Aaron Bady brilliantly sums up how bleakly bad the direction of this season has become.

You might say: but they have to finish it up! They can’t possibly go for another six seasons at the same pace! Or you could be like the director of episode six, Alan Taylor, and say “Oh, who cares about distance and plausibility, you guys all love the show no matter what.”

I felt compelled after watching episode six to draft a completely plausible rewrite that would: a) fit in the same number of episodes; b) be no more expensive than what was on screen; c) require no one to act like an idiot or to do things that are wildly implausible.

So here we go.

This is to me the most important kind of “textual poaching”, basically how fans demonstrate a kind of ghostwriting of the main text. Not the extensions of fan-fiction or shipping, but a sober critical re-examination of how another text was possible even given the material limitations on its production.

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Last season: After the Battle of the Bastards, Sansa flat out tells Jon Snow that she thinks she should be the Lady of Winterfell and he should be her general. The bannermen unfortunately screw it up and proclaim Jon Snow King of the North. He tries to appoint Sansa instead but they won’t have it. Sansa begins to brood and plot on how to become Queen, believing Jon is simply too much of a fuck up as a political leader. (Davos tells her about the events at Castle Black.) A minor adjustment, but an important one.

Episodes 1-3:

Arya kills the Freys. She visits Hot Pie while trying to decide what she’s going to do next, and hears about the current events at Winterfell, resolves to go there.

Daenerys lands at Dragonstone. She very sensibly moves her Dothraki and Unsullied primarily to the mainland and has them range threateningly towards the southeastern edges of King’s Landing. Her Tyrell and Dornish allies insist she immediately assault King’s Landing. Tyrion and Varys point out casualties and genocide and all that. The Tyrells and Dornish, annoyed, say that they’ll siege KL from the west, and when they’re in place, she’ll close the trap to the east.

They question Tyrion’s reliability and loyalty and demand that he prove he’s safe by sacking Casterly Rock. He agrees rather enthusiastically–he’s always hated the place anyway. DT and Tyrion agree to send some Unsullied fast march. Tyrion cautions against sending Tyrell and Dornish forces via ship, because “there’s an enemy fleet out there, we think”. Ellaria and Yara ignore him–what a twerp.

Euron ambushes them. The Unsullied take Casterly but they’re under attack from the sea–and they’ve got no artillery because the castle’s been stripped. Cersei and Jamie wipe out the Tyrells. DT despairs–are there no good allies for her in this shitty place?

Jon Snow, meantime, broods about zombies and sends *Davos* south to beg for the Dragon Queen’s help. To Sansa’s frustration, Jon Snow won’t talk much with his bannermen or give inspirational speeches–she has to do all the politicking. There are bannermen who are beginning to doubt–they don’t believe in the zombie thing, they think somebody’s got to solve the food thing.

Arya returns. She’s a bit disconcerted to find Sansa more or less in charge. Jon welcomes her but is plainly distracted and disconnected.

Sam’s plot as-is, including the magical Mormont cure, which is delivered by the end of Ep 3.

Episode 4:

Loot Train. Mormont arrives at Dragonstone and there is much rejoicing. Davos arrives and DT and Tyrion wonder if they have a two-front battle on their hands or an even better alliance than they had before. But he wants help with zombies! This is stupid! Daenerys finally agrees: she won’t go herself with her dragons, because who knows what the dangerous Cersei Lannister might do. She says: ok, I will send my very best friendzone Jorah Mormont north to investigate. If he says: there are zombies! Yow! Then I come with dragons.

Davos says: ok, I will come back too–but first I want to go fetch a kid from KL that I know, and I’ll smuggle a message to Jamie Lannister written by Tyrion telling them to surrender, put ’em off guard, right? Jamie Lannister receives the letter. Qyburn later steals it from him and shows it to Cersei.

Sam leaves the Citadel.

Sansa decides to have a disloyal bannerman punished harshly when he is heard openly speaking against the Starks. (Littlefinger put him up to it.) Arya witnesses the punishment without seeing the original provocation and becomes convinced that Sansa is damaged and is endangering the Starks.

Episode 5

Guess who’s coming to dinner? The Hound, Beric and Thoros show up at Winterfell. Sansa and Brienne do not trust them, throw them in jail. Arya is conflicted. But spying around she begins to discover what is making the bannermen restless: it’s Littlefinger. She consults with Sansa and hears the truth about what happened in Episode 4. She and Sansa ponder what to do–they can’t displace Jon or act completely independently of his nominal authority! But Jon won’t talk, he’s still obsessing about the zombies.

Davos, Jorah and Gendry show up. They decide to go to Castle Black with Hound, Beric, Thoros to show Jorah some zombies. Jon insists he has to come. Sansa is worried–does she have the authority to hold off the restlessness, esp. if Littlefinger is up to no good? But the Knights of the Vale are especially uncertain in their loyalty, and she needs them.

Jon and Company leave for Castle Black.

Bran returns about two hours after they leave and does all the weird stuff about seeing his sister’s trauma, etc. Littlefinger gives him the dagger and gets freaked out.

In meantime, Dany roasts the Tarlys and Tyrion is of many minds.

Cersei and Jamie have a conversation about a baby and loyalty.

Episode 6

They get to Castle Black. There’s a guy dying of cholera. Dolorous Edd says, wait a day to see a zombie. Jorah sees a zombie and says, fine, let’s send the raven to DT. The horn blows. There’s a giant army of a million zombies at the gate. They change the message to the raven, HELP NOW.

DT comes north with three dragons–Jorah says! And yeah, zombies are real, she roasts them, and then, bam! the Night King wounds but doesn’t kill Viserion.

The Magnificent Seven go out the gate in a doomed attempt to save the wounded dragon by keeping the zombies off of it. Much battle, DT is freaked out and just stays perched on the wall in terror. But after Thoros dies and some redshirts she sees that Viserion is going to die no matter what. She risks it and goes in with Drogon to choppa them out. They all get on the dragon–including dumbfuck Jon Snow–and the Night King gets ready for his second kill of the day. Then Benjen shows up and does the heroic last stand thing and distracts him. DT and the Magnificent Six escape intact on Drogon. They fly to Winterfell to confer.

When they arrive, the castle has erupted into unrest because Littlefinger has made his big play–he’s trying to force Sansa to marry him and to overthrow Jon. Littlefinger didn’t really plan on two dragons arriving, though.

Episode 7

Cold open: Arya takes out Littlefinger. Sansa and Li’l Mormont talk the bannermen down. Jon bends the knee to DT, DT appoints Sansa Queen of the North and asks Jon to come with her south as her chief general. They do goo-goo eyes at each other and then sneak away that night to consummate their relationship.

