[Not A Fiction] The Hard Humanities Fiction Manifesto

Shhhhh I'm procrastinating

A while ago, someone asked me why I was reading the Huainanzi, a collection of Han Chinese essays intended to educate the emperor on everything he needed to know to rule. I explained that I was researching a xianxia novel and wanted to describe the characters’ cultivation powers in a way deeply grounded in historical Taoist teaching. But all the secondary sources either skipped over all the detail I cared about or assumed I already knew what the Five Phases were and how they affected the use of astrology to diagnose qi imbalances. So I got fed up and started reading an original text, which it turned out was very accessible and had resolved a lot of confusions I’d had since I started researching.

About halfway through this explanation I began to question my life choices.

I do a lot of research before I write. Her Voice Is A Backwards Record and Mea Maxima Culpa were both, luckily, about long-standing interests of mine.¹ But my first step to writing a story about any unfamiliar setting is compiling a list of forty books from reputable academic presses. I am this meme:

But I’m not this meme about science. One of my revision notes to myself on both Her Voice Is A Backwards Record and Mea Maxima Culpa was “sprinkle future tech and weird astronomy on this space setting until it is acceptably science-fictional.” Greg Egan I am not.

No, my giant pile of academic books is made up of theology and philosophy, history and archaeology, mythology and literature, gender studies and area studies in its nigh-infinite diversity. Which is to say that they’re the humanities.

I don’t write hard science fiction. I write hard humanities fiction.

But the merits of hard humanities fiction go beyond having an excuse to read obscure millennia-old philosophy books. I think hard humanities fiction has value for the writer and the reader.

In her books Not For Profit and Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum names three purposes of humanities study which prepare people for democratic citizenship:

1. Socratic argument

2. World citizenship

3. Narrative imagination

I will take each in turn.

Socratic Argument

Socratic argument is the process of critically questioning yourself, your culture, and your beliefs; not assuming habits and traditions and norms are right because it’s always been done this way or everyone else does it like that; believing things only if there’s evidence for them; engaging in rational argument instead of namecalling or misrepresentations. Socratic argument is practical philosophy which engages with the issues people face in their everyday lives: Is my life a good kind of life to live? Is God real? Is it ethical to have an abortion, or to eat meat, or not to donate to charity? Is this the right sort of situation in which to feel angry, or sad, or jealous? How do we tell if a government is just?

Socratic argument is often very unpopular: people would prefer that their cherished beliefs’ weak points not be poked at, thank you. People who like Socratic argument—beginning, of course, with Socrates himself—are known for being very annoying.

But Socratic argument is good. Socratic argument helps people clarify their goals and values. It encourages a culture of healthy disagreement, which reduces the likelihood of serious moral or empirical error. It keeps people from being overly influenced by charismatic people, group consensus, or authority. And it helps people see their enemies as people behaving in ways that make sense to them and trying to pursue the Good as we all are, instead of orcs bent on destruction whom all right-thinking people must crush into the ground.

Hard humanities fiction is fiction of ideas. It explores questions of practical philosophy. It challenges the beliefs and behaviors that have been handed down from our ancestors, or that all our friends are doing, or that some powerful person says is right. It models rational argument and debate. It accurately represents diverse viewpoints.

Hard humanities fiction can engage in Socratic argument in many ways. Some stories are explicitly philosophical thought experiments: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas asks about which utopias we find most plausible; my Her Voice Is A Backwards Record asks what it would be like to live in a world where modal realism is true. Other stories bring out the ideas through the world and characters themselves: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Lions of Al-Rassan explores religious conflict through its three protagonists, one Fantasy Jew, one Fantasy Muslim, and one Fantasy Christian; Le Guin’s The Dispossessed imagines what it would be like to live in an anarchocommunist society. Still other stories just have the characters argue about philosophy on-page, as in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, Kay’s Tigana, or my own Mea Maxima Culpa.

I want to highlight that hard humanities fiction is not propaganda for a particular viewpoint. It is fine to write stories where the intelligent, rational, knowledgeable, wise hero trounces an array of interlocutors who might as well be named Simplicio. But hard humanities fiction recognizes that people believe things for reasons that make sense to them and tries to understand them on their own terms. While not hesitating to dismiss beliefs as wrong or even evil if it is called for, hard humanities fiction humbly approaches new belief systems with the awareness that the author might be making a mistake, instead of dismissing them as stupid or immoral at first glance. In the best hard humanities fiction, readers are left with more questions than answers. Hard humanities fiction prompts readers to think instead of giving them the correct answer on a multiple-choice test.

World Citizenship

World citizenship is seeing yourself as having something in common with all other people, as being part of a vast community with all other people (although not necessarily prioritizing this community over nearer communities). People who live far away, in different cultures, or in long-ago times are still people. In the words of the Roman playwright Terence, “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.”

Some hard humanities fiction creates a unique secondary world. The world of Terra Ignota, for example, has no gender and freely chosen countries that don’t correspond to any geographical location. Others base their setting on real Earth cultures. Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, for example, are more accurate to the cultures they’re based on than much historical fiction, and often only seem to be fantasy so he can rearrange timelines to suit himself.

