There’s been some discussion lately – well, there always is, it’s a perennial topic – about empires and autocracies in SF, and I thought I’d post my thoughts on how empires work, and why they don’t work in any reasonable SF setting.

The basic model for a colonial empire works like this: you have a metropolis, or central state, that subjugates and controls various other states forming a periphery around it; the metropolis plants colonies of its own citizens within the periphery to maintain its control and exploitation. The terminology is mostly Greek, because the Greeks did like discussing and categorizing their political systems, but the imperial model is much older. A lot of people reckon Sargon the Great of Akkad was the first-ever imperial ruler, and we may as well blame him as anybody else.

So how does a community get to be a metropolis? Basically, by having an advantage (technological and/or organizational) over its neighbours, and a desire to exploit those neighbours. “We have trained soldiers with bronze armour and spears,” Community A might say to itself, “while Community B makes nice pots. Why should we not bring them under our control, so that forever after they can make nice pots for us?” And so Community B is forcibly invited into Community A’s periphery… and Community C, hearing about this, decides it doesn’t want to be next to fall, and annexes Community D to start up its own empire. Pretty soon, everyone is trying to get their retaliation in first, and found their own empires rather than be absorbed into someone else’s, and things get messy. Conflicts between imperial states can get very nasty indeed. Just ask the Carthaginians.

Are there advantages to the imperial model? Only sort of qualified ones….

To begin with, surplus wealth tends to pool in urban centres – the economic surplus created by the countryside gets concentrated in the nearest town, which gets to support specialized trades as a result. If you have a larger state, the surplus wealth of the towns starts pooling into cities… and, in the imperial model, the surplus wealth of entire nations gets soaked up and stored in the central capital of the metropolis. Imperial capitals are immensely rich, and they show it. The proverb goes that it takes forty men with their feet on the ground to support one man with his head in the clouds – but the metropolis is absorbing the wealth of many times forty men, and as a result, it can afford indulgences that subsistence-level agrarian communities can’t. Things like big civil engineering projects; like studying the arts and sciences, and financing all sorts of poets, architects, philosophers and musicians who, elsewhere, would have to work for a living.

The metropolis has lots of incentives to invest in arts and showy public works… because such things emphasize and reaffirm that the metropolis is in charge, that it is the centre of civilization and culture and so on, that it is just naturally so much better than the barbarians around it, so it deserves to rule over them. Empires do tend to create a lot of art specifically glorifying themselves – whether it’s Virgil promoting Rome’s imperial destiny, parcere subiectos et debellare superbos, or Kipling banging on about the “white man’s burden”, the celebration of the empire is always in vogue. It’s part of the superficial glamour of the imperial model, this – after all, the imperial state can afford good poets to sing its praises. This sort of propaganda serves two purposes, really: firstly (and obviously) it’s to keep the periphery cowed and in line; secondly, it provides a comforting narrative of intrinsic moral superiority, giving the metropolis’s own citizens the assurance that they deserve their place in the world, and that everything they’re doing to the colonized peoples is for their own good really. Considering what most colonial empires do to the people they colonize, this last is pretty much essential if the metropolis’s citizens want to sleep at night.

(“But, Steve,” I hear you cry, “surely there must be a better way? Must we forever endure the Medicis in the hope that they might sponsor a Leonardo? What of the talented people of the periphery, those mute inglorious Miltons condemned to lives of toil for their overlords, denied any chance for their own talents to flourish? Surely there’s some way to remedy this injustice!” Like, off the top of my head, having a central government that funds the arts and sciences through central taxation, making no-strings-attached grants available to institutions or individuals regardless of location, creed, colour or nationality? Yeah, that might work better, at least after you’ve done some work to redress the balance and repair some of the damage caused by the imperial system. I did say the advantages of an empire are only qualified ones….)

