Novel Explorations of Con Politics

Henry Tam’s novels – Kuan's Wonderland; Whitehall through the Looking Glass; and The Hunting of the Gods – satirises how Con politics turns those with little power against those with no power at all. Each novel brings into sharp relief the threats posed by charlatans and manipulators, and explores how their domination can be overcome.

Theses thought-provoking tales have been praised in diverse quarters: “An unmissable page-turner” (President, the Independent Publishers Guild); “An important reminder of the risks of crude neoliberal ideology” (General Secretary, TUC); “Simply a tour de force” (Director for Education, WEA); “Original and very engaging” (Fantasy Book Review); “The ending is tense, unexpected and powerful” (Economics Editor, The Independent newspaper); “Beautifully, deftly written” (Dame Jane Roberts, NLGN); "It's a cautionary tale and a call to action, but also a gripping read" (Director, Speakers’ Corner Trust).

• Kuan’s Wonderland is an allegorical story about a young boy, Kuan, who is taken against his will to the mysterious realm of Shiyan, where nothing is as it appears. Held back by quite unexpected threats and diversions, he hopes his father will come to his rescue, not suspecting that they may both be the target of a dark conspiracy. In his attempt to escape from Shiyan, where the lower order routinely pledge to give more of their time to do the bidding of the ruling elite, Kuan encounters a host of enigmatic characters, from the unseen Curator to Dr Erica Lee, to whom the motherless boy develops a deep attachment. In the end he has to face up to a painful secret from his past and make the ultimate sacrifice to save his own world from annihilation.

• Whitehall through the Looking Glass is a satirical tale about how a group of corporations known as the Consortium, with George VIII as a figurehead, has come to rule over both the UK and the US. In this timid new world, civil servants jostle to be of the greatest service to their new political masters, except for Philip K. Rainsborough when he learns of the Consortium’s real agenda. Alas, the Consortium has on its side the Super Utility Network, the most advanced opinion manipulation technology in the world. Rainsborough gets a chance to bring down the government when Chief Supt Carrie Edel asks for his help in charging the Prime Minister with murder. But who can he really trust?

• The Hunting of the Gods is a saga set on an unrecognisable Earth under the control of immortal ‘gods’, whose subjects accept that all life on the planet was created by their rulers just 500 years ago. Down the centuries, all racial differences have merged into homogeneity; gender discrimination has vanished; the poor die young; and the elite prosper and live very long indeed. There is nothing beyond the grasp of the gods except how to make peace with each other. From the beginning, the two immortal rivals have divided the world into interminably warring realms. But during the latest conflict, rumours start to circulate that the reign of the gods must come to an end. Amidst the revolutionary intrigues stands a recently resurrected man whose past has long been forgotten by everyone. Rebels turn to him for help, but his second coming may soon be over.

Click on the links below and select either the Kindle edition or the paperback option:
Kuan's Wonderland: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kuans-Wonderland-ebook/dp/B008144G9I/
Whitehall through the Looking Glass: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whitehall-through-Looking-Glass-Novel-ebook/dp/B00J3VRGEU/
The Hunting of the Gods: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hunting-Gods-Henry-Tam-ebook/dp/B01FKF212O/

--

In addition to his novels, Henry Tam has had many books and articles published on social and political issues. These include Time to Save Democracy; Communitarianism, which was nominated by New York University Press for the 2000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order; and a global history of the progressive struggle, Against Power Inequalities, which has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also been a senior adviser in the UK Government; lecturer at Cambridge University; Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London; and a speaker at key events on democracy and governance around the world from Washington and Warsaw to Oxford and Strasbourg.
(Learn more at: Henry Tam: Words & Politics)

5 Predictions from ‘ The Hunting of the Gods’

What radical innovations can be found for Earth in ‘The Hunting of the Gods’? There are quite a few, but here are five that are particularly significant:

[1] Heartbeat Surveillance
The unique heartbeat of every individual is registered and tracked. Scanner can detect any individual and identify who it is instantly. No one can disappear from the pervasive surveillance system. One further use of this technology is that in line with the agreed protocol, governments share their information on how many of their people have died in war so that fighting will stop when fatalities on either side has reached one million (with victory going to the side with under a million killed at that point).