In either case, hard humanities fiction is grounded in the arts, area studies, and history. And not just any history! The history of kings and battles is normally irrelevant. Hard humanities fiction is primarily concerned with economic and social history. How did most people live? How did they feed themselves, dress themselves, house themselves, treat their own illnesses? How did they form families, raise children, worship gods, resolve disputes, punish thieves and murderers? What was it like to live in Renaissance Italy, or Al-Andalus, or Song China? What would it be like to live in a society where you can circumnavigate the world in half an hour, or where all property is held in common, or where people have no fixed sex?

Intellectual history and history of folklore, literature and the arts are important as well. They study how people made sense of their lives. What stories did they tell about themselves? What did they think was good, and how did they pursue it? (Did they pursue it?) What comforted them in times of grief or suffering? What did they take joy in? What did they find beautiful? The author of hard humanities fiction should understand not only how the people in their setting lived but what meaning they made from living that way.

It would be a mistake to say that hard humanities fiction can only be written about societies that are “foreign.” All societies are foreign to someone. A closely observed modern middle-class British suburb can be as enlightening as some setting from long ago and very far away (particularly for those of us who have never had the privilege of setting foot in Britain).

The hard humanities fiction writer must avoid acting like people from other cultures (whether based on a real Earth culture or entirely made up) are people from the author’s own culture in funny outfits. People from Alpha Centauri in the year 2800 or from Fantasy Renaissance Italy shouldn’t have the same understanding of their sexuality and gender as people from 1950s Iowa or 21st century San Francisco. At the same time, the hard humanities fiction writer must avoid exotification of cultures unlike their own, the idea that other cultures are mysterious and alien and fundamentally unlike us. They shouldn’t write a culture of noble savages, pure, spiritual, in touch with nature, yet incapable of logic or science.

They must remember that all cultures have multiple sets of values, ideologies, experiences, and norms; that all cultures contain people who question or rebel against their culture’s strictures; that all cultures have men and women, rich and poor, powerful and powerless; that all people have agency and make their own choices within the structure given them. They must avoid presenting a culture as monolithically better or worse than their own culture. But they also shouldn’t hesitate to show norms that are bad as actually being bad.

Most of all, they must try to understand cultures on their own terms, to figure out how a culture’s norms and behavior make sense given the circumstances a culture evolved in. The reader should understand that people who live in this culture are genuinely different from the reader, and yet that they share the common needs and vulnerabilities of all humanity.

Narrative Imagination

Narrative imagination is the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes, to understand people very different from you. Narrative imagination is the sense that other people have thoughts, emotions, goals, and so on in the same way you do. It is the sense that other people are like you and—perhaps more important—that they are unlike you in a way that still makes sense. Narrative imagination cultivates a sense of sonder:

the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

In hard humanities fiction, narrative imagination is different from world citizenship because world citizenship is about settings and societies, while narrative imagination is about individual characters. Although they are closely linked, many stories put you in the shoes of (some) characters while having a thinly sketched and incoherent setting. While it’s rarer, you can imagine a book with a sociologically rich setting populated by cardboard cutouts (perhaps intended to symbolize this or that cultural tendency).

Hard humanities fiction shares an attention to narrative imagination with most other fiction that has any pretensions whatsoever to art. So this section is one I will elaborate on less than the others. But hard humanities fiction is populated with vivid and memorable characters: Estraven and Shevek and Tenar; Mycroft Canner and Bridger and J.E.D.D. Mason; Dianora and Ammar ibn Khairan and Scortius. They are torn between conflicting desires and needs and loves; they behave in ways unpredictable to others and often themselves. Some may be reasonably accused of being strange. But I think this is realistic; fiction, to my mind, often underestimates how strange people really are.

Often, a character in hard humanities fiction is a representation of an idea (J.E.D.D. Mason) or a cultural tendency (Shevek). But they should still, first and foremost, be people. There is something it is like to be them.

Hard humanities fiction (particularly if longform) often benefits from having many characters. All too often, in books, the protagonists are people and everyone else is furniture. Hard humanities fiction should give the sense that everyone in the book has an inner life, and it’s just that these are the characters we happen to be shining a spotlight on. If a book has dozens of lead characters—Terra Ignota’s TV Tropes page, for example, lists no fewer than thirty-five—it’s easier for the reader to feel sonder about all the spearcarriers that populate the pages. To make best use of a large cast, a writer might try to represent the diversity that exists in their world: for example, Terra Ignota has sympathetic, agentic characters from all Hives (i.e. nation-subcultures) and every side in the ongoing political conflicts. Characters should care about different things from each other and perhaps even work at cross-purposes to the plot: for example, a book about a war might feature several characters who care about the war, but also a major character who primarily cares about reuniting with her husband.

Ultimately, a work of hard humanities fiction aims to build understanding. Through Socratic argument, it builds understanding of ideas; through world citizenship, it builds understanding of cultures; through narrative imagination, it builds understanding of people. These aspects mutually reinforce each other to create a novel that treats the humanities with the same rigor that hard science fiction has long treated science.

1. Which is why they’re finished instead of taking the form of tens of thousands of words of notes about the role of humaneness in Confucian thought and the experiences of courtesans in Song China.