Ravens arrive: Euron has landed Iron Islanders at Casterly Rock to kill the Unsullied, Cersei is burning all the crops of the Reach and the Riverlands to force everyone to surrender. DT decides she has to go south and try to convince Cersei to sign a truce, and to bring Jon Snow with her. Jon surprises everyone when he leaps on Rhaegon and is able to ride him. Suddenly, Bran rolls into the courtyard to explain the real story and suddenly Sam and Gilly show up to say, “Yeah, that’s it man, it turns out Jon is a Targ.” Jon and DT look at each other and realize that they are nephew and aunt.

Just then, everyone senses that something strange has just happened–the winter wind blows insanely, there’s a bizarre light in the skies, and an odd howling noise. Turns out the Night King just used zombie Viserion to destroy the Wall. Castle Black is a ruin.

Jon and DT tell Sansa: you hold out as long as you can. We’ll be back with the biggest army we can get and two dragons. Sansa, Arya, Sam, Beric, etc., get ready for a big last stand. The Hound asks to go south–“I hear my brother is still around, the cunt.”

FIN

But I also do feel that it’s important in some sense not to have a dispute that is both scholarly and political completely overwhelm the possibility of giving useful guidance to J.K. Rowling and other creators who work with fantasy or speculative fictions. In general, I would like to see specialists in African history and anthropology be prepared not only to provide useful, digestible knowledge to fiction writers but also to non-specialists. Which means, I think, showing how it could be possible to draw upon specific African histories and experiences to create and imagine fictions and stories that incorporate African inspirations rather than to treat Africa as a zone of exclusion because it’s too difficult or touchy.

So: a bit of fanfiction, intended to demonstrate how to subtly rework what Rowling has already said about her wizarding world.

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#PrefectusMustFall
A MANIFESTO

For a month now the instructors at Uagadou have dutifully assembled to ward off attempts by students, particularly those in Ambatembuzi House, to cast kupotea on the statue of Peter Prefectus that has been at the foot of the Great Stairway for the past sixty years.

Prefectus’ own nkuni spirit has joined the teachers in defending his statue, though as always it is hazy and distracted, only half here, half wandering indistinctly in the halls of England’s Ministry of Magic. We say that they must allow the spell to be cast: let him go home once and for all. There are few left in Prefectus House, anyway. The white wizards who still live in Africa go to Hogwarts, Ilvermorny or Durmstrang, as do some number of Africans.

Prefectus Must Fall. Though we students love Uagadou and what we learn here, it is time for this school to be a truly African school. Not the “African” of silly affectations like using hands instead of wands that a few teachers introduced forty years ago in an attempt to get away from Prefectus’ wholesale importation of the curriculum of Hogwarts! Let us rediscover the real history of African magic, of the many magical styles and ways of learning from Africa!

We know the truth now. This old, rotting, half-real castle shivering in the mountains isn’t a thousand years old, it’s 110 years old. Or more to the point, it’s a thousand-year old school that was stolen and stuffed inside an imposter’s cheap recreation of the school that never let him be a teacher. Peter Prefectus was a fourth-rate wizard stuck in a basement of the British Ministry of Magic who decided that if he couldn’t teach at Hogwarts, he’d go off to Africa just like the Muggle officer Harry Johnston and make a Hogwarts there.

There was a school here once, back before the kingdom of Bunyoro rose. It wasn’t for all Africans everywhere, but Swahili and Ituri and Khoisan wizards from the coast and the jungle and the forests all came. People from the shores of the big lakes came, people from the hills and savannah came. That’s where Peter Prefectus built his fake Hogwarts, where that old school was. The leaders of that ancient school foolishly let him and helped lift the stones and cast the spells. They felt they needed to understand what was happening, and to learn the magics that Prefectus offered, but all they did was sell out our heritage!

They don’t tell you when you get sorted that Prefectus was an incompetent who had the cheek to believe that his teachers and pupils were incapable of any real magic anyway. He never learned an African language, not one, but made the students learn spells like “expelliarmus” and “impedimenta”. He hired other European wizards and let them bully and hurt and even kill the Africans who came there. We had wizards like Grindlewald and Voldemort here too, but they were in charge and no one came to the rescue, not for us.

We know the truth. Prefectus must fall.

Prefectus stole two schools! The ancient one of the lakes and then he had the cheek to try to steal a name from near to another old African place of magical learning, the school which today still exists at Kumbi Saleh in the ruins of Ghana. Hard times for it now, harried by sinister wizards hiding in the Sahara who believe that all magical schools should be destroyed. That is another reason Prefectus must fall: it is time for Uagadou to do its part in helping other African wizards in their struggles. Kumbi Saleh should not have to wait for a half-hearted delegation of wizards from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang to save it from attack. We should not hear any longer from our headmaster and teachers that it is “against tradition” for Uagadou to play a role.

Uagadou, even in disrepair, is still wealthier than our real comrades at the ancient academies in Kumbi Saleh and Axum. We should help them and work with them and learn from their wisdom about wizarding. We should be working with the “moving school” of Eshu, the secret society of West African wizards who have no castle or building, but who move tirelessly from one site of ancient power to the next, from Old Oyo to Benin to Kumasi, walking the ways that they know. We should talk to the small schools that meet all over the continent, and reach out to wizards too poor or endangered to think of coming here. Uagadou should train far more Africans than it does, and stop just being for a small handful of families made powerful by their dealings with the European wizards.

Prefectus Must Fall! Unite to liberate our school and our peoples! Leave off the lies, cast away the glossy brochures that arrive by Dream Messengers to entice you here. Face the truth!

Let’s start from the very beginning, with Rowling’s expansion of her world-building in Harry Potter. When she recently imagined what the whole world in her fantasy universe looks like, what did she say about it?

1. That most nations in her world do not have their own wizarding schools. Most wizards are “home-schooled”.
2. That distance education (“correspondence courses”) are also used to train wizards.
3. That the eleven wizarding schools that do exist in the world share some common characteristics that derive from the common challenges and affordances of magic. They tend to be remote, often in mountainous areas, in order to insulate themselves from Muggles, in order to attempt to stay out of wizard politics as much as possible, and to maintain some independence from both Muggle and wizard governance.
4. That there is an International Confederation of Wizards to whom a budding wizard can write (via owl) to find out about the nearest wizard school.
5. So far, Rowling has announced that there are three wizarding schools in Europe, one in North America (on the East Coast), one in Japan, on in Brazil (in the rainforest), and one in Africa called Uagadou, pronounced Wagadu. As far as I know the others aren’t announced yet.

What of Uagadou?

1. It’s pronounced Wa-ga-doo. Farrell and Blattman take this to be a reference taken from the place of the same name associated with the ancient empire of Ghana. (Which was located in what is now Mali and Mauritania in West Africa.)
2. There are smaller wizarding schools in Africa, but Uagadou has an “enviable” international reputation and is a thousand years old.
3. It enrolls students from all over the continent.
4. Much magic, maybe all magic, comes from Africa.
5. Wands are European inventions; African wizards just use their hands.
6. Uagadou doesn’t use owls for messages, it uses Dream Messengers.

