Is The CLOAK GAMES Series A Dystopia?
I had a high-school student email me this week and ask if I had intended to write the CLOAK GAMES series as a dystopian setting.
Not intentionally. Of course, the secret to writing a dystopia is to realize that every possible configuration of human society is a dystopia to someone. 🙂
In the setting of CLOAK GAMES, it’s not that Earth is a dystopian police state so much as the High Queen of the Elves has trained her human subjects over the generations to police themselves without much interference from her. Governing Earth is way down on her list of priorities – she views Earth as sort of a factory farm for producing supplies and troops to further her main goals*, and she understands human psychology and group dynamics better than most humans do.
So from birth, people are trained to revere and admire the Elves, and the whole curriculum of the schools is written to emphasize every bad thing that happened in human history before the Conquest, and to highlight the peace and unity among human nations since the High Queen came (while overlooking things like the fact that the Elves wiped out two-thirds of the human population in the first stages of the Conquest). Popular culture and mass media are carefully designed to reinforce the message. Dramas always show heroic men-at-arms fighting for their lords in the Shadowlands, heroic servants protecting their noble Elven lords from treachery, or heroic Homeland Security officers tracking down Rebels guilty of the most appalling crimes. Characters who dislike the Elves are shown either as pathetic fools or as the blackest sort of villains who are utterly beyond redemption.
The flip side of this is that people who do offend the Elves are punished in the most public and humiliating way possible – floggings that are recorded and then uploaded on the Internet for mass viewing on Punishment Day every week. (In the CLOAK GAMES setting, there are entire websites devoted to making humorous remixes of Punishment Day videos designed to ridicule the victims.) Someone who winds up on a Punishment Day video becomes a social pariah unable to earn a living, and usually winds up having to sell himself in slavery to an Elven noble to keep from starving to death – social security-type things like pensions and disability support are only available to men-at-arms who honorably completed a term of service.
So there is gentle and pervasive persuasion on the one hand, and the other hand is an iron fist.
And the system works so well that most people are unaware it even exists, and police themselves without thinking about it. 90% of the US population in CLOAK GAMES will never meet an Inquisitor or talk to a Homeland Security agent, but if someone criticizes an Elf in their presence, they will call the emergency number to report it as fast as they can. For the 10% who are troublemakers, the Inquisition and Homeland Security are there to deal with them.
(At least that is the way it works in the English-speaking countries – other countries have their own power dynamics, and the High Queen has different systems for keeping them in line.)
Nadia is aware of most of this, but definitely not all, so one of the interesting things about writing the CLOAK GAMES book is how her extremely cynical perspective clashes with that of the people she meets – either idealistic supporters of the Elves, or the much darker idealists who join the Rebels.
And, of course, when Nadia learns of some of the darker secrets the Elves have.**
So, to sum up, I didn’t set out to write CLOAK GAMES as a dystopia, but the idea came from an inverse of my FROSTBORN series. In FROSTBORN, refugees from Earth travel to a magical world and build a civilization. In CLOAK GAMES, refugees from a magical world come to Earth and conquer it, and some of the practical problems that would pose led to the idea for CLOAK GAMES.
And if all this sounds interesting, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP is on sale at Kobo this weekend!
-JM
*Her main goals, of course, will turn up in later books.
**Also to be explored in later books. 🙂