- The location of key story elements at a liminal point between the possible and familiar, on the one hand, and the strange and speculative, on the other. The speculative conceits of science fiction feel adjacent to the possible without quite being verifiable or going all the way into the boundlessly fantastical.
There are other factors we could discuss at length, and I teach a course about it if you're really stuck on this part. For now, before I present the survey of prominent archetypes that is the meet of this brief, I want to discuss the curious role played by the train in this flowering of fiction.
From our fragmentary records of the Time Before and histories of the muslim exodus, as well as observing other cultures on Paradisea, it seem that more often than not the emergence of the novel as a persistent, popular form rather than an occasional elite indulgence follows the invention of the printing press. Yet in the New League, we have hundreds and then thousands of novels that precede the printing press by many decades. The particulars of our industrialization certainly played a part: the production methods of the printing guilds and their infrastructure of electrified tools, craft shrines, hyper-specialized artisans, advanced memory, and certain illusion magics, not to mention the cross-pollination of techniques with Sanctuary's calligraphers, meant that the material reproduction of novels could be sustained at a rate above that of other pre-press societies we can observe. Still, social-technological revolutions require multiple contingent factors to align before the swells of change can crest over the walls of stasis. The most significant factor was the invention of the electric train.
I say
most significant because the train was key to the re-emergence of the novel in multiple ways. Most prosaically, they were a massive improvement in transit costs - my partner Jihad is an economic historian, in both senses of the phrase, and has ranted in my general direction many times about the "tyrannical weight of transit costs upon history." A very Whiteclay sort of sentiment, but not wrong. While not quite as ultra-efficient a trade vehicle as the massive water vessels that science fiction would inspire a generation later, the train was the single most cost-effective transportation device our people had ever seen, capable of carrying people and products not just
quick and
far but
cheaply and at scale. The train extended the range in which a book could be sustainably transported and exchanged by an order of magnitude, turning the operation of a printer's workshop from the service of one city-tribe and determined collectors to being able to trade with the whole length of the (rapidly expanding) League. Scale produced not just additional customers, but the room and incentive to specialize: individual printing workshops distinguished themselves by devoting themselves to specific formats (cookbooks, novels, and children's books, to give three examples, demanded very different sorts of layout, binding, and material to suit very different use cases), specific genres (whether the famous dialogue-memoirs co-narrated by an author and their ancestor, the science fiction which defined the era's optimism, or the political commentary which often defined its pessimism), and by vibrant experimentation with fonts, illustrations, and other vagaries of ink. This was the dawn of what social historians call the
print enterprise explosion, which would have a great many unexpected effects on society but, for my purposes, meant that "novel binder" was a valuable specialization for printers to pursue.
More romantically, the train was also key to the rebirth of the novel because it heralded unprecedented cultural exchange. (Jihad would tell you that this, too, was because of the lightening of transit's tyrannical grip on the human experience.) While social interactions between the different cultures of the league had been accelerating for generations, the arrival of train travel made it practical for more people, more often, more casually. The train-sped written work finally presented a viable alternative to long-distance magic for the easy transfer of cultural content, and one accessible to somewhat broader class of people. This broadening is clear from the authors we see among the first wave: where in the generations immediately following the development of a written language see authorship dominated by merchants, intellectuals, and holy men, the era of the novel sees a rapid rise in authorship by other professions and classes - especially workers, foresters, mechanicals, and soldiers. Notable here too is the role of the personal narrative in the background of the era's political and social events. The writings of freed slaves in the territories formerly known as the League of Strength dramatically asserted their distinctive culture and perspective in public debate, repeatedly shaping reconstruction in both perception and policy. The famous rival Speakers from the north, Neto and Martinox, both rose to influence on the back of their writing, and both recognized the author Efros as a peer, though she never participated in assembly and her novels of love and debt were only indirectly political. The dialogue-memoir
The Paths of Magda 3-Manifold, written by the famous machine soldier's spirit and her granddaughter the notorious abolitionist spy, is now most famous as a proto-philosophical foray through treacherous terrain like the justice and madness of war and the tensions between individual freedom and authority, but in its own time it was best known for seeding a considerable revival of machine soldier culture even as the machine army remained a feared rival of the league.