In response to Twitter complaints that this is just more “Africa is a country” thinking, where the entire continent gets one school that is an undifferentiated mass of African-ness, without specific location, Rowling has responded first to say, “Students from all over” and second, that Uagadou is in Uganda, in the “Mountains of the Moon”, by which she probably means the Rwenzori Mountains in northwestern Uganda.

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Farrell and Blattman set out to defend Rowling, saying that it is plausible that all of sub-Saharan Africa would only have one wizarding school. (I’m guessing that before she’s done, there will be a wizarding school in Egypt or otherwise near to North Africa, so let’s leave that aside.) Farrell and Blattman do so by saying that Sub-Saharan Africa didn’t have a “state system”. In an initial tweet, I expressed my irritation by noting that there were states in Africa, to which Farrell replied that their article concedes that there were. Just that material environments “conspired against” state development until colonialism, and that the fewer states that existed were far apart, and thus that there was no state system, no competitive relationship between states, and thus that states did not become strong through such competition, unlike in Europe or Japan, where there were more rivalrous relationships between states because of the relative scarcity of land.

I think I am right to say that Farrell and Blattman’s acknowledgement that there were states is essentially prophylactic, meant to head off precisely the kind of Twitter objection I offered. The substance of their piece is still this: Africa had an absence of something that Europe had a presence of, and that this is what makes Rowling’s fantasy a historically plausible one, that rivalrous states that form a state system that is about control over a scarce resource (land) could lead to having multiple wizarding schools, and that Africa’s absence of these things means that having only one makes sense too. “There has been a relatively solid state” in England for a thousand years, they say, so of course Hogwarts. Uagadou, in contrast, must have formed in the absence of a state. And maybe it shares a name with a place that was thousands of miles away because perhaps “the school began in a faraway territory, before it hid itself in the remote mountains of central Africa, fleeing slave raiders and colonial powers”.

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I have on occasion expressed frustration with Africanists for insisting that non-specialists must go deep inside the particulars of specific African histories in order to win the right to talk about them. And the similar inclination of many practicing historians to view large-scale comparative history or the more universalist aspirations of many social scientists with suspicion. But this is a case where some of that suspicion is warranted, I think. Partly because Farrell and Blattman insist on the tangible historical plausibility of Uagadou in Rowling’s fantasy world and they then toss in just enough history to be tangibly wrong.

Here’s the thing. First, if I were going to construct what is essentially a fantasy counterfactual of a relationship between the place Wagadu and some other place in sub-Saharan Africa, that a group of wise and knowledgeable wizards moved from an important trading community in the empire of Ghana to somewhere else in Africa, I’d at least stick to historically plausible routes of movement and connection. Wagadu and the eastern side of the Rwenzori Mountains is roughly like imagining that an ancient group of Irish wizards relocated to Ukraine in order to get away from British landlords. It’s very nearly random, and that’s the problem. It’s exquisitely well-meaning of Rowling to want to imagine Uagadou in the first place, and to respectfully draw out of African history for the name of the place. But it doesn’t make sense in terms of very real histories that can be described for what they actually were, not in terms of some abstracted absence in comparison to Europe.

Equally, I’d wonder at the counterfactual that has Uagadou moving a thousand years ago, before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and at the height of state-building (even state system building) in the upper Niger and Sahel. It’s not as if the idea of great institutions of learning and teaching built through the revenues of trade are fantasies in that region of West Africa at that specific time: there were real institutions of that kind built in Timbuktu and Gao at exactly that moment which depended on very real long-distance connections between Muslim polities in Egypt and North Africa and the major states and polities of the West African interior. Why would Uagadou want to get away from all of that in 1016 CE? Even if Farrell and Blattman want Africa’s supposed lack of state systems to be the magic variable that produces more than one wizarding school, Uagadou’s birthplace has exactly that. And if even the wise wizards of Uagadou decided they had to leave, why the east side of the Rwenzori mountains, to which the peoples of their home region had no links whatsoever?

But hey, at least Farrell and Blattman’s defense is intact in the sense of western Uganda not having a state system, right? That would have made Uagadou different than other wizarding schools coping with state systems! Except that the region between western Lake Victoria and the Rwenzoris was another place in sub-Saharan Africa where multiple states and polities with sometimes rivalrous relationships go back at least three or four hundred years. If Uagadou was really trying to move to a place where there weren’t very many human beings or there weren’t states or there weren’t state systems (or it arose in such a place, if we discard the relationship between the name Wagadu and Uagadou), western Uganda isn’t the place to put the imaginary school.

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Ultimately this is why I think Farrell and Blattman’s defense of Rowling is more problematic than Rowling herself. I think Rowling is trying to do the right thing, in fact, to include Africa and Africans in her imaginary world, and she’s not just reaching for lazy H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs tropes of cities in jungles and excitable natives yelling Ungowa! Bwana! But the fact is that the way she picks up a name to stand in for a more respectful conception of Africanity still underscores the degree to which the history of African societies is a kind of generic slurry for most people. If I had imaginary Scots-named people running around in an imaginary Pomerania dotted with imaginary Finnish place names, most readers of my fantasy would understand that I was doing some kind of mash-up, and if I didn’t have some infodump of an alternate history at some point to explain it, they’d likely regard what I was doing as random or incoherent.

Farrell and Blattman are trying to provide a kind of scholarly imprimateur for that same sort of mashup, but the histories of the places that come into view in Rowling’s imagination are knowable and known. If you ask me to provide the fictional background of a wizarding school in western Uganda and why it is the only one in sub-Saharan African and admits pupils from all over a very large continent, the last thing I’m going to do is start farting around with gigantic generalizations about states and state systems that immediately frame Africa as a place which has a lack, an absence, a deficit, that is somehow naturalized or long-running. I’m going to build my plausibility up from the actual histories of African societies.

So maybe I’m going to talk about the historical world of western Uganda for what it was, for which I have a more than adequate scholarly literature, and try to imagine what a wizarding school there looks like that makes sense in that history. And the first thing I think is that it isn’t a castle in the mountains if it’s a thousand years old and it isn’t distinguished from European wizarding just by using hands rather than wands. I start to think about what magical power in western Uganda might be like, even in a world full of magical power.

If I start to think about why there’s only one school, and why the whole continent uses it, I stop thinking about a thousand years and start thinking about two hundred. I stop messing around with giant social scientistic abstractions and start thinking about colonialism. Which, to head off Farrell and Blattman’s likely objection, they do too–but not as an explanation for Rowling’s fantasy Africa being in a state of relative global deprivation. I start thinking about why Uagadou is in fact like Hogwarts, physically and otherwise. Perhaps why the University of the Witwatersrand is not wildly different from Oxford in the generalities of its institutional functioning. I think about the world in the last three hundred years, and why institutions in modern nation-states resemble each other in form even if they don’t in power or privilege or relative resources or impact. And then I wonder why Rowling doesn’t simply go there too.