[2] Cloning/Memory Transfer & Identity Therapy
Others have imagined the technology for cloning a body to transfer one’s memory into. But in ‘The Hunting of the Gods’, we have the realisation that such a technology does not preserve one’s identity, it merely creates another being with a replicated memory when one’s true self is terminated. The new self then needs therapy to cope with bearing the guilt of the previous person while trying to realise that one is a new person.

[3] Virtual Immortality
People can live in a relatively youthful and healthy state depending on the dosage they can access for longevity treatment. Most people cannot afford any treatment, and given the lack of nutrition, will die young. A minority can get the medication to live like a youthful middle-aged person until they are 100 or 150. With a weaker dose, some live a long but not quite youthful life. But those on the highest rung can secure the supply that will guarantee them virtual immortality (though it does not make them invulnerable to violent attacks).

[4] Human Reproduction & Biological Convergence
Any pair of human partners can for a fee, submit a request for a foetus to be incubated in a commercial facility that will use randomly selected and mixed genetic codes from a data bank. Ethnic differences have disappeared and all inhabitants have a similar ‘mixed-race’ profile. As men and women alike acquire an offspring in the same way, there is little divergence in what careers they pursue. However, strong divisions still surface as a result of political leaders presenting targeted scapegoats as enemies.

[5] Microbot Technology
Microbots are small dot-sized automatons that can combine to form larger units to perform a vast variety of functions. They can carry out domestic chores, basic gardening, visual projections, medical tasks, and many other duties, including, where a special licence has been granted, military actions. Separated as individual microbots, they can vanish from human sight with ease.

20 Dystopian Classics: how many have you read?

Dystopian literature emerged in late 19th/early 20th century. When the optimism for progress in the 1800s was confronted by a series of unprecedented disasters as the world moved towards a new century, a new genre was born to highlight possible futures and warn against the dangers of misrule.

To look back on the dystopian classics is to revisit the major forms of dysfunctional society, many of which still pose a threat to us today.

Here’s a chronological list of 20 dystopian classics of the 20th century:

'The Iron Heel' (1908) by Jack London.
A group of powerful business people take it upon themselves to get rid of all protection for workers and systematically eliminate anyone who dares stand up against their exploitative regime.

‘The Sleeper Awakes’ (1910) by H. G. Wells.
A man awakes in the distant future to discover that an oppressive regime is now in power, yet when that is overthrown, the new leader betrays the people by imposing ruthless controls over them, provoking a new rebellion.

‘We” (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
A ruling clique seeks to retain absolute power by imposing mass surveillance and stripping people of their sense of individuality. But some people begin to discover there is an alternative beyond their confines.

‘Brave New World’ (1932) by Aldous Huxley.
A hierarchical social system is sustained by dividing all new born into classes with distinct capability, diffusing all potential frustration with a ready supply of pleasure-inducing substance, and promoting a culture of unquestioning contentment.

‘It Can’t Happen Here’ (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.
A politician with the public persona of an affable man-of-the-people gets himself elected as the President, and proceeds to use his power to crush all opposition, while amassing more wealth and power for himself and his cronies.

‘Swastika Night’ (1937) by Katherine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine).
The Nazis have won the Second World War and established an enduring regime that exploits non-Germans, marginalises non-Nazis, and dehumanises women. History has been completely rewritten but one man has a true record of the past.

‘Animal Farm’ (1945) by George Orwell.
An allegorical tale wherein the rebel leaders promise equality for all until they have seized power, after which they deviously widen inequality and deepen exploitation until they are no different from those they overthrew.

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) by George Orwell.
A regime that turns deception into a round-the-clock strategy, feeds the masses with jingoistic stories, monitors the behaviour of the people, and inflicts psychological torture on anyone suspected of dissent.

‘The Day of the Triffids’ (1951) by John Wyndham.
Disorder spreads when the unforeseen consequences of genetically modified plants, combined with the loss of vision amongst most people, leave individuals exposed to harm until a new democratic sanctuary begins to be developed.

‘Fahrenheit 451’ (1953) by Ray Bradbury.
Society is rendered ignorant by the burning of all books, and control of the masses is reinforced by entertainment that ranges from mind-numbing TV drama and reality shows that focus on the hunting down of those designated public enemies.

‘The Chrysalids’ (1955) by John Wyndham.
Following a devastating nuclear war, a regime rises to impose its own religious orthodoxy on the survivors and eliminate any ‘deviants’ not conforming to the prescribed normality.

‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ (1960) by Walter Miller.
A monastic order preserves fragmentary learning after deadly weapons have wiped out most of humankind, not realising that the fragments contain information that will one day be used by irresponsible rulers to develop and deploy similar weapons.

‘Cat’s Cradle’ (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut.
An ailing ruler controls his people with a mixture of physical threats and the secret promotion of quasi-religious doctrines that will breed a sense of contentment. A substance that can destroy the world then falls into the hands of this ruler.

‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (1968) by Philip K. Dick.
Android slaves are made to do all the dirty work and subject to arbitrarily shortened lifespan. When they question if there should be alternative arrangements for their existence, they are hunted down one by one.

‘The Lathe of Heaven’ (1971) by Ursula Le Guin.
A doctor discovers his patient can alter realities through his dreams, and seeks to change things better for the world and himself. But each attempt to bring about a new utopia is ruined by overlooked details or unforeseen twists.

‘The Running Man’ (1982) by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman).
In a society structured purely for the profit of rich corporations, a destitute man is forced to go on a reality TV show where he will get money to pay for his sick wife’s treatment, if he survives being hunted down by professional killers.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985) by Margaret Atwood.
An oppressive regime uses force to quash dissent and deploys religion to reduce women to the roles of wives, child-bearers and servants. A resistance movement emerges but it is hard to tell who fights for it and who is a government agent.

‘The Children of Men’ (1992) by P. D. James.
As for some unknown reason, children can no longer be conceived, the government takes on absolute power to determine whose lives are to be curtailed, and what to do about the dwindling labour supply and the end of the human race.

‘Parable of the Sower’ (1993) by Octavia E. Butler.
With the extreme rich living in their own protected domain, everyone else descends into abject poverty, with many becoming vulnerable to being robbed and killed by others. A young woman hopes to escape and build a new, fairer community.

‘The Ice People’ (1998) by Maggie Lee.
In a bleak future where, in the midst of the returning ice age, men and women are divided into antagonistic camps, food is scarce, robotic pets are turned into killing machines, lawlessness threatens to destroy everyone.

Political Engagement of the Surreal Kind

[Below are extracts from my interview with Shout Out UK, about the thinking behind my novel, Whitehall through the Looking Glass, and its predecessor, Kuan’s Wonderland.]

Your last book was called Kuan’s Wonderland, I’m sure most of our readers will have not failed to miss the reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. How does Whitehall Through the Looking Glass follow on from your last book, and why did you choose to make such explicit reference to Alice in both titles?

Lewis Carroll was fascinated with logical puzzles and he created surreal worlds in his stories to engage readers, old and young, in thinking about those puzzles when a more formal presentation of them would have bored them. I’ve always been a great admirer of Carroll. But for me, the surreal worlds I create are to engage people in thinking about political puzzles – what is wrong with certain forms of society? what can be done about them? Kuan’s Wonderland is more of an allegorical tale – it’s part ‘Animal Farm’, part ‘Star Trek’, but turns out to be something completely different with the final twist. Whitehall through the Looking Glass is in part a prequel to Kuan’s Wonderland, but also takes the story beyond where the first novel ended. It’s essentially a political thriller – a mix of ‘1984’, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and Sinclair Lewis’ ‘It Can’t Happen Here’.

Why do you think a novel is such a great form through which to explore political ideas?


It gives the writer the opportunity to paint a vivid picture of what would happen if certain political ideas and practices win out against others. Not many people enjoy reading through detailed policy analyses or dense expositions of political theories. But few can resist a good story. It is particularly powerful when you can present the reader with both characters they can come to empathise with, and characters they can look upon with derision. Once drawn into the fictional universe, they relate to events and problems with far greater intensity than they would in relation to abstract facts and figures.

Upon who did you model the characters that dominate and reside within your Whitehall?

Nearly all the characters in the novel owe something to people I have met or worked with in Whitehall, especially in the senior civil service. There is no simple one-to-one correspondence. Each fictional figure is a composite drawn from a number of real-life people, with in many cases a good dose of Dickensian exaggeration stirred in.

How did you conceive the ideas behind this book? What inspired this vision of the future in politics, social dynamics and technology?