All of these people and books that you recognize from history classes drew strength from the reach of their words into distant cities and many classes, more than they could have hoped for before the print enterprise explosion. The popular book let them tap into a long tail of small, devoted, often widely distributed audiences (from antislavery charity activists and the descendants of machine soldiers to White Mask lodges and Muslim migrants) in a way that speech and images, stuck in the fat head of public prominence and mass appeal, could not.
Most entertaining to me of the ways the train midwifed the novel is the way that
reading on the train was important. Our people simply did not travel passively very much until the creation of the train; travelers were often occupied navigating or working. Even if they were a simple passenger, they were often stuck in a water-rich environment. The commuter train and the long distance cruiser together, overnight, produced another order of magnitude increase, this time in the number of man-hours spent in a semi-controlled environment with nothing to do but wait. The pooling of resources between coworkers to acquire a book to be read from aloud during commutes was quickly commonplace, and provided a steadily expanding pool of customers for the print-workshop. The reader's train provided a public space of literary discourse that often overshadowed the role of cafes and bookshops. Travelers between cities often read to themselves, and carried books with them to trade with hosts and friends. Train spirits themselves took note of these associations, and were some of the first non-humans to engage closely with the written word; to this day most maintain a library as part of their locomotive shrine, though they have largely shrunk down to a place of honor for the spirit's favorite texts rather than a 'working' archive.
To circle back to the science fiction which is my true topic here, all of these curious impacts of the train upon the novel had a more idealistic, abstract impact upon the form, and one that would drive the prominence of science fiction as a genre. The train was a symbol of progress which inspired authors and readers alike. The sheer overwhelming utility of the train in improving their lives and society, combined with the mystique of what we might call 'charismatic megatech' and the softer cultural powers the train unleashed, was a profound source of optimism in a culture caught between its own runaway success and its fears for the future. The scale of the railways project rivaled the common electrical grid and monument system as vast, complex undertakings representing the height of society's achievement, but it had a certain visceral quality the others seemed to lack—perhaps simply novelty or generational associations. It is notable that when trains are used as a metaphor in the period, it is almost always a positive, flattering comparison, suggesting power, sophistication, promise, or even goodness.
What forms did that take? This is the thrust of the back half of my introductory notes: a survey of the most common subgenres of science fiction during the first wave. Note that with the novel conceived in the wake of the magician's light show, the relative advantage of the novel was seen as its sheer density and length in presenting information, meaning that for a generation they all had huge ensemble casts.
Train To Another World Stories
One of the most prominent and iconic science fiction tropes of the first wave was the "train to another world," which saw the passengers of a train (or sometimes just a few cars) transported to another world. Usually this was by accident, though sometimes it would emerge that a mastermind or a few co-conspirators had planned it all along. This generally led to either the dramatic social transformation of a host society or the hardscrabble creation of a new one on an empty frontier. Popular destinations included faraway planets (especially Endymion), Mnemosyne, the other planets around our sun, the distant past, the new continent, or the forgotten homeworld.
The morals and subtexts of these stories were generally about class: stripped of their family connections, the passengers were forced to rely on cooperation and their own particular set of skills. It was relatively uncommon, especially early on, for these parables to anticipate the class conflicts of the near future: instead the more political parts of Train To Another World stories tended to rehash the questions of the place of the warrior in society that dominated the war with the League of Strength and integration with the League of Five Shields. Protagonists gamely working to rebuild their energy and nutrient supplies were constantly encountering stock opponents with obvious real world antecedents like the Greedy Warrior-King, the Society of Slavers, the Troubled People Caught Between Fear And Hope, the Technological-Plutocratic Nobility. These stories were often sophisticated and probing about war in a way they didn't bring to bear on their rampant optimism in "developmental progress" and "economic uplift."