The answer would in some sense because Rowling’s descriptions of the wizarding schools wants to retain some whimsy and some friendliness to a young-adult sensibility. But you can imagine African magics in a globalized fantasy from within their imaginary histories rather than from outside and even stay friendly to a young adult sensibility: as Vicki Brennan noted, that’s a good description of Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. And Rowling’s Harry Potter books inscribe the history of World War II into the wizarding world, and racism and fascism into the conflicts wizards face today. Why isn’t colonialism Dark Magic of a particularly troubling sort–the kind that suppresses many African ways of learning wizardry and then leaves behind a single, limited institution for learning magic that is built on a template that comes from somewhere else?

There’s a plausible history for Uagadou right there, but it can’t be a thousand years old if that’s the case. This is the basic problem.

You can tell a story that imagines fantastic African societies with their own institutions arising out of their own histories, somehow protected or counterfactually resistant to the rise of the West. But you have to do that through African histories, not with an audit of African absence and some off-the-shelf environmental determinism.

You can tell a story that imagines that imaginary wizarding schools arise only out of histories with intense territorial rivalries within long-standing state systems, but then you have to explain why there aren’t imaginary wizarding schools in the places in the world that fit that criteria rather than frantically moving the comparative goalposts around so that you are matching units like “all of Sub-Saharan Africa” against “Great Britain”. And you have to explain why the simultaneous and related forms of state-building in West Africa and Western Europe created schools in one and not the other: because Asante, Kongo, Dahomey, and Oyo are in some sense part of a state system that includes England, France and the Netherlands in the 17th and early 18th Centuries.

You can tell a story about how many different ways of learning wizarding in an imaginary Africa were suppressed, lost, denigrated, marginalized or impoverished, leaving a single major institution built on an essentially Western and modern model, and write colonialism into your world of good and evil magic. If you have a faux Hitler in the Dark Wizard Grindlewald, why not a faux Rhodes or a faux Burton as another kind of dark wizard?

That’s not what Rowling has put out so far. And it’s definitely not the kind of thinking that Farrell and Blattman offer in an attempt to shore up Rowling. All they offer is a scholarly alibi for Africa-is-a-country, Africa-is-absence, Africa-can-be-mashup-of-exotic-names.

In long-running conversations, I’ve generally supported both the violence that GoT is known for and the brutal view the show takes of social relations in its fantasy setting, particularly around gender. Complaints about its violence often (though not invariably) come from people whose understanding of high fantasy draws on a very particular domestication of the medieval and early modern European past that has some well-understood touchstones: a relentless focus on noble or aristocratic characters who float above and outside of their society; a construction of violence to either formal warfare or to courtly rivalry; a simplification (or outright banishment) of the political economy of the referent history; orientalist or colonial tropes of cultural and racial difference, often transposed onto exotic fantasy types or creatures; essentially modern ideas about personality, intersubjectivity, sexuality, family and so on smuggled into most of the interior of the characters.

These moves are not in and of themselves bad. Historical accuracy is not the job of fiction, fantasy or otherwise. But it is also possible that audiences start to confuse the fiction for the referent, or that the tropes do some kind of work in the present that’s obnoxious. That’s certainly why some fantasy writers like China Mieville, Phillip Pullman and George R.R. Martin have various objected to the high fantasy template that borrows most directly from Tolkien. It can lead to a misrecognition of the European past, to the sanctification of elitism in the present (by allowing elites to see themselves as nobility), and also simply to the reduction of creative possibility. If a fantasy writer is going to draw on history, there are histories outside of Europe–but also early modern and medieval Europe suggest other templates.

Martin is known to have drawn on the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War (as did Shakespeare) and quite rightly points out when criticized about the violence in Game of Thrones that his books if anything are still less distressing than the historical reality. It’s a fair point on several levels–not just ‘accuracy’, but that the narrative motion of those histories has considerable dramatic possibility that Tolkienesque high fantasy simply can’t make use of. Game of Thrones is proof enough of that point!

But GoT is not Tuchman’s Distant Mirror nor any number of other works. A while back, Crooked Timber did a lovely seminar on Joanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Most of the commenters focused on the way in which the novel reprises the conflict between romantics and utilitarians in 19th Century Britain, and many asked: so what do you gain by telling that story as a fantasy rather than a history?

To my mind, you gain two things. The one is that there may be deeper and more emotional truths about how it felt to live and be in a past (or present) moment that you only gain by fiction, and that some of those in turn may only be achievable through fiction that amplifies or exaggerates through the use of fantasy. The second is that you gain the hope of contingency. It’s the second that matters to the last episode of Game of Thrones.

Historical fiction has trouble with “what if”? The more it uses fiction’s permission to be “what if”, the more it risks losing its historicity. It’s the same reason that historians don’t like counterfactuals, for the most part: one step beyond the moment of contingency and you either posit that everything would have turned out the same anyway, or you are stuck on a wild ride into an unknown, imaginary future that proceeds from the chosen moment. Fantasy, on the other hand, can follow what ifs as long as it likes. A what if where Franklin decides to be ambassador to the Iroquois rather than the French is a modest bit of low fantasy; a what if where Franklin summons otherworldly spirits and uses the secret alchemical recipes of Isaac Newton is a much bigger leap away, where the question of whether “Franklin” can be held in a recognizable form starts to kick in. But you gain in that move not only a lot of pleasure but precisely the ability to ask, “What makes the late colonial period in the U.S. recognizable? What makes the Enlightenment? What makes Franklin?” in some very new ways.

Part of what governs the use of fantasy as a way of making history contingent is also just storytelling craft: it allows the narratives that history makes available to become more interesting, more compressed, more focused, to conform not just to speculation but to the requirements of drama.

So Game of Thrones has established that its reading of the late medieval and early modern brings forward not only the violence and precarity of life and power in that time but also the uses and abuses of women within male-dominated systems of power. Fine. The show and the books have established that perfectly well at this point. So now you have a character like Sansa who has had seasons and seasons of being in jeopardy, enough to fill a lifetime of shows on the Lifetime channel. And there is some sense of a forward motion in the character’s story. She makes a decision for the first time in ages, she seems to be playing some version of the “game of thrones” at last, within the constraints of her role.

So why simply lose that sense of focus, of motion, of narrative economy? If Monty Python and the Holy Grail had paused to remind us every five minutes that the king is the person who doesn’t have shit on him, the joke would have stopped being funny on the second go. If Game of Thrones is using fantasy to simply remind us that women in its imagined past-invoking world get raped every five minutes unless they are plucky enough to sign up with faceless assassins or own some dragons, it’s not using its license to contingency properly in any sense. It’s not using it to make better stories with better character growth and it is not using it to imagine “what if”? If I want to tell the story of women in Boko Haram camps as if it were suffused with agency and possibility, I would rightly be attacked for trying to excuse crimes, dismiss suffering and ignore the truth. But that is the world that we live in, the world that history and anthropology and political science and policy and politics must describe. Fiction–and all the more, fantasy–have other options, other roads to walk.