The other qualified benefit of imperialism is that it’s great for promoting trade and awareness of other cultures, at least those within the periphery of the empire. The far-reaching iron fist of the empire pretty much depends on effective communications and transport links across its subjugated states, which means the subjugated states get to know each other a lot better. Moreover, the empire, out of sheer necessity, has to impose things like standardized weights and measures, and an empire-wide currency, all of which make commerce a whole lot easier. I’ve been known, in the past, to compare the Roman Empire and Microsoft, because the one thing both of them did was impose standards – maybe not the best standards possible, but in an era of relative disorganization, any standard is better than none. The most obvious thing here, I think, is language – Latin remained the common language of scholarship and administration throughout the former Empire for over a millennium after Rome fell, and English seems set to do the same over much of the world today.

(“But, Steve,” I hear you cry again, “surely there must be a better way? Can nations not come together voluntarily, to agree mutual standards and a common currency, to take down barriers and borders so that trade may flow freely? Do we really need to be joined together under an imperial rule to learn to understand our neighbours? Would it not be better to have a voluntary super-national organization, a Union that might span, say, the entire continent of Europe?” Um, yes, well… since the next Prime Minister of Britain is going to be either a Brexiteer who thinks dissenters should be put in jail, or another Brexiteer who thinks dissenters should be sent to re-education camps, I’m not sure it’s a good time for me to say anything positive about the EU. I mean, your idea is sound in principle, but – Brexit means Brexit! Who needs money, or heating, or food, or human rights, anyway? We have blue passports and happy fish! And we swell with pride to hear the money spurting out of the severed arteries of the British economy, and splashing merrily into Tory donors’ offshore bank accounts!)

Ahem. (Ben Elton voice: “liddlebitofpolitics”.) Anyway, one consequence of this second highly-qualified benefit is that all empires contain the seeds of their own destruction. Because those communications networks, that promote the interchange of goods and ideas, also inevitably cause the spread of whatever technological or organizational advantage the metropolis started out with. Deprived of most of its resources the periphery may be, but it will, eventually, reach a sort of parity with the original centre of the empire. At which point, the nations of the periphery may take stock of the situation, and realize that a) the metropolis is still taking all their money, and b) the metropolis now has no edge over the subject populations, who outnumber it rather significantly….

I think what follows then depends on the way the empire has treated the periphery. The Assyrians, notably bad news for those around them, were famously wiped out to the point where Alexander the Great, riding past the ruins of the imperial capital, asked what those ruins had been called, and no one could tell him. By contrast, the Romans were actually fairly good about spreading the benefits of their civilization, actively co-opting members of their subject nations into the Roman social order, to the point where, at the empire’s peak, there were people from Cornwall to Cairo who could say civis Romanus sum. And Rome, even after the (Western) empire fell, remained a city of significance and a centre of culture – today, of course, it’s a national capital and the home base for one of the world’s major religions. The British Empire? I think we’ll have to wait a century or so for history’s considered verdict on that one – probably not as good as the Romans, though. And there’s a problem for post-imperial states, in that they still have all that good artwork and good propaganda hanging around, telling them they’re exceptional and special. (Can I think of a former imperial state which has made a very bad decision based on a mistaken belief in its own exceptionalism? Why, yes, I believe I can.)

But anyway. What about empires in SF? How does the imperial model scale up to the interplanetary, the interstellar, and finally the galactic stage?

Well, the short answer is, it doesn’t.

This was not apparent in the so-called “Golden Age” of SF, which is full of happily colonialist yarns where all the planets and moons are habitable, and inhabited by more-or-less friendly natives who can be hoodwinked or cajoled or coerced into accepting the overlordship of Imperial Earth. Readers could be gently reassured that decent white chaps with stiff upper lips would, having civilized the whole of the Earth (by knocking brown people over the head and nicking their countries), strap on their space-galoshes and their radiation-proof waistcoats, and sally forth in their rocketships to extend the benefits to outer space (by knocking green people over the head and nicking their planets.)