Notable Works:
- Moonwrecked sees the passengers of a train from the restive north to Whiteclay transported by a freak astrological accident to Mnemosyne, where they fight to survive in an alien landscape (already scientifically improbable for the time, and clearly fantastical to the modern eye). Considered subversive and challenging in its day for the story arc that sees a Whiteclay-born warrior slowly turns tyrannical in the face of survival pressures, and a repentant veteran of the League of Strength who began the story a prisoner team up with an illuminator-turned-moonranger from Sanctuary to restore democracy.
- Albas Slugged, a story that sees the protagonists transported to an icy moon where they have to keep the train running to have the warmth they need to live, is notorious for the twist revealing that the mastermind who transported the train was the train spirit itself, hungry for ever greater respect, reverence, and fuel. A prime example of satire of the genre's usual techno-optimism.
Lost Family Stories
The most prolific and iconic subgenre of the period, representing a crossover of science fiction's tools with the 'family novel' that was the period's signature story of manners and society. Life in the league revolved around family, and so fiction naturally reflected that importance. Lost family stories transplanted the relationships and pressures of the family novel into a speculative setting where the family was forced to adapt to new circumstances and problems.
Where the blatant subtext of Train To Another World Stories was normally class, Lost Family stories lent themselves to investigations of clashing cultures and changing social norms. This also pushed the genre towards more naturalistic, less fantastical settings, from islands and hidden mountain valleys to failing colonies and spaceships cast adrift.
Notable Works:
- The Good Muslim Family al-Rubin, about a family from Sanctuary's allied tribes who are marooned on a jungle island halfway between the League and the New Continent. The book blends Sanctuary's tradition of ethical parables (from a distinctly syncretist viewpoint) with the tropes of the lost family story to explore what it means to be a 'good muslim' amidst Paradisea's rapid changes, ultimately expressing a very pro-integration, pro-technology, wearily optimistic perspective. Also famous for the iconic spectacles of the family discovering ancient machines inside a ruined spaceport complex from the Time Before, endlessly imitated in subsequent art.
- The Ravens of Mnemosyne sees an astrological catastrophe teleport a family from the Raven Tribe to the moon - along with a number of actual ravens, several dolphins, and a handful of spirits. The first act is largely concerned with navigating inter-species politics and survival challenges, while the second act sees politics and ethical dilemmas stem from the introduction of several other families stranded by the same catastrophe, including spiritualists from the north, muslim true people from the southwest, a group of islanders living out of the wreck of their ship (who are more a wry commentary on Train stories than a strict presentation of Islands culture), and a warrior society from the League of Five Shields. Though nuanced and sympathetic to most of its characters, the novel is ultimately most sympathetic to the intellectuals of the Ravens' younger generation, and presents a parable for the unity of the new league in a world of loosened family bonds, many species, and cultural diversity.
Deep Water Stories
The most technically specific and materialistic subgenre of the time were the 'deep water stories' that focused on the sea as the next frontier. Authors from mechanical workshops and historian cells battled to outdo each other with their scientifically plausible depictions of ocean-crossing longships, submarines, seaplanes, and even one memorable proposal for a balloon-lofted aircraft carrier the size of a small town, propelled by suspended mercury engines and capable of landing, resting, and refueling its hydrogen cells on calm waters. Sometimes whole novellas would be dedicated simply to the heroic design and building of a ship; others blended the technical marvels with the Building and Adventure style of power fantasy so common to our people's science fiction.
Political historians have in fact discussed the impact of 'deep water fans' as a political constituency at some length, debating rival theses whose dominant camps can be summarized as "their enthusiasm and research was an early model for organizing collective efforts outside of the frameworks of family and workplace, and ensured sea exploration survived the neglect of the establishment" and "sea exploration was actively delayed by how obsessive and frankly annoying they got."