There is no requirement for the show to have Sansa raped by Ramsay Bolton, no truth that must be told, not even the requirement of faithfulness to the text. The text has already (thankfully!) been discarded this season when it offers nothing but meandering pointlessness or in the case of Sansa, nothing at all. So to return suddenly to a kind of conservation of a storyline (“False Arya”) that clearly will have nothing to do with Sansa in whatever future books might one day be written is no justification at all. If it’s Sansa moving into that narrative space, then do something more with that movement. Something more in dramatic terms and something more in speculative, contingent terms. Even in the source material Martin wants to use, there are poisoners and martyrs, suicides and lunatics, plotters and runaways he or the showrunners could draw upon for models of women dealing with suffering and power.

Fantasy means you don’t have to do what was done. Sansa’s story doesn’t seem to me to offer any narrative satisfactions, and it doesn’t seem to make use of fantasy’s permissions to do anything new or interesting with the story and the setting. At best it suggests an unimaginative and desperate surrender to a character that the producers and the original author have no ideas about. At worst it suggests a belief that Game of Thrones‘ sense of fantasy has been subordinated to the imperative of “we have to be even grosser and nastier next time”! That’s not fantasy, that’s torture porn.

But if you want a sense of how there is a problem with teleology that is a meaningful impediment to thoughtful exploration and explanation of a wide range of existing intellectual problems, take a look at io9’s entry today that reports on a recent study showing that self-replicating probes from extraterrestrial intelligences could theoretically reach every solar system in the galaxy within 10 million years of an initial launch from a point of origin.

I’ve suggested before that exobiology is one of the quintessential fields of research that could benefit from keeping an eclectic range of disciplinary specialists in the room for exploratory conversations, and not just from within the sciences. To make sure that you’re not making assumptions about what life is, where or how it might be found or recognized, and so on, you really need some intellectuals who have no vested interest in existing biological science and whose own practices could open up unexpected avenues and insights into the problem, whether that’s raising philosophical and definitional questions, challenging assumptions about whether we actually could even recognize life that’s not as we know it (or whether we should want to), or offering unexpected technical or artistic strategies for seeing patterns and phenomena.

As an extension this point, look at the Fermi Paradox. Since it was first laid out in greater detail in 1975 by Michael Hart, there’s been a lot of good speculative thinking about the problem, and some of it has tread in the direction I’m about to explore. But you also can see how for much of the time, responses to the concept remain limited by certain assumptions that are especially prevalent among scientists and technologists.

At least one of those limits is an assumption about the teleology of intelligence, an assumption that intelligent life will commonly or inevitably trend towards social and technological complexity in a pattern that strongly resembles some dominant modern and Western readings of human history. While evolutionary biology has long since moved away from the assumption that life trends towards intelligence, or that human beings are the culmination of the evolution of life on Earth, some parallel speculative thinking about the larger ends or directionality of intelligent life still comes pretty easily for many, and is also common to certain kinds of sociobiological thought.

This teleology assumes that agriculture and settlement follow intelligence and tool usage, that settlement leads to larger scales of complex political and social organization, that larger scales of complex political and social organization lead to technological advancement, and that this all culminates in something like modernity as we now live it. In the context of speculative responses to the Fermi Paradox (or other attempts to imagine extraterrestrial intelligence) this produces the common view that if life is very common and intelligent life somewhat common that some intelligent life must lead to “technologically advanced civilizations” which more or less conform to our contemporary imagination of what “technological advancement” forward from our present circumstances would look like. When you add to this the observation that in some cases, this pattern must have occurred many millions of years ago in solar systems whose existence predates our own, you have Fermi’s question: where is everybody?

But this is where you really have to unpack something like the second-to-last term in the Drake Equation, which was an attempt to structure contemplation of Fermi’s question. The second-to-last term is “the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space”. For the purposes of the Drake Equation, the fraction of civilizations that do not develop that technology is not an interesting line of thought in its own right, except inasmuch as speculation about that fraction leads you to set the value of that term low or high. All we want to know in this sense is, “how many signals are there out there to hear?”

But if you back up and think about these questions without being driven by teleological assumptions, if you don’t just want to shortcut to the probability that there is something for SETI to hear–or to the question of why there aren’t self-replicating probes in our solar system already–you might begin to see just how much messier (but more interesting) the possibilities really are. Granted that if the number that the Drake Equation produces is very very large right up until the last two terms (up to “the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligence”) then somewhere out there almost any possibility will exist, including a species that thinks very substantially the way we do and has had a history similar to ours, but teleology (and its inherent narcissism) can inflate that probability very wildly in our imaginations and blind us to that inflation.

For example:

We’ve been notoriously poor in the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution really took hold at predicting the forward development of technological change. The common assumption at the end of the 19th Century was to extrapolate the rapid development of transportation infrastructure and assume that “advancement” always would mean that travel would steadily grow faster, cheaper, more ubiquitious. In the mid-20th Century it was common to assume that travel and residence in space would soon be common and would massively transform human societies. Virtually no one saw the personal computer or the Internet coming. And so on. The reality of 2013 should be enough to derail any assumptions about our own technological future, let alone an assumption that there will be common pathways for the technological development of other sentient life. To date, futurists have been spectacularly wrong again and again about technology in fundamental ways, often because of the reigning teleologies of the moment.

It isn’t just that we tend to foolishly extrapolate from our technological present to imagine the future. We also have very impoverished ways of imagining the causal relationship between other possible biologies of intelligent life and technosocial formations, even in speculative fiction. What technologies would an underwater intelligence develop? An intelligence that communicated complex social thoughts through touch or scent? An intelligence that commonly communicated to other members of its species with biological signals that carried over many miles as opposed to at close distances? And so on. How much of our technological histories, plural (because humanity has many more than one technological history) are premised on our particular biological history, the particular contingencies of our physical and cultural environments, and so on? Lots, I think. Even within human history, there is plenty of evidence that fundamental ideas like the wheel may not be at all inevitable. Why should we assume that there is any momentum towards the technological capabilities involved in sending self-replicating probes to other star systems or any momentum towards signalling (accidentally or purposefully)?

Equally: why should we assume that any other species would want to or ever even think of the idea? Some scientists engaging the Fermi Paradox have suggested that signalling or sending probes might prove to be dangerous and that this is why no one seems to be out there. E.g., they’ve assumed a common sort of species-independent rationality would or could guide civilizational decision-making, and so either everyone else has the common sense to be quiet or everyone who wasn’t quiet is dead because of it. But more fundamentally, it seems hard for a lot of the people who engage in this sort of speculation to see something like sending self-replicating probes for what they really might be characterized as: a gigantic art project. It’s no more inevitable than Christo draping canyons in fabric or the pharoahs building pyramids. It’s as much about aesthetics and meaning as it is technology or progress. There is no reason at all to assume that self-replicating probes are a natural or inevitable idea. We might want to at least consider the alternative: that it is a fucking strange idea that another post-industrial, post-scarcity culture of intelligences with a lot of biological similarity to us might never consider or might reject as stupid or pointless even if it occurred to them.

