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Why Political Winds Should Shape Worldbuilding

by James Bow


Author James Bow (photo by Christine Saunders).
Author James Bow (photo by Christine Saunders).

Things About Governance (2026) - 6

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"Things About Governance" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series run from Jan-June 2026. Query us about contributing for $25 CAD a post at https://facebook.com/relskim  or by email at info@realityskimming.com

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My late mother, a proud Canadian who I thought of as somewhat conservative on a personal level, could not believe there could be queens in the twenty-second century. It became my job to figure out how.

My mother and I were both writers, and she was my mentor. A trained librarian, she encouraged my love of reading and writing. She was a fantastic editor who could catch a typo at twenty paces, deconstruct a plot, and suggest multiple solutions to storytelling problems. Suffice it to say, I miss her.


But she never quite got behind my story idea for my science-fiction novel The Sun Runners. The story is set on Mercury aboard a series of latitude-towns (long train-cities constantly moving to stay on the dark side of the planet. These colonists survived for fifty years after the Earth succumbed to environmental collapse and went silent. Somehow, they managed to keep order, to feed themselves on extremophile bacteria, and maintain a tense peace between the towns just when the Earth emerges from its silence to disrupt everything.


As wild as these ideas might be (though they’re explored by other science fiction authors, including Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel 2312), they didn’t break my mother’s suspension of disbelief. Rather, it was the fact that one of the latitude-towns, named the Messenger, had a main character named Frieda who was a crown princess. The town had a queen as ruler and a grandmother who served as dowager regent after the queen died, leaving young Frieda technically in charge. A hereditary monarchy, my mother said, was just too anachronistic to fit into a harder science-fiction novel supposedly set 175 years in Earth’s future.


There are plenty of examples of hereditary monarchies in science fiction. Dune has them. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series models his Galactic Empire on the excesses and corruption of Rome’s emperors. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga has not only emperors, but hereditary counts acting as judges in their fiefdoms, with little sign of a democratic assembly to buttress them.


But space monarchs have also been criticized. Adam Cronk, writing for Medium, called them “failures of imagination”, saying, “It’s as if science advanced, but society regressed. Just as common in some ways is the depiction of other forms of government in the same universe as not merely defective but as fundamentally deficient.”


Further, the examples I’ve cited are far in the future, where science has had time to advance, and societies have had time to regress. Setting a story 175 years into the future ties it a lot more closely to the state of our world today, and readers like my mother and Mr. Cronk expect that science fiction tied this closely to today’s world would continue the work of pushing out something as anachronistic as a hereditary monarchy. The near future, it would appear, is either a Star Trek fully democratic socialist utopia if we get it right, or one governed by strongmen who prefer the title of President to King if we get it wrong.


Cover of The Sun Runners by James Bow.
Cover of The Sun Runners by James Bow.

Truth to tell, Frieda was made a Crown Princess because it felt right to me as the writer. I imagined The Sun Runners as The Crown meeting Snowpiercer, set on Mercury. I liked the juxtaposition between an anachronistic political system and a harder science fiction ragged future setting. But to get my mother and readers like her on side, I was clearly going to have to work for it.


Fortunately, politics is something I think about a lot, and more writers should, too. Today, people are often afraid to get political. Indeed, the word is thrown around as an epithet. “Can’t we keep politics out of this?” “Star Trek has become too political and woke!”


The reality is, politics is central to our lives. It’s not some dark, evil thing; it’s simply a matter of how we decide to do things as a society when resources are limited and lots of people have different opinions about what to do. If everybody agreed, there’d be no need for politics or democracy; we’d just act on what we decided to do. You can’t shut out politics without infringing on our right to express disagreement.


A formative quote from my university poli-sci professor sums it up perfectly. In Thomas Qualter’s book, Conflicting Political Ideas in Liberal Democracies, he says, “Commonly, we will find in practice that those who argue for forgetting about politics in the interests of the common good are really saying ‘I know what I think, and I don’t want to have to consider anyone else’s opinion.’ On many local councils, school boards, and club executives, you will hear it said, ‘Let’s keep politics out of this.’ This view reveals a profound misunderstanding of the nature of a democratic society, which in essence is based on the propriety of politics. Political activity to resolve conflict is at the foundation of our way of life, without which we would not be a democracy.”