Notable Works:
- Truth Underwater follows the heroic crew of the submarine CEPHALOPOD in a world where most of the League is under occupation by a victorious Machine Army. While dodging pursuit by drone-shamans they build safe havens on remote islands, explore several natural wonders of the sea, spread True People customs and technology to the far continent while gathering support from its cultures, circle the globe, and ultimately team up with the navy of the Islanders to began ferrying support to the insurgent Machine Army of Old Roads on the southern coast. An unusually political and anti-imperial example of the popular Building and Adventure style. Also famously incorporated the authorship collective's experiments with pykrete into a description of magically chilled ice-dreadnaughts from the League of the North, which proved oddly prescient.
- The Long Way Round To Sanctuary is more pointedly idyllic and social than most Deep Water stories, describing the lives and personal journeys of the crew of a massive cargo ship as it travels around the continent from a Machine Army trading port on the north coast to Sanctuary. Famous for anticipating a remarkable number of details about how such ships could work many decades before even a test model was built, and for both anticipating and inspiring a forester-like culture of artistic revel (and sexual ferment) among sailors. Coined several pieces of jargon still used today, including most famously "guaranteed shore time."
Lost City Stories
The most pointedly political and grandiose archetype in first wave science fiction were the lost city stories, which presented various utopian (and occasionally dystopian) visions through the metaphor of a lost city, often from before or during the Fall. Our people love to describe an elaborate system. More often passion projects than runaway commercial successes, many of these cities would nonetheless prove inspirational and important to political thinkers generations later. Though the boundaries are certainly arbitrary, in spirit Lost City Stories are distinguished from Stories About The Fall in that any degree of understanding the past is largely either illusory or didactic. They are about taking tours of societies that could have been or might be, not understanding complex histories.
Notable Works:
- Pale Haven, written by a heterodox legal scholar from a nativist family in Sanctuary, imagines the fate of a splinter group who got split up from the Sheik and the rest of the settlers and wound up living alone in a large spaceship in orbit around the Pale Giant, mining its moons and rings while growing food in vats and farm-corridors. Though she enjoys laying out intricate material details of their life in space, the real focus of the book is on their social-economic system - a blending of Islamic finance run through a central bank and an otherwise decentral system of Whiteclay-style worker's collectives, "a world with computers and without Historians," a sophisticated afterlife to enable careful management of reincarnation and population levels, and a radically reordered and proceduralized class of legal scholars dominated by Muslim spirits of the Pale Giant. The book infamously ends with the sudden suggestion that there are rising tensions between the many small "satellite settlements" and the central ship, and that some of the writing may have glossed over some conflicts and failures. "A merchant who has a dog-eared copy of Pale Haven" remains a distinctive stereotype even today.
- City of the Tech Baron imagines a single city high in the mountains ruled by, essentially, "the one moral Tech Baron," whose city is otherwise occupied purely by refugees and runaways watched over by a virtuous bureaucracy of sapient animals with customized power armor. In contrast to the highly specific, rationalist hybrid decentralism of Pale Haven, CTB is essentially a romantic argument for a powerful central administration, and much enamored of historian training - it is eventually determined that the Baron had achieved it on her own, and the young historian from Sanctuary who has been the cipher narrator is in fact being chosen as her successor, that there might "always be somewhere for people to take shelter." Also famous for its infatuation with the southeast's technofeudal aesthetics, which would influence generations of "technofantasy" settings.
Stories About The Fall
Most elegiac and often least optimistic among subgenres are stories about the Fall, which helped spark a growing curiosity about Paradisea's past that would eventually spark the emergence of archaeology practices. Lacking in a great deal of knowledge we nowadays take as basic, primary school details, the stories tend to have a sweeping and impressionistic style, and almost inevitably reflect some other, more current political concern, especially the fate of the first Great League or the threats of rival relict cultures such as the Tech Barons and the Machine Army. Most are tragedies.