Anthropocentrism has died slowly by a thousand cuts rather than a single decisive strike, for all that our hagiographies of Copernicus and Galileo sometimes suggest otherwise. Modern Western people commonly accept heliocentrism, and can dutifully recite just how small we are in the universe. Until we began getting data about other solar systems, it was still fairly common to assume that the evolution of our own, with its distribution of small rocky planets and gas giants, was the “normal” solar system, which is increasingly obviously not the case. That too is not so hard to take on board. But contemporary history and anthropology provide us plenty of information to suspect that our anthropocentric (specifically modern and Eurocentric) understandings of how intelligence and technology are likely to interrelate are almost certainly equally inadequate to the reality out there.

The more speculative the conversation, the more it will benefit from a much more intellectually and methodologically diverse set of participants. Demonstrating that it’s possible to blanket the galaxy with self-replicating probes within ten million years is interesting, but if you want to know why that (apparently) didn’t happen yet, you’re going to need some philosophers, artists, historians, writers, information scientists and a bunch of other folks plugged into the discussion, and you’re going to need to work hard to avoid (or at least make transparent) any assumptions you have about the answers.

“The overly episodic focus of military historians and policy experts rather typically leads them to ignore the deeper structural considerations shaping this period in the history of galactic society. The Battle of Hoth is in fact an epiphenomenal afterthought notable largely for the waste of lives and resources on both sides, rather than any kind of turning point in the conflict. In the longue duree, what is more striking by far is the escalating failure of bureaucratic centralization under the late Imperial government, which was in turn little more than an extension of a similar structural contradiction in the late Republic period. Paying too much attention to ideological superstructures like ‘The Force’ conceals the degree to which galactic governance in either period had become a form of tributary extraction from separate polities whose cultures and languages were poorly integrated into the dominant elite culture. The Empire’s racial preference for humans with pink skin and a selected set of other privileged subaltern cultures was simply a ratification of the tendencies towards speciescentric elitism in the Republic, and the tendency to rely upon technological violence and coercion to keep systems in line merely a variation on the use of highly trained paramilitary “Jedi” to intimidate rebellious or dissenting local elites in the late Republic.

Battles like Hoth were a constant feature of the late Republic and Imperial periods alike, but have received less attention from scholars due to the lack of participation by charismatic leaders whose long-term importance was negligible, like Darth Vader and Leia Organa. In many ways, the destruction of Imperial facilities by poorly armed indigenes in the Endor system is more indicative of the ways in which galactic governance was fragmenting and failing in the late Imperial period. Treating the Rebellion as a privileged mode of dissent in an era when many other systems and social classes were in other ways ‘slipping through the fingers’ of the Coruscant metropole is itself granting too much credit to a ragtag band of avidly self-promoting malcontents.”

Joking about the second film being a documentary on the genealogy of the Stewards of Gondor aside, I’ve been doing a sort of mental inventory of what content Jackson could use and how that might add up to six to eight hours of narrative without the grotesque bloating of his King Kong. I actually think this kind of “cultural workshopping” is a great potential meeting ground for traditional humanistic critical analysis and practical cultural production. (My Swarthmore colleague Craig Williamson has taught some terrific classes along precisely these lines.)

So here’s what I come up with out of the LOTR appendices and The Hobbit (TH), either narratively important bits that happen entirely “off-screen” of the main book or that could receive a fuller visual and cinematic treatment in the film than in the book.

The War of the Dwarves and Orcs. (Over Moria, before TH starts.)

Gandalf’s espionage mission into Dol Guldur in which he obtains the map of the Lonely Mountain from Thorin’s father Thrain II.

Beorn wiping out a bunch of goblins with an army of bears and/or bear-men while Bilbo and the dwarves sleep in his house.

The White Council’s assault on Dol Guldur along with expository set-ups earlier in the narrative (e.g., consultations between Gandalf and Elrond while the group is hanging out in Rivendell.)

Elvish doings in Mirkwood that intersect with the dwarves.

More Elvish doings while Bilbo is doing his sneaking around. (Have to be careful here because the elves have to feel a bit more comical and less capable than LOTR elves.)

Smaug vs. Laketown/Bard

Gandalf’s return from Dol Guldur to Battle of the Five Armies. (He gets intelligence about what’s going on from somewhere, after all.)

Saruman seeing Sauron in the palantir and being ensnared by him. Could happen at various points in this narrative. (This very question is debated by characters in LOTR.)

Battle of the Five Armies

Bilbo’s return trip and his new life in the Shire.

Gollum leaving the Misty Mountains, going to Mordor, being interrogated by Sauron, and later being captured by Gandalf and Aragorn.

Balin’s attempt to recapture Moria.

——–

Ok, is there a narrative line here that is neither bloated nor confusingly digressive? I can kind of see one, actually.

You cannot start the first film with the War of Dwarves and Orcs or Gandalf’s spy mission to Dol Guldur. That would be a tonal and narrative disaster. You have to start where the book starts.

But how do you make those two bits of story into something more fleshed out, something less of a footnote?

Well, the War of Dwarves and Orcs is important for injecting a much more personal arc into the Battle of Five Armies and giving the story one of three major antagonists. Smaug is the Big Bad of the film, and if Dol Guldur is going to have a major role, Sauron in his guise as the Necromancer is the other. But the third is right there in plain sight: Bolg, the orcish ruler of Moria, son of Azog, who killed Thorin’s grandfather and started the War of Dwarves and Orcs. All of this even rates a footnote when Gandalf starts yelling about what’s coming at the beginning of the Battle of Five Armies. So you use the backstory to give Bolg a way more personal presence in the overall narrative. What Jackson might even do is put Bolg into the Misty Mountain confrontations–maybe have him be visiting the Great Goblin, have him be chasing Thorin once they get out, have him survive the battle with Beorn and see him go off to raise up his armies. So a flashback to the war over Moria (which also lets you introduce Dain early on) somewhere around the time the dwarves first encounter the goblins might work very well.

The Dol Guldur spy mission can be expanded really well whenever Gandalf first gives over the map to Thorin. That might be a great thing to do in Rivendell–Gandalf is getting them ready to go through Mirkwood, he’s making plans with Elrond, so he can flash back to Dol Guldur. The other place that could happen is just before Gandalf rides off for the White Council’s assault on DG. So film #1, with these two flashbacks, gets you to the edge of Mirkwood–the big set-pieces that can close it out would be Beorn’s battle against the goblins and wargs and Gandalf flashing back to his spy mission and the terrible danger of an all-out assault on DG.

