I am an artist and an author of science fiction. In my opinion science fiction falls into one of two categories from the perspective of the writer. We either;
Write about how we think society in its current form will develop and where it will end up. This usually falls into the apocalyptic and dystopian categories
We write about the society we would like to see, one which is either better than or an improvement on this one.
A poor artist it is indeed, I believe, that does not try and reach the zeitgeist or spirit of the time in which he, she, or they writes. We communicate issues which matter to us and, we hope, to our readers in the form of fiction, through our characters and their challenges. I have noticed few examples of science fiction, in fact, reinforcing the current status quo, as it were. In fact;
science fiction noun
fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.
Our very raison d'etre, in fact, does indeed revolve around how changes brought about by such technology as long-distance or supraliminal space travel will impact and change society. Gender roles and race have always been matters of import in sci-fi. Look at a ground-breaker in the genre; Star Trek. It faced and challenged gender roles, race, and LGBTQ issues, often too allegorically for our modern tastes, but it challenged the accepted norms of the day all the same. While early fantasy was men in loincloths waving around swords to rescue women wearing almost nothing at all, sci-fi was always about challenging what was.
If this limitation upon society was removed, where would it lead?
If humanity were to face a shared threat, how would we come together?
If, instead of Americans, Britons, Russians, Africans we were Terrans/Earthpeople/Gaians etc. then how would that change how we behaved towards one another?
If readily accessible technology removed men's "natural advantages" over women (note the intentional stress there, I do not think there are too many of those) and women could do any job as well as a man, what would that result in?
If we were all out there as a human race trying to survive together on alien worlds, would race be a big deal anymore?
These are all questions that, among many others, have risen to prominence in science fiction writing and movies, as well as in other media. Such matters are considered "woke" and both ridiculed and attacked by many because they feel threatened by them. See, science fiction deals with significant and far-reaching change and, let's be honest, quite a sizeable portion of the human race doesn't really like that, that's why they're afraid, because change is scary isn't it?
Well, it depends...
Could it be that very frisson of fear engendered by powerful change that makes science fiction so popular, that plunge into the unknown and the different?
Maybe.
The Leap into the Unknown
When I started to develop the idea of The Empyraeum Cycle, my premise was a simple one, and it wasn't really a sci-fi one, it was more of a speculative nature. It was a simple question yet one, I realised, that would birth a lot more questions than answers, one which would monopolise a great deal of my free time for a significant period.
What would the world be like if Alexander the Great had not died in Babylon back in 323 B.C/BCE?
You see, I was focussed not just on the cultural, linguistic. artistic, and social changes, although I did, of course give these plenty of time. I was focussed on the world at large and my central premise was this. If Alexander had lived and achieved his ambitions, there would, in all likelyhood have never been a Roman Empire so Western Civilisation as we know it would never have come to be.
Next I asked myself, "and if Alexander became immortal?" because that's what you do, right? Makes perfect sense to me, grab that ball and run as fast and as far as you can with it, right? Right?
Oh, just me then, OK...
The Night of 10,000 Weddings
So, let me cover an important point here, it'll help the rest of it make sense. We know Alexander was a great general, a conqueror without peer and a very, very ambitious man. What fewer know is that, according to biographers, commerators, and latter day historians, he was a bit of a visionary. This is what attracted me to him as inspiration.
You see, before Alexander, conquest consisted of;
Army marches in and fights local army
Invaders win
Invaders kill lots of people, rape the women, murder the children, and plunder etc.
Leader of invader takes over as king and imposes his ways on the conquered
Now, OK, this is generalising a little bit but, essentially, it is truth based on what we know of history. Those times were brutal and unforgiving and games of conquest and empires were never good for the common person. In fact we have an example during Alexander's own conquests; following the complete rout of Darius at Gaugamela, his army arrived at Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire.
He "gave the city of to the army" and, in an orgy of vicious, brutal, wanton distruction and violence that night, it was burned to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered. According to some writers, Alexander was later disgusted by both the actions he had committed and that he had destroyed such a beautiful city. According to scholars such as de Vries and Abernathy, among others, Alexander did something nobody before him had considered and the atrocities of Persepolis made him want to make reparation;
He would fight and, usually, win his battles
He would call for local lords, officials, viziers, satraps, etc
He would ask them to swear loyalty to him and then leave them in their positions
He would then learn about and adopt local customs and learn what was expected of him as ruler
He would leave the lives of the locals untouched. They would need learn no Greek, worship no Greek gods. In fact their lives barely changed. Under new management but same service.
He would them build cities, infrastructure, garrisons and leave troops from his army behind. These soldiers would end up marrying locals and starting families with them.
His people became their people.
No grander an example of this occurred than at Susa in 324 BC/BCE, he arranged what some call "The Night of 10,000 Weddings". En-masse, according to Arrian of Nicomedia, he married up to 10,000 of his soldiers and officers to local women, the weddings held according to Persian tradition, not in the Greek manner. He was, he made it clear, a guest who respected the ways of his hosts. He also solidified that relationship between nations. He joined the Old Empire with the New, through blood and a shared future.
Many say it was a stroke of unparalleled genius that he also gifted the new couples small fortunes from his own war chest. He injected what might be milions of dollars, pounds, or euros in today's money into the economy and changed the lives of everyone in the area forever and, so it is said, for the better.
Now, what if Alexander met a source of deep and abiding wisdom and was bestowed immortality by this being, The Dragon? What if he decided to build a new world, The Empyraeum, on this very principle?
A New World
This is where science fiction starts to creep into what has, so far, been historical fantasy. let me explain. Many, many years ago, I developed a love for a game called Rise of Nations. In this game, one could re-enact confrontations and conditions from history; from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, etc. I started to think;
How can I fit these previous ideas into my games? What would happen if I built these conditions into my virtual world here?