Science, sadly, marches on, and the real nature of the solar system became clearer over time. It is more wonderful and more bizarre than the Golden Age writers ever dreamed of… but it is also singularly lacking in native life, friendly or otherwise. To dominate and exploit a periphery, well, you do kind of need a periphery to exploit.

“Aha!” some might say, “but that just means all those empty worlds are ripe for exploitation! We will send people out to gather their valuable mineral resources and other bounties, just like when the USA expanded into the totally vacant and not at all inhabited by Native Americans reaches of the west!” Yeah, right. Here I will quote a serious and unimpeachable authority on the economics of space travel: “The reality of space exploration is that it is very, very expensive.” Well, OK, it’s a quote from the “Dragon’s Domain” episode of Space: 1999, but the point is valid nonetheless. SpaceX apparently quotes a current figure of $2,720 to put a kilo of mass into low Earth orbit (specifically, the ISS) which sounds, superficially, rather affordable. Until you remember that if you want to get beyond low Earth orbit, you will have to send up more fuel, and a spaceship for the fuel to drive, with power supplies and radiation shielding and onboard electronics and heat dissipation systems, oh and of course a crew, who will need clothing and furniture and trivia like food, water and oxygen…. and then, if you want to do any serious exploitation of resources, you will need appropriate specialist equipment, lots of it, all hardened to withstand local conditions on the moon, or Mars, or wherever.

The staggering expense of space travel, coupled with the simple fact that everything we might actually need we can find right here on Earth, means that any hope of a return on investment for interplanetary exploration is pretty much doomed. SF writers trying to use the imperial model find themselves handwaving the problems away, with implausibly cheap and efficient technology, but if you seriously expect to make the commercial exploitation of space plausible, you will wind up doing more handwaving than a sign language interpreter at a high-speed rap battle. (The most egregious example I can think of offhand is the patently unworkable economy of Star Wars, which is so dedicated to the idea of cheap-as-chips super-technology that you have, for instance, Boba Fett’s mod squad – who can afford sparkly colour-coded hover-Vespas and cool cyborg implants, but not water – or Obi-Wan Kenobi, a wanted fugitive eking out a living as a menial worker in a meat-packing plant, who can hop aboard a transport to another star system more easily than I can catch a bus.)

There may be other reasons to go into space, of course. Doing Cool Science Stuff of various kinds is always popular… and we should remember that the Moon landings were largely driven by national prestige, with a helping of “we can’t let the darn Commies get there first” thrown in. The much-vaunted “send out a lifeboat of survivors fleeing our doomed planet” scenario, though, almost certainly isn’t viable – by the time Earth’s environment is degraded to the point that it’s no longer habitable (sometime around next Tuesday, if the climate change “sceptics” have their way), there isn’t going to be anywhere near the economic surplus or the organization necessary to mount a massive space effort.

The problems only get worse when you try to scale the imperial model up to interstellar levels. Firstly, you absolutely have to invent some sort of cheap and reliable faster-than-light drive to make an empire even faintly plausible – in the boring old Einsteinian space-time continuum, even talking across interstellar distances takes decades, and as for the metropolis delivering actual, physical, boots on the ground to any part of its periphery… just forget it. (Which, over the decades or centuries required, would be easy enough to do.)

Secondly, the absence of an exploitable periphery still applies, even more so in this case. We haven’t yet discovered any sign of intelligent alien life outside the solar system, and if and when we ever do, there are no guarantees that it will be alien life we can colonize – it may be that the first aliens we run into are so advanced that they’re more likely to be able to colonize us. But, even supposing that we run into some Earthlike world with vast mineral wealth or something, and a native population at, say, the early agrarian level of the late Stone Age overall… how is exploiting them ever going to be commercially viable? Interplanetary spacecraft are expensive enough, the cost of actual starships is going to be – well, astronomical. Even if the natives are friendly, and can produce some sort of wonder drug that cures all known diseases up to and including death, the cost of sending out starships and colonists to take them over will be so huge, you will not see any return on your investment for a long, long time – certainly enough time for someone else to analyze the samples of wonder drug and work out how to synthesize it at home.