Film #2 is where I think the bloat problem is going to loom largest, because the obvious closers for a second segment if there have to be three are arriving in Laketown and the Assault on Dol Guldur. The dwarf and Bilbo segment of that film is almost weightless–it has the tension and character development of the long journey in Mirkwood, the spider battle and then the more light-hearted tension of being stuck in the elvish fortress and the barrel escape. The DG thing can have a certain amount of build-up through Gandalf meeting up with Radagast, preparations in Lorien or Isengard (maybe with some tension about whether Saruman has already been turned or not), and then the Big Battle. That whole battle is entirely open in narrative terms: we have no idea whether it’s just the three wizards, Galadriel and Elrond personally storming the place or whether there are armies clashing as well. But I think the best end for that is for them to think they honestly kicked Sauron’s ass, and for Gandalf to feel safe returning to help the dwarves with their Smaug problem.

I don’t think a second film can go any deeper into the main Hobbit story and that’s where I would see the worst danger of bloat. But since he’s going to go for three, that’s the only logical stopping place I can see, short of Lonely Mountain (the film could plausibly extend into the maneuverings at Laketown and end with the dwarves and Bilbo starting towards the mountain).

Third film would then be the standard story through to Smaug’s attack on Laketown. Then maybe we see that Gandalf learns that Bolg’s armies are heading for Lonely Mountain and it becomes a race–probably there can be a few set-pieces along the way of Gandalf fighting with some part of Bolg’s forces. Then we go back to Thorin being an asshole and Bard and the Elf-King blockading the Gate, Dain’s arrival, and then Gandalf getting all shouty about the Battle of the Five Armies. Big climactic battle, doubtless we get a dwarfo-a-orco between Thorin and Bolg at some point (I seem to remember that we hear a bit about that confrontation when Gandalf infodumps on Bilbo after he wakes up).

Then get Bilbo back to the Shire and DO NOT stretch that out, play it straight to the books, with one exception–have Aragorn meet Gandalf and Bilbo on the way home, have Gandalf confide to Aragorn that he’s a bit worried about this Ring of Bilbo’s but what the hey, Sauron has been crushed again so no biggie. Conclude the film with Gollum leaving the Misty Mountains and do NOT do it quite the way it happens in the books. Have him meet up with Aragorn and maybe Legolas, have Aragorn realize that this guy is talking about Bilbo and that his chatter about the Precious and the Master is quite alarming. Aragorn interrogates him, gets the whole Smeagol thing down. Gollum escapes, takes off for Mordor, because he figures that’s the only way to be safe from Aragorn and the elves. Aragorn goes in pursuit all the way to the Black Gate, sees Mount Doom erupting and realizes Sauron’s back in Barad-dur, figures he has to get back to Gandalf and Elrond right away with the bad news.

End the trilogy with Bilbo hanging in Bag End, smoking his pipeweed, saying “Well, all’s well that ends well”, and a furtive glance at the place where he’s got the Ring stored.

It can work, I think, but that second movie really worries me.

——

Also, Jackson’s been quoted saying that they’re going to expand or create a role for a female protagonist of some kind. Other than Galadriel there is literally no one in the main narrative or the appendices who they can use, so this will have to be a reimagined or wholly invented character. I suppose you could make one set of dwarf siblings into females but that messes with Tolkien canon about dwarves and besides, the one bit of footage everyone has seen doesn’t have an obvious female dwarf in sight.

I’ve experimented with classes that are annotating primary documents, something that other faculty at Swarthmore have taken to a whole new level. Similarly interesting discussions arise out that kind of “applied knowlege”.

Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting.

Or, in another case, if you were going to debate and discuss what you’d have to do to successfully adapt a science-fiction novel to a film. Not actually create the adaptation, just figure out what the issues involved in an adaptation might be, what rules of preference for ‘adaptable’ works a group of students could generate and discuss and so on. This is probably yet another example of an exercise or a direction for a class that would define me as the advance guard of a barbarian horde dedicated to despoiling the noble traditions of disciplinary inquiry and serious scholarship. But honestly, you can study texts which exist and use them to raise the same questions: how does intertextuality operate? How do visuality and textuality interrelate? Are there cultural works which are so strongly native to one mode or form of representation that they have no plasticity, no room for reinterpretation or translation into other forms? Are specific technologies of representation necessary preconditions of some kinds of cultural work? It’s just that starting from the question, “Which books on this list do you think could plausibly be adapted into films, and what kinds of translating and interpreting would you employ in your favored cases” gives those discussions an interesting mix of open-ended contingency and practical concreteness.

Having to explore your reasoning for those kind of preferences is a really interesting exercise. For example, on the Register‘s current list:

John Scalzi, Agent to the Stars. This seems like an easy adaptation to me, and a highly viable one. But why? Some of it is Scalzi’s prose and dialogue: it already feels like a screen treatment in places. The pacing of the story fits the likely pacing of a standard commercial film. The premise isn’t complex, it doesn’t have a huge amount of world-building or backstory. On the other hand, stripped of Scalzi’s wit and the smooth readability of his prose, it could come off as derivative or familiar.

Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Well, maybe I’m inclined to think these books both unadaptable and unwise to adapt because I don’t like them much. But an assignment’s an assignment, so independent of my feelings, this is the classic kind of premise that creates a puzzle about the relationship between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements. In the best case scenario, that’s a goad to the creation of really amazing work that pushes at the boundaries of what cinema can be. In the worst case scenario, well, we’ve all seen epic fails in rising to this challenge. There are some existing films that work brilliantly with the basic construct at the heart of the Thomas Covenant books: The Wizard of Oz for one (the visual and narrative relationship between Oz and Kansas, but also Dorothy has Covenant’s dilemma in the sense that it’s important that she not accept Oz for what it offers, just without so much self-loathing, leprosy and rape).

David Brin, Kiln People. I think I might pick Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon instead for some of the same themes and mood of this Brin novel, but both of them strike me as readily adaptable and as being adaptations that could support a really wide range of visual aesthetics and thematic ambitions. Compare to the Scalzi: anybody who tries to make that a “heavy” text or as an occasion for visual invention is going to break what charm it has. But Kiln People or Altered Carbon have some thematic potency lurking inside the noir-ish mood.

Jack Chalker, the Well World books. Can’t see that these could be adapted as a single feature film, for a zillion reasons, ranging from the irreducible genre geekiness involved in their premise and style to the visual challenges to almost-Rule-34-invoking Chalker fetish about body-swapping to the convoluted plotting of even the relatively simple first book in the series. On the other hand, this strikes me as an insanely appropriate series for adaptation to a digital game, especially a massively-multiplayer persistent-world format.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. As my uncle once put it, “Easiest book ever to summarize: an immortal guy has sex with everyone he meets, and then travels through time to have sex with his hot young mother. The End.” Here the premise restricts what it can be: too outre and Mary-Sueish to work as a story played straight, and made as a piece of porn that tries to hold on to a shred of narrative complexity, it would be at best a quaint period piece alongside “Dwarf Threesome Amateurs” and so on in the contemporary market.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy. Great text for thinking about how cinematic work handles (or fails to handle) world-building fictions. (Anybody who watched Game of Thrones this last week saw a case of a cinematic work really struggling and sometimes failing to surmount this obstacle.)

