Fiction battling autocracy…
There’s a long tradition of fiction writers battling autocracy. From the seminal (and alarmingly prescient!) 1984 and Animal Farm of George Orwell (still obviously current, considering the despotic Pig Putin’s invasion of Ukraine!) and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to C. M. Kornbluth’s Not This August (his famous novella “The Marching Morons” does a good job of describing Trump’s followers or anti-vaxxers—those two groups overlap, of course), authors have been outspoken about the dangers of autocracy. Although my skills aren’t anywhere near the caliber of these literary giants, I’m doing my part.
While many of my novels have an anti-autocracy theme and are therefore “evergreen” books (novels as current as the day I finished their manuscripts), let me focus on a few recent ones. Three books from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Death on the Danube, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and Leonardo and the Quantum Code, focused on Putin and his psychotic dream of recreating the Soviet Union. Yes, autocracy vs. democracy is only one theme here, but it’s an important one, and the autocrats are shown to be thugs who are willing to kill innocent people.
My holiday gift to readers this last year was Defanging the Red Dragon, #6 in that series, and it went after Xi’s China. The Chinese and Russian governments try to censor such tales because they speak truth to autocratic power, so I couldn’t let Xi’s China escape my literary wrath. I had to go after them as well. Their attacks on democracy are more clever than crazy Putin and friends’. For example, the financial success of a Hollywood movie all too often now requires success in China, and this leads weak Hollywood moguls to dilute freedom of speech and expression, a core democratic value, and thus aid and abet Xi’s censors. As one pundit put it on CNN a while ago, “You can’t kill a Chinese spy anymore!” In the recent James Bond movie, for example, they edited out an entire scene where that occurred. That didn’t stop me from writing one in Defanging. Xi can go to hell!
So can Putin! I took a vacation from bashing autocracy in Intolerance, an important theme if only because autocrats know how to encourage that as a way of turning citizens in democratic societies against each other. But in The Klimt Connection, I’m back to blasting autocracy in general, and Putin in particular, spurred on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What makes fiction such a useful tool in battling autocracy, whether it takes the form of a sci-fi, mystery or thriller novel? The answer is simple: It’s a clear case of the good guys waging war against the bad. Autocracy has been much more prevalent in world history, so the good guys always have uphill battles. That makes for a good story, albeit sometimes depressing, a meaningful one that can hopefully spur readers on to join the battle.
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Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