What would happen if Alexander conquered from Asia to Ireland; India, Africa, Russia, Scandinavia - everything on the vast Eurasian Continent and consolidated his Empyraeum there, leaving everyone else, the later-named New World alone? This was initially due to the fact that he did not know they were there but he later formed treaties with the other nations that developed with little interference. Let's say that he built an advanced, secure, prosperous, and stable empire with no ambitions of war, only of improvement? He was immortal and nobody was going to usurp him because he has over 10,000 super warriors nobody dared face, not even your most bloddthirstily ambitious idiot would think of invading, not when they'd get a personal call from a ten-foot dragon-man with an axe...
Thousands of years of war and death never happened. The crimes committed during the Age of Discovery never took place. Christians, Moslems, and Jews were never oppressed but left alone to practise their faith and lives as they wished while being osmotically influenced by the Empyraeum as will always happen....
What a world that might be, right? The horrors of colonisation, of religious war and persecution never happened. Instead, in around 317 BC/BCE, peace came to a large part of the world and, later, through technology, trade, and wealth the rest of the world decided that peace was a great idea too.
Now, obviously, there's a lot more to it than that and, The Empyraeum Cycle, while being built upon this base, is not so simplistic as to believe that that, as they say, is that. Gosh no, can't have a good science fiction epic without some conflict now can we? We are not, however, going to talk about that today.
Empyraeum is Empyraeum
You see, this is what developed during what was later called The Bloodless Conquest. An army of six million, from 1,000 nations, speaking 100 times more languages than that, over the course of The Bloodless Conquest, started to mesh, develop a joint identity, and even a language which was a mixture of many of those spoken by its members. The ordinary soldiers (or Regular Irregulars as they were called) saw the Kalshodar, giant, perfect soldiers, as a threat to their future employment so they went out of their way to unite against the "common enemy" and prove how useful they were as soldiers. They put their cultural conflicts and disputes aside and turned into Alexander's Army, a model for the future Empyraeum.
A man's a man, unless she's a woman and then, they're all Empyraeum, right? One of us, part of the biggest dream there ever was, only this dream is real!
So said Korae, the big Thracian Dracograth, in his earthy manner. He's right, though. While the Regular Irregulars served as model for The Empyraeum, the Kalshodar and Dracograth were not exempt either. They had members from pretty much every nation that had joined The Empyraeum on the army's way to Mount Everest and, though they were all male, that was due to circumstance rather than design; back them, most of the experienced soldiers Alexander had available were male but it would change later, once the Empyraen Army started to spread.
The Empyraeum is a dream, an ideal of a world where it doesn't matter who you are, where your blood came from, who you do or do not worship, how you speak, what clothes you wear off duty, who you love or don't love, what reproductive organs you possess or lack; you're Empyraeum and that's all that matters.
Again, there's a bit more to it than that, it's not a magic wand, plot armour, sort of thing at all. It's simply that we'd be here all day if I explained it down to the last detail and it would also ruin all the surprises you'll have in reading the books, wouldn't it?
I'm trying to keep my hints mysterious and so forth. Have a read, you'll see.
Conclusion
So, as tangentally wondering as all of this has been, it has a purpose and an aim, believe it or not.
We began this post in discussion the concept of "wokeness" did we not? Of how many people are afraid of change, of in fact, waking up the realities of a changing world. These people may well wish to remain asleep to safely dream of the world they are both used to and comfortable with. As Lucifer, in The Chronicles of Enoch so deftly put it "They like the type of change that isn't...".
But, as writers and artists, we're not in the game of change that isn't, are we? Art pushes boundaries, it explores, it leads people to places they may not have thought to explore before, it challenges them, makes them feel certain things and, in doing so, really think about them. Science fiction especially, is a genre built on taking people out of their comfort zone and challenging then with new ideas, concepts, and places.
It is, if done well, about taking them away from the familar safety of Earth and transporting them out into space forcing them to adapt to it. Perhaps even introducing them to strange new alien races and challenging them to understand how these beings act and think because it's inconceivable that they'll be just like us isn't it?
The trick of good science fiction is to do all of that while, in fact, the reader goes nowhere in actuality.
Much to the disgust of some, science fiction has, in fact, been "woke" for a very long time and I, for one, both doubt and hope that this will never change. Let me move away from The Empyraeum Cycle and let Asmodeus, from The Chronicles of Enoch, close for us;
They're all humans, at the end of the day. You know, Julian, what they've got that we don't? They can change, they can change yet millions of them - millions! - actively choose not to. I'd love the odd change, me, wouldn't you?
They don't realise that to us, as much to the loyal angels as to us Fallen, that a human's a human. We don't care what cast your features have, what colour your skin is, where you're from, what version of human gibberish you babble, who you fall in love with, what pronouns you apply to yourself, what bits your body does or does not have, what you call yourself!
We. Don't. Care. Because we hate you all with equal passion and, sometimes, we are inspired and amazed by you too. With your brief lives, it seems to us that you're running around like ants from a shattered nest but you create more sublime miracles, at times, than even the greatest of angels could imagine!
In the end, just be you and let everyone else be them because, when it comes down to it, when The End finally comes, none of it will matter, none of it, except what you bring with you...
Call me "woke" and think it's an insult? Ha! I consider it a compliment because I am living this dream of change, you're sleeping though it trying to hide in stale and worn out dreams. I know which one I'd prefer....
There are still people, you know, that think that The Matrix was just a literal warning about the dangers of intelligent computers and video games, imagine that...