Obviously, this all depends to some extent on the decision-makers being economically rational, and it is often the case that decision-makers are not economically rational, or even rational at all. I’ve often thought that the ludicrous premise of the TV series V, for instance, is more likely than you’d think, because if you are the evil dictator of the Sirian lizard people, and you have a choice between a) an ecological management programme to restore your planet’s environment, or b) a fleet of enormous fuck-off space battleships, then what even is the point of being the evil dictator of the Sirian lizard people if you don’t pick option b? But such aberrations are not, in the medium-to-long term, sustainable. Ultimately, empires are all about control – control of the resources afforded by a captured territory and its population. If you consistently expend more resources than you acquire, then you are doomed, in the end, to fail. And sending very expensive starships and highly trained personnel out into the vastness of space is a very good way to expend resources.

Mention of the decision-makers, though, leads me on to the other problem with interstellar empires – organization.

You’ll notice, back in my description of the imperial system, there’s absolutely nothing specified about how the metropolis itself is governed; and, in fact, many imperial states have been partly or entirely democratic at home. The Roman Republic, for instance, operated as an imperial state for many decades before the innovation of an actual emperor. But SF writers, it seems, do love their autocrats…. Partly, it’s down to the love of dealing with the movers and shakers of the world, the “fantasy of political agency” (the phrase is C.J. Cherryh’s, though I’ve shamelessly borrowed it before.) Partly, too, it’s story convenience; stories move so much faster when you can pass all the decisions through to a single omnipotent boss. As I’ve said before, “Captain Picard beams down to Grugnos III for a summit conference with the Grand Panjandrum of the Grugnian Autocracy” is better television than “Captain Picard spends three weeks waiting for an appointment with the Grugnian Third Undersecretary for Extremely Foreign Relations.”

But that’s television, and an actual empire isn’t going to work that way….

Here I fall back on my Latin A-level once again, and refer to Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, slightly better known as Pliny the Younger, whose collected letters have been anaesthetizing students for centuries. The important thing here, though, is Book X of the letters, which contains Pliny’s correspondence with the emperor Trajan while Pliny was governor of the Roman province of Bithynia and Pontus, between 110 and 113 CE. It offers a glimpse of routine management of the empire, and gives us some idea of what Trajan’s imperial in-box must have looked like….

A lot of it is just routine stuff; Pliny sends his regular affirmations of loyalty for Trajan’s birthday and the anniversary of his accession, and Trajan sends a rubber-stamp response. Then there’s the bits where Pliny is wheedling various sorts of leg-up for some of his mates… and then there’s the stuff about actual policy decisions: what Pliny has done on his own account, what he’d like to do, and what things he has to refer upwards for the emperor to decide. I can’t help hearing a sound, as of imperial teeth grinding together, as Trajan turns down yet another request from Pliny for a Roman architect, and tells him once again to look for some local talent. A lot of attention has been focused on an exchange where Trajan sets out the policy for dealing with Christians, but the one that sticks in my mind is when Pliny is thinking about establishing a volunteer fire brigade in the city of Nicomedia, and he kicks this decision up to Trajan, and Trajan writes back saying no, a fire brigade could become a place for undesirable political activity. You might think that a provincial governor would have the authority to settle this sort of thing on their own – but, no, it has to be referred to the head of state, because that’s the way autocracy works.

Bithynia and Pontus wasn’t a particularly large or particularly fractious Roman province (it’s a chunk of territory running more or less along the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey.) The reign of Trajan saw the number of Roman provinces grow to 46 – so, we can look at Book X of Pliny, and figure that, every three years or so, at least 46 times that amount of paperwork landed on Trajan’s desk. Not counting the administration of the metropolis itself, or the setting of broader policy, or the military initiatives (Trajan was pretty well known for those, you can inspect his famous column for details, and would the person who just said “oo-err Missus” kindly leave the theatre?)

