social theory – Matthew Wolf-Meyer

One of the first books I read that really impressed on me what the powers of world-building could be was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. As a rough analogy to Haldeman’s experience in the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a near-future in which a distant, interplanetary war is unfolding. Earth soldiers are shipped to the front through space travel, but due to the effects of relativity, when they come back home, much more time has passed for the people on Earth than for the soldiers. The novel follows a series of distant battles with encounters on Earth that are estranging, both for the protagonist and for the reader, as decades pass on Earth while mere months pass for the protagonist. It’s elegant in its premise: less than instantaneous interstellar travel means increasing disjunctures in personal experience with a quickly-changing society. As a world-building technique, it means that there’s a logic to the universe–even if there are aliens, space ships, and weapons of interstellar mass destruction.

A map of Earth that points conventional understandings of north to the bottom, making the south the top of the map. It’s an elegant disruption of accepted aspects of our world. It’s borrow from “**Why Is North Up on Maps?**“

In working on this list, I set a few rules for myself. First, it couldn’t include Ursula LeGuin. That’s not because I don’t like her work (I do!), but rather that it so often gets talked about that it obscures a lot of other, often more recent, work that’s just as good. Second, it needed to not already be included in one of the syllabuses for my Human Futures class or discussed in Theory for the World to Come. Third, it needed to stand alone as a short story or novel–meaning no multi-volume series (which excludes tons of great stuff, but none of it could viably be taught in a college class). Fourth, it needed to be focused on the United States. That was mostly to limit the sample size and make it possible to actually compile a list with an ending–I encourage experts of other national traditions to compile and share their own lists. And, fifth, it needed to be based on one fundamental and identifiable change or premise from which everything else followed.

This last rule is borrowed from Hal Clement’s “Whirligig World,” which describes how he set about building the world that Mission of Gravity takes place in. That world, which he named Mesklin, was characterized–no spoiler here–by its severe gravity, relative to Earth’s, because of the planet’s oblate shape. When astronauts from Earth find themselves stranded there, they come to rely on the local inhabitants to help. Most of what the reader experiences is from the perspective of Barlennan, a ship’s captain who is embroiled in the rescue efforts of these stranded humans. Through his relationship with a human helper, the reader comes to understand how the planet’s oblate shape affects gravity, weather, species and their evolution, and social structure. It all spawns from Clement’s initial experiment in literal world-building, which many of the texts below diverge from in that they assume an Earth-like world with small and large changes mapped onto a world similar to what the reader already knows.

I don’t want to spoil any of the following, so I’m leaving my descriptions of the stories relatively vague–and in some cases not revealing what the central change is, particularly if its revelation is integral to the plot. I’ve tried to group them thematically in case you’re interested in treating the list a bit like a syllabus.

In Stephen Graham Jones’ The Bird is Gone and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, what might be thought of as a relatively straightforward social–and specifically legal–change leads to a cascading series of effects. Jones imagines a near-contemporary United States where the government has ceded back most of the middle of the country to Indigenous groups. Robinson posits a change to the size and structure of corporations leading to a more communitarian ethos. Both texts are interested in how these legal changes lead to new ways of relating to one another, although in Jones’ book its more explicitly tinged with the racialization inherent in American settler-colonialism. They’re both, maybe not coincidentally, very fixated on ideas about property.

The feminist speculative tradition of imagining a world without men, which starts in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, flows through Alice Sheldon’s “Houston, Houston, Do you Read?” (writing as James Tiptree Jr.), and continues with Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed” and more recent work, is variously fantastic or scientific, relying on women finding new ways to reproduce without men. In each case, getting rid of men–accidentally, deliberately, or violently–opens up new social possibilities for the women who remain, which range from changes in gender roles to the entire structure of society. In many cases, men are the visitors to these men-free societies, and the narrative is told from their perspective as they struggle with realizing that they’re useless in the new social world. They also offer stinging rebukes of patriarchy and heteronormative social structures, and bring assumptions about American gender roles into stark relief.

Experiments with human consciousness, which are well represented in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” play with the idea of small changes in human capacities having profound effects on the structure of society, and, ultimately, what it means to fit into the category of human. In both cases, assumptions about what the human is and can be are disrupted by something novel, questioning, in Dick’s case (no surprise), what sanity is and, in Chiang’s case, how human cognition shapes the worlds we live in. (In many ways, this is my favorite subgenre of world-building, and I recommend Steve Shaviro’s Discognition for its engagement with this strain of work.)