Notable Works:
- Ferlun is now one of the most famous tragedies in our canon, and so I don't need to recount its plot, but I can place it for you in a context many forget. Compared to many Fall Tragedies that tended to place the analogues and/or forerunners of the People as sympathetic and relatively innocent figures amidst darkness and chaos, Ferlun pointedly casts our ancestors as vicious and cruel in ways far out of proportion to their suffering. The suggestion of the anonymous playwright is that we were redeemed not because of our actions, but because of our escape - that the old world was far closer to the vicious, oppressive squabbling of the Baronies than to anything we have built, but once we scattered into the wilderness we were able to create new lives free from the sins of the old. This 'redemptive new birth' is so central now to popular thinking and literary styles that it's hard to imagine that this was once novel and challenging, but many other tragedies of the first wave struggled to shed their techno-optimism enough to reach that point.
- Our Fathers Forgotten focuses the entire moral question of the old world around homunculi, imagining an entire enslaved caste of transhuman mages whose righteous rage at their abuse and neglect eventually destroys everything around them, leaving just a handful to disappear off to an unclear fate. Originally published under the name of an alchemist, she later acknowledged that she was mostly an editor and occasional coauthor for two of her own homunculi children. Taken at the time as simply a parable about the League of Strength and interspecies unity, few anticipated how darkly prescient it would prove.
Worldbooks
Though really only some of these strictly qualify as science fiction, I include them as a class simply because I'm fond of them. 'Worldbooks' as a word and a cultural construct originates from Sanctuary, where a small subculture produced lovingly illuminated texts describing speculative settings with no plot and few pre-defined characters, but with the intention that readers would use the books as the source material for their own stories - especially those created live through various forms of roleplaying. In the original tradition, the most common were ancient Arabia, Endymion (whether before, during, or after the exodus), and 'what if' settings revolving around Sanctuary being built in other places, such as on the north coast next to the Machine Army, on the far continent, or on a fantastical planet.
The print enterprise explosion and train travel brought worldbooks into contact with the rest of the League in ways they never had in previous generations, and saw speculative settings explode in popularity. Whiteclay's people had an old tradition of tabletop gaming focused around intricate resource collection and many small markers, often cooperative and competitive at the same time, and this merged with worldbooks to produce a flurry of developmentalist power fantasies that the emotion- and character-focused aesthetes of Sanctuary often found baffling or boring. Foresters were often more interested in Sanctuary's "old school" roleplay and particularly the physically embodied variety, to the point that it came to be called "woods roleplay" (especially when combined with elements of sport and combat). The League of Strength's military had a long-running tradition of wargaming that spanned both simulated combat and abstracted strategic exercises, which had already diffused into both the Great League's military and the general population; contact with the worldbook tradition produced here the most fervent and culturally mainstream world-gaming, the most popular form of which we now know as simply the RRPG: the revolutionary roleplaying game, where players schemed and raided their way through an oppressive society on their way to successful liberation.
Notable Works:
- A World Of Our Own was the most widespread and successful worldbook of its day, and the popularizer of the "RRPG" concept and term. Blending the old Sanctuary traditions and the conflict-focused small party adventures of northern wargaming, it presents a post-Exodus Endymion on a steady march into both stagnation and repression (with a side of dark spirits), and puts players in the shoes of dissidents who must survive and change the world through generations of organizing, fighting, preaching, and fleeing that prioritizes the preservation of the 'crew' over the individual. Though its commercial prominence has eased off to the moderate over the generations, it's still played all over the League.
- Untitled Dolphin Game is simultaneously an incredibly unserious game and also seriously discussed by historians as a contribution to popularizing support for the political integration of river dolphins into the League. Notable for being one of the first worldbook games to support solo play via dice (though games with as many as fifteen players have been recorded), the game is set in ancient Whiteclay before the introduction of water management or organized river veneration, with the players cast as river dolphins who try to nudge humans towards better practices (or amusing failures) through stealth, trickery, and the occasional heartfelt magic ritual. This game would, a century later, experience a revival as played by river dolphins, who seem to find the game both very amusing and also more serious than the standard human interpretation.