So let’s scale this up a bit – one of the big problems with SF is, traditionally, that SF writers have no sense of scale. Let’s look at a hypothetical world emperor, in today’s world. Our modern Trajan would control a territory and a population orders of magnitude bigger than the Roman empire; then, too, there are issues (the growth of technology, the influence of electronic media, pollution and climate change) that weren’t even on the horizon in Roman times. Neo-Trajan is going to be dealing with a whole lot of decision-making, pretty much twenty-four hours a day, no matter how much gets delegated or handled by automatic systems. Now let’s expand further, from one world to several… then out to the stars, to empires on the interstellar scale, encompassing dozens, hundreds, thousands of worlds….

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire, there’s a bit where Foundation agent Lathan Devers and rogue Imperial noble Ducem Barr are trying to get to see the Emperor, bribing their way through a succession of officials… when, really, all they should have needed to do was get into the Imperial palace with a couple of shovels, listen out for the feeble cries for help coming from under the giant mounds of paperwork, and once they’d dug the Emperor out, he’d be grateful enough to give them anything they asked for.

The idea of a single person keeping track of everything in hundreds or thousands of worlds is… essentially ludicrous. The British empire, probably the most far-flung one in history, was never an autocracy; colonial affairs were managed by Parliament and the civil service, and, even so, they allowed plenty of latitude to colonizers on the spot, so long as they made the right civilizing-the-natives noises. Which explains how the likes of Cecil Rhodes, or the East India Company, were able to get away with, well, not so much murder, as genocide. (I do think that Rhodes needs to be remembered, by the way – in context, as an awful warning rather than someone to emulate.) Anything, no matter how atrocious, can be made acceptable if it’s wrapped in the imperial flag; this is the power of the imperial myth.

To be fair to SF writers, some of them have come up with some intriguing wrinkles on the administrative problems. The late Alexei Panshin, in his “Anthony Villiers” books, gave us the Nashuite Empire, where the planet Nashua has been given metropolis status precisely because the rest of the galaxy wants it to do all the paperwork. And, more recently, there’s been Ann Leckie’s “Imperial Radch” trilogy, in which the autocratic emperor takes a… decidedly different… approach to the problem of being on the spot for every crisis. (I would say a unique approach, except… that really isn’t the right word.) Mind you, the plot there is driven by the omnipresent dictator’s method starting to break down…. And, as regards the glamour of the empire, Arkady Martine’s much-praised A Memory Called Empire has some pointed things to say about that.

Empires do have glamour, of course. Deliberately. Empires spend much of their fortunes in wrapping themselves in glamour, layers and layers of it, hiding the naked cruelty at their hearts.

And because empires have glamour, stories about empires are still popular… which is fine, I guess, so long as you don’t take the imperialist propaganda seriously. I mean, I enjoy Star Wars, and Virgil, and Kipling, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, and many others. But I don’t go from that to thinking “oh, yes, a strong autocratic figure who can cut through the red tape and Get Things Done is what we need in real life!” and I hope no one else does either.

Given all of the foregoing… I wouldn’t dream of censoring anyone; if you want to read, or write, books with an imperial setting, I for one won’t stop you. But, really, it’s worth thinking about alternatives SF is, after all, the literature of ideas, and there are ideas about social organization other than the imperial model, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of those. My own humble contribution to the genre, Felons in the Eyes of God (still available on Kindle! – [advt.]) features FTL travel and lots of inhabited worlds, but nothing like an over-reaching Galactic Empire. More distinguished entries in the field include Iain M. Banks’s Culture books, Becky Chambers’s Galactic Commons novels, and of course the other big visual media franchise, Star Trek, where the Federation may have its faults, but at least it’s not an empire.

There are stories outside of empires. Why not explore those?