Encounters with aliens are by their very nature experiments with world-building as storytellers develop whole worlds populated by a species that is influenced by different social and environmental rules, but there are aliens who are more and less human and who are governed by more and less human rules. One of the best encounters with the alien, notable for the alienating alterity of the aliens involved, is Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Ostensibly a sequel to his more popular Ender’s Game, most of Speaker for the Dead follows a family of xenoanthropologists (although I don’t think that’s what they’re called, since it would basically be an oxymoron) as they attempt to unravel the symbiotic interconnections of a group of species on a distant planet. The rules that govern life there are different than those on Earth, which reveal the anthropocentric biases of human administrators in their assessments of what needs to be done on that foreign planet. In a very different vein, Rivers Solomon’s The Deep imagines a more terrestrial kind of alien, born from the adaptation of escaped slaves to aquatic life. It’s based on a clipping. song, which is an homage to Detroiters Drexciya‘s electronic music. Solomon’s novel imagines a form of life that is haunted by its humanness, but is ultimately something quite different. Taken together, they offer a beginner’s course in Afrofuturism and a challenge to the often obligatory whiteness of speculative world-building. (Thanks to Elizabeth Fein for this suggestion!)

I’m technically over 10 entries if you count Haldeman and Clement. There’s a ton more (see below), but this set of stuff gives a pretty good sense of the parameters that people work with in trying to spell out the repercussions of sometimes subtle, sometimes enormous changes and their effects on a shared world. At their best, they posit a cascading set of changes that alter everything from individual subjectivity to forms of social relations (especially kinship structures), to forms of labor and governance, to planetary politics. Bad world-building usually makes no sense when it’s closely scrutinized.

I’d love to hear about people’s other favorite built worlds and the kinds of traditions they see unfolding in them. Suggest your own in the comment section below.

*Here’s me cheating–this is the list of stuff that I’ve used in classes that I’ve found to be especially effective helping students understand world-building: the first five minutes of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the first half of Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, Greg Rucka & Michael Lark’s Lazarus series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode (Season 5, episode 2). Check out the syllabuses for Human Futures for even more.

I’ve been playing Sid Meier’s Civilization my whole video-game-playing life. If you don’t know it, it’s a slow strategy game that models the origins of “civilization” through the near future. Players choose a “civilization” to play (what anthropologists of an earlier era might refer to as a “culture group”) and take turns conducting research, moving units around to explore the randomly-generated board, engaging in diplomacy, waging war, and modifying the landscape to extract strategic resources. Players start by placing a settlement that will grow into a dynamic, urban, capital city over the next 6000+ years of gameplay. If that sounds boring, somehow the designers of the game have managed to overcome the implicit boringness of the premise, and made a game that can half-joking ask players when they’ve finished the game if they want to play “just one more turn” and know that many will. Which is all to say that Civilization is slightly compulsive, and I have lost many nights to playing the game into the wee hours.

The cover of the original version of Sid Meier’s Civilization from 1991. Somehow it perfectly captures a lot of what’s wrong with the game…

Civilization is almost educational. Or it would be if it didn’t fly in the face of a century of research in the social sciences (which I’ll get to briefly). I often think about having my undergraduate students play it, largely because it relies on a set of presumptions about how “civilizations” work, and what differentiates “successful” ones from those that “collapse.” As a game, it attempts to model how societies move from being small-scale, early agricultural communities with a small government to a much larger, continent-spanning, industrialized nation with a “modern” form of government (i.e. democracy, communism, or fascism). All of these are based on a player’s progress through the “tech tree,” a set of unfurling technologies that move from pottery, agriculture, and the wheel, to sanitation, nuclear power, and space flight. If that sounds like unilineal evolution, that’s because it basically is; if it doesn’t sound like unilineal evolution, it might be because that’s an unfamiliar term, which might be familiar in its assumptions.

Unilineal evolution is the idea that there are stages to social development, and societies move from a state of savagery, to barbarism, to being truly civilized. Popular in the US and Western Europe in the late 1800s, unilineal evolution was one of the underlying justifications for imperialism (the “white man’s burden” was to help all of those “half-devil half-child” “savages” move up the tech tree). As a theory, social scientists threw unilineal evolution out decades ago, pointing to the racist, colonial biases in a theory developed by a bunch of white men in the global north that posited that the features of societies in Western Europe (and, begrudgingly, the northeastern US) represented the pinnacle of civilization (secularism, representative politics, industrial capitalism, heteronormative kinship, etc.).