So, how could I get a queen onto a throne on Mercury? Well, I was going to have to start writing backstory, and by backstory, I mean history. I looked for precedents and connections between the society I want to build and how it could relate to the present day. Plenty of novels answer this question by introducing a clean break: an apocalypse, a nuclear war, something that wipes the current world order off the map and leaves plenty of chaos from which a new society can be born. The entire post-apocalyptic genre of books, movies, and video games follows this path, with examples including Fallout, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Mortal Engines, to name just a few.


The Sun Runners’ break is not nearly so clean. The latitude-towns on Mercury were established as research stations by the various space agencies of Earth. The colony grew thanks to resource mining and transferring the tremendous solar energy Mercury received to Earth. These towns didn’t receive the direct blow of the Earth’s apocalypse. We see the latitude town named Messenger at the start of the Earth’s silence, and we see it at the end, still moving to keep ahead of the deadly sunrise. Things don’t completely fall apart and vanish with plenty of time available to allow something completely different to magically form in its place.


But the Mercurian society has been put under stress, and with stress comes change. The Earth, which had provided Mercury with a third of its food supply, has suddenly gone silent. Supplies have stopped. Starvation looms. What are the people to do?


The answer is: a lot of politics.


Rationing is imposed, which the people support because the alternative is a breakdown of order. People still need to work to keep the water clean, the air purified, and the systems moving. But the stress remains, and with it come the debates over how to save as many people as possible, turning those strains into schisms. More than one latitude-town breaks, and the largest one goes completely feral and resorts to cannibalism. Desperate times lead to desperate measures.


A key part of politics is not only deciding what should be done but deciding on who should decide what should be done. In this era of societal stress, there is the temptation to hand the task over to a strong leader – or, rather, a leader that appears to be strong. This is what happens on The Messenger. Luckily for its citizens, the woman they select (an army lieutenant who will become Frieda’s grandmother) doesn’t want that leadership thrust upon her. But she’s smart and decisive, and she genuinely wants what’s best for all the people. So, she takes the job and makes the decisions that get the latitude-towns of Mercury out of their crisis. That’s how she ends up in charge. Because she feels her people deserve better than to be ruled by a military government, she adopts a title from her Dutch heritage: Stadtholder, meaning "placeholder," declaring herself the temporary ruler until legitimate, democratically elected leaders emerge.


 Then, fifty years later, the system she set up is still in place. Because when you take charge of something, sometimes you can’t bring yourself to let it go because you’re afraid that others will mess it up. Her daughter becomes Stadtholder, who then names herself Queen. It’s a message to her mother: if you’re going to make me Queen in all but title, I’m taking the title. She also turns the civilian advisory council into a parliament – a step towards a constitutional monarchy. The Crown Princess Frieda takes over at the end, hoping to abdicate sometime soon and hand over power to the civilian parliament.

There are plenty of examples in dystopian fiction where the government is a monolithic, overwhelming block whose only weakness appears to be rebellious teenagers. There’s President Coriolanus Snow’s control over PanEm, Emperor Palpatine of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, even Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. It’s easier if you could shove your antagonistic government into the hands of one person. It keeps the narrative uncluttered.


But governments are made of people. They may be made of good people, they may be made of bad people; quite often, they’re made of both, plus a large contingent who just want to hunker down, hop into their cars at 5 p.m., and return to their quiet life with their quiet family. These governments are held in place by the tacit support of the wider population, and they earn that support through competency, compassion, or fear. We all know which we’d rather be governed by, and we all know what could happen if our nightmares come true.


Applying this understanding to your story is a key part of worldbuilding. If you want to build a society that feels real to your reader, then it is worth asking how it’s governed. It’s worth asking how it gains and retains its legitimacy. It’s worth asking how people resolve conflicts in this society. That will give you a foundation for what your main character feels needs to change.


I realize politics can be boring for many people. Few want to read the drama of a town meeting; fewer still probably want to write about it. But you don’t have to get down to minute readings and discussions of quorum. Simply understand that politics are at the heart of what we are as human beings. Our politics determine how we engage with others in our society and how we reach agreements with those who disagree. It’s at the heart of how we exist in a democracy, or not in a democracy, if the case may be. And as some of the best fiction is about people, understanding their politics can help your readers understand their world.

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James Bow is the author of seven books of science fiction, fantasy and young adult fiction, including The Sun Runners and Tales from the Silence. His work Icarus Down won the Pris Aurora Award for Best Canadian YA Science Fiction Novel. By day, he’s a freelancer and a communications consultant. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his fellow author and partner in crime, Erin, and their two children, Wayfinder and Polaris.



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