The natural way of things

Last night I finished the novel Dark Secret by Edward Lerner. It was serialized in the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact issues April, May, June, and July/August of 2013. Yes, I’m six years behind in my reading.

I enjoy science fiction, though a great deal of what I see in bookstores this days focuses on some sort of epic battle between this civilization and that one or is really fantasy. Even with that enjoyment I rarely discuss those stories in this blog unless there is a particular reason. And there is.

A spaceship of six adults – Captain Dana, Blake and wife Rikki, Carlos, Antonio, and Li – and a cargo bay full of thousands of human embryos heads out to establish a new human colony on a planet outside the solar system (I won’t go into reasons why). The nature of the story becomes apparent before they reach the new world – Li aims to go full-on supremacist.

The first glimpses are when Li suggests philosophers for the captain and others to read. All of them tout a strong respect for authority. One of those philosophers was Confucius. Of course, I’ve heard of him, but didn’t know he supported submitting to authority. The aim of each of these writers is to teach that authoritarian ways are the natural order and one should properly fit into this order and its social hierarchy.

Li’s quest for power is a lot more subtle and manipulative than I’m used to seeing out of the current GOP. Over the last few years what the nasty guy and the GOP have been doing are easy to spot (unless you like what they’re doing). It has been a blatant power grab, nothing subtle about it. Then again, the current GOP has been dancing to the tune of Vladimir Putin, and his ways really are subtle and manipulative.

Once the artificial wombs start turning embryos into children Li’s full plan is laid out. She wants all these children, eventually thousands, to grow up understanding that they are to treat Li as their queen and that is the natural way of things. One way Li does this is to imprint her face in the minds of the little ones along with good things and associate the faces of the rest of the adults, other than Carlos, with bad things like snakes. These other adults don’t understand why the children are scared of them. Another thing Li does is create a mythology around their arrival on the new planet, similar to Noah’s Ark, with herself as God’s Messenger.

When the other adults refuse to turn all child care duties to Li she engineers a coup – do what I say or I destroy the embryos and children. These other adults are labeled evil and banished from the children’s compound. Eventually, a child who is a bit too questioning is also banished.

Spoiler alert: Li’s reign is eventually brought to an end (though I thought it took too many years for people to act). Through that point Li’s actions as a supremacist are pretty much true to form. But in the epilogue chapter I thought the author did not get it right. Considering how deeply those children had been imprinted they would have to deal with a lot of trauma of suddenly having to live without their primary caretaker and among the people they had been taught were evil. That trauma wasn’t mentioned.