Over time, anthropologists and historians did a pretty good job of showing how wrong that kind of thinking is, beyond its implicit colonial racism. First, civilizations like China and Japan made it fairly clear that a society can have some of these civilizational features without having all of them, and that the development of any one of them doesn’t necessarily depend on the development of a specific preceding stage or technology (e.g. you don’t have to have polytheism before monotheism, or monotheism before secularism; or or the germ theory of disease before sanitation). And second, it became increasingly clear that the idea that societies move from “simple” to “complex” forms of institutions ignored just how complex “simple” institutions can be. What looks to be “simple” from the outside can be exceedingly complex from the inside (e.g. kinship systems in Papua New Guinea). But some form of unilineal evolution persists in Civilization, and it’s very apparent in the biases baked into the game.

Early versions of Civilization were pretty straightforward in their biases. It was difficult to win the game with anything other than a market-driven democracy, even if you were a warmonger (you’ve got to have a market system to pay for all that military R&D and unit support, after all). Over time, Civilization has become a more modular game. It used to be that adopting a government like Democracy came with a set of predetermined features, but now Democracy has a base set of rules, and players can choose from a set of “policies” that offer a variety of bonuses. In that way, you can play a Democracy that depends upon an isolationist, surveillance state or a peaceful Communist state that provides its citizens with amenities to keep them happy. Better yet, the designers chose to separate the technological and “civic” trees, so one needn’t research the wheel before democracy (which can also allow for a civilization that is scientifically invested, but ignores “civic” achievements). But one of the biases that persists is technological determinism.

It might seem silly to suggest that a society needn’t invent the wheel before inventing gunpowder, but the wheel is not a precondition for chemistry. Similarly, one needn’t understand shipbuilding to develop atomic theory. Yes, we live in a world where the wheel preceded gunpowder and shipbuilding preceded atomic theory, but on a planet with a Pangea-like mega-continent, shipbuilding would be unnecessary. Access to some bat guano, sulfur, and charcoal resulting in gunpowder isn’t so hard to imagine preceding the development of the wheel. In all cases, what actually makes a technology possible are the social demands that compel research and encourage individuals and communities to harness a technology’s usage. Hence, gunpowder’s early discovery and widespread abandonment in China or how the refrigerator got its hum. I understand why, for the sake of the game, some kind of tech tree is important, but what continues to confound me is why there are technological bottlenecks where you have to have a specific technology before you can research further technologies (and the same goes for “civics”).

A persistent feature of the game is that each of the civilizations has some set of basic benefits, which can include special units and buildings, and, in some cases, suggest that there is something intrinsic about a civilization’s relationship with geography. Canada and Russia get a bonus for being near tundra tiles; Japan gets a bonus for fighting along water tiles; etc. At its best, these kinds of rules make the game dynamic. At its worst, it fosters a kind of Jared Diamond-esque environmental determinism. (Which, again, historians and anthropologists discredited long before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel — but, institutional racism is hard to overcome!) A more nuanced game might allow players to mix and match these bonuses to reflect the complex relationship between what societies value and the landscapes they have to make do with.

One other enduring problem in the game is that the designers really want to focus on the positive side of civilization. These days, Great People can be recruited to join your civilization, each of which has a positive effect (e.g. Albert Einstein gives a boost to your scientific output). But what about all the terrible “Great People” in history? What about the slave trade, on which contemporary capitalism was built? When Civilization 6 was initially released, environmental change (i.e. the Anthropocene, which is what the game is all about) wasn’t included in the game, inspiring the rumor that it was too controversial to include. Maybe including things like racism and ethnonationalism would make the game too grim; maybe the designers simply want players to provide those narratives to the game as they play it. But if any of the criticisms of my above concerns amount to “but that just isn’t realistic,” so too is the history of human civilizations without the ugly side of the nation-state and everyday politics. (As I write this, I kind of wish there was a “utopia mode” that would allow players to avoid things like fossil fuel combustion, factory farms, and the gendered division of labor, to name just three.)

This is clearly not an exhaustive list of all of the problems with Civilization. Whatever its problems, it provides a basis to rethink some of the biases in history and social science — and popular culture more generally. Working through what’s wrong with Civilization helps open up what anthropology and history have done over the 20th century to change the way that social scientists think about “civilization” and what it’s composed of and how it changes over time.

It would be amazing if Civilization 7 was more of an open sandbox, allowing players more flexibility in how they play. It would also be great if there was more of a dark side to Civilization. I don’t think Civilization drove me to become an anthropologist, but it does continue to remind me — each time I play a game — of what has gone wrong with social theory over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how we might work against implicit and explicit biases in the narratives that get told in video games and elsewhere. I hope the next version of Civilization gets up to date with contemporary social science, but, in any case, I’m not going to stop playing it…

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