Novik’s series is focused on the adventures of a British naval captain and his accidentally-acquired dragon, who turns out to be a highly intelligent and strong-willed member of a breed previously found only in China. Over time, Captain William Laurence and the dragon, Temeraire, have grown increasingly estranged from the British military and now from British society as a whole. What originally started as a bit of a mash-up of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels has developed its own distinctive feel.

As I’ve noted previously, Novik’s alternative history has the escalating feel of galloping away from her in a way that I find kind of intriguing if also perilous to the coherence of the series.

The changes that her story has made to world history are now so comprehensive that they’re plainly straining her ability to keep all the balls in the air, which I think is one reason why the newest volume in the series sometimes feels a bit boring and glum, like it is stalling for time. Still, I really enjoy thinking through the cascading sequence of alternate events and conditions that she’s set in motion, like those thought-experiments where legal scholars sit down and try to figure out what laws would govern vampirism or lycanthropy if they were real.

Novik deserves a lot of credit for not just returning the status quo in each book to a kind of Napoleonic-era + dragons baseline. That’s what a lot of her fans seem to want: the comfort of keeping early 19th Century British military officers as British military officers, in a setting where the British Empire is a pleasantly nostalgic backdrop to the action. There are a lot of complaints from readers that the characters are “too modern”, the plot developments too politically correct. I think in many cases, these are readers who don’t really know much about the actual history of the British Empire (and therefore regard it as impossible that there should have been actual British people in 1800 who were anti-imperialist or at least indifferent to imperialism) and are more comfortable with non-Western people in such tales being nothing more than background elements. I agree that Novik is starting to use Temeraire as a kind of ‘modern’ critic of imperialism, but given that the European-trained dragons in some respects function as “anthropologists from Mars” (e.g., they’ve previously not had much exposure to human institutions or knowledge, but Temeraire’s sharp interest in these subjects has changed things), it’s not at all unreasonable that he should ask some basic questions, such as why lodging a claim of territorial sovereignty based on Captain Cook getting off his boat briefly makes any sense whatsoever.

Spoilers ahead for Tongues of Serpents.

Sending Temeraire and Laurence off to Australia is a solid low-key follow-up to the last volume’s major developments: it gets the characters away from the major global events unfolding, and lets Laurence slowly come to the next stage of his development as a character, turning his back on the British Empire for good. Temeraire clearly has already come to the point of regarding imperialism as nonsense, though in a dragonish fashion.

But enough information gets added to the picture of Novik’s alternative world that the next volume honestly should take place in a setting that is thoroughly unlike the early 19th Century in any respect: this is no longer just Napoleonic Europe + dragons. Here’s what I noted:

There are now at least two other major “dragonish” species of creatures in this world, with serious political and military implications. There are sea serpents, some of them trained and under the control of a renascent Chinese empire, and there are bunyips in the Australian outback, which aren’t under human control but are clearly intelligent and hostile to human beings.

In the meantime, an alliance of African kingdoms using weaponized dragons has attacked European ports in the Mediterranean in retaliation for the slave trade and have been given naval transports by Napoleon to Brazil, where they have continued their attacks, now on slave plantations. (I complained earlier about Novik’s idea that “the Tswana”, a single state/people from southern Africa, could have crossed the rest of the continent to North and West Africa as if it were more or less unpeopled and then carried out military operations from there, so I’m taking her continued mentions of “the Tswana” as being an alliance of multiple African states. Because that’s what makes sense to me.)

So let’s sum this up: Britain no longer has effective naval superiority in the eastern Pacific because of Chinese sea serpents, plus China is no longer the enfeebled Qing China of the early 19th Century, but instead under leadership determined to push back on European advances. African states are working in alliance to destroy the slave trade, European states no longer have territorial footholds in West or Southern Africa, and with the aid of Napoleon, Africans have begun an invasion of the New World.

In addition, we hear a bit more about North America in this volume, including the proposition that dragons there are increasingly being used by both European and Native American merchants for air transport of commodities rather than as military assets.

All that adds up to an utterly different, almost alien world, quite aside from there being dragons and such:

*No plantation slavery past 1810 anywhere in the world, assuming that the African alliance doesn’t meet meaningful resistance. Huge implications not just for the New World and Europe, but for Africa.
*Air transport of goods within continental landmasses, so no need for railroads or even canal-building in North America. (This is assuming dragon husbandry can produce sufficient numbers of animals to meet increased demand + sufficient food for the dragons. Industrialization of meat production might come earlier in this world!)
*Societies previously vulnerable to European expansion are strongly defended: it’s hard to see how Europeans would gain imperial hegemony over the Australian outback, China, or Africa.

Now add to this that whether she knows it or not, Novik is laying the groundwork for some kind of dragon liberalism, that Temeraire is more or less heading in the direction of a dragonish verison of the Enlightenment. I’m not sure Novik will want to pull the trigger on this particular mantlepiece gun, but it’s hard to see how she can avoid it. I keep wondering why Temeraire hasn’t read Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, John Locke, Montesquieu and so on, given his interests. (Maybe he has and I just missed it, but…) Conversely, of course, imagine what Enlightenment thinking would have looked like if there was another unmistakeably sentient species sharing the planet with human beings, and what the intellectual consequences of news about the emancipated status of dragons in Chinese society in particular might have been within European society. Dragon Chartism can’t be far off. Though Novik has also done more and more in each volume to establish what the dragonish version of “reason” looks like, and it’s not entirely human. Dragons have a psychologically dependent relationship on the human that they imprint upon at birth, and dragons have an avid near-instinctive interest in loot and riches that has nothing to do with accumulation in the human sense.

Of course, the extent to which Novik is engaged in world-building is also raising a lot of questions not just about future events in her series, but about the implausibility of the past of her world. How exactly did Europeans engage in post-1492 expansion in the New World if the Incas and other Native American states had dragons? (We know that the Inca and Aztec Empires resisted Iberians successfully, but on the other hand, we now know also that Portugal has extensive holdings in Brazil. These are hard to reconcile.) What exactly do the Americas look like, anyway, and where on earth were all those African slaves going to? (Something I wondered about the last time I posted on the series.)

Why did West African states tolerate the slave trade in the first place? Did the Mongols use dragons, and wouldn’t that have made a difference in their conquests whether they did or not? More importantly, why have intelligent dragons ever tolerated subservience to humans? How could dragons make any ecological sense whatsoever given their need for huge amounts of meat? Some dragon breeds in the books are able to eat two or three large mammals per day. (Not to mention economic sense: even a small dragon force would have put a huge burden on most preindustrial societies.) I’m hard pressed to understand dragon evolution in any respect, even given centuries of artificial selection.

Etcetera. But like I said, I enjoy the extent to which Novik is at least allowing these kinds of questions to slowly rise to the surface in the series. I really do think it’s time for her to move into a completely new narrative line and start putting the dragons into the politics of the European Enlightenment: a dragon-rights campaign would make perfect sense, given the direction of the series so far.