After my first novel, Kuan’s Wonderland, which was set in what appeared to be an other-worldly realm, I wanted to turn to the world we inhabit. And three trends struck me as more menacing than anything else: first, the way plutocrats were tightening their grip on government policies; secondly, how the public were increasingly deflected by the media controlled by large corporations so they overlooked the key political issues of the day; and thirdly, the rapid technological development that was making data capture about every minute aspect of our lives a simple and routine task. I asked myself what it would look like if these trends were to continue unabated, and the corporate elite at the heart of all of them were able to pull them together into a strategy of dominance. The Consortium was born.

In the book you describe ‘The Consortium’ a league of large corporations acting together to exercise total dominance over the UK and US, do you see big business being able to put aside concerns over their own balance sheets and stop competing with one another in order to act with solidarity for the greater consolidation of power to big business?



The powerful, be they medieval barons or modern corporate giants, have always zigzagged between fighting amongst themselves and joining forces to crush their common enemy. I don’t think they can stay united on a permanent basis, and the novel hints at internal problems within the Consortium as time goes on. But there will be times when they think the gain in coming together is great enough to make it worth their while to eliminate those who get in their way. The law is the only thing that has historically stood in the way of monopolies and cartels, it shouldn’t be surprising that given half a chance, big businesses will rewrite the law to enable them to grow richer and stronger without any serious competition.

How closer do things like TTIPs (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and the obsession of successive government with Public/Private partnership get us to the world of Whitehall Through the Looking Glass?


TTIP, Public-Private Finance Initiatives, corporate lobbying on an industrial scale, party donations followed by the award of billions of pounds’ worth of public contracts, board positions waiting for government Ministers when they leave office, secondment of top accountancy firms’ staff into government to advise on the drafting of tax regulations before the same staff return to their firms to advise their clients on tax avoidance – these all suggest that we are not far from the world of Whitehall through the Looking Glass. Large corporations have been securing an insidiously powerful influence over every major aspect of government. If you look at what billionaires such as the Koch brothers are doing in America, and how the Republican Party is becoming simply the political wing of transnational corporations, the nightmare scenario of the novel is really not far off at all.

How large a role do you think there is for fiction and literary arts to get people involved in politics?


There is huge potential to use fiction – novels, drama, films – to get more people to take an active interest in politics. As an academic and an activist, I’m very familiar with the expectations different people have in different contexts. Some people want detailed arguments, statistics, and critical analyses. Some want rousing speeches and rallying calls. But for those who are not open to either of these approaches, we need to go back to the oldest form of human engagement – storytelling. Weave a good tale and let people see what they make of the heroes and villains. Few political writers are making use of popular fiction to reach the public; and not enough people at the forefront of literature are prepared to use their art in the cause of politics for fear of being dismissed as partisan. But hopefully, Whitehall through the Looking Glass, and Kuan’s Wonderland will show what dystopian novels can really do for political engagement. During the Adult Learners’ Week this summer, for example, I [worked] with WEA to run an event called ‘A Novel Exploration of Inequality’, [to] consider how sci-fi/fantasy fiction can help to raise political interest. And the Equality Trust is promoting Kuan’s Wonderland and a companion learning guide as part of their 'Young Person’s Guide to Inequality'.

Dystopian Essays

What can dystopian fiction tell us about the society in which it is written? What do different approaches reveal about the concerns of the authors and how they want to tackle the underlying threats? What forms of utopia risk degenerating into dystopia?

Here are 10 essays on dystopian themes you may find of interest:

'Dystopian Origins: how did we get here?': on what gave rise to the dystopian genre.

'The Politics of Control: Huxley, Orwell or Burdekin?': comparing Huxley, Orwell, and their lesser known contemporary, Katherine Burdekin, whose novel, Swastika Night is insightful and terrifying.

'Triffids, High-Rise or Lord of the Flies': on the common themes of lawlessness and disorder in three contrasting novels.

'Utopian Jekyll & Dystopian Hyde': on how utopian intentions can turn into dystopian rule in practice.

'Power Disparity & Dystopian Breakdown': on the central theme of widening power gaps as a precursor to dystopian nightmares.

'The ‘Good’, ‘Bad’ & ‘Ugly’ in Dystopian Fiction': comparing the political targets of different dystopian novels and what they reveal about their authors' attitudes towards social issues.

'Cooperative Gestalt & Dystopian Fiction': on the core communitarian themes and their relationship to the cooperative gestalt in the writings of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and James Harrington.

'Contesting Dystopian Visions': on the recurring dystopian concern with the concentration of wealth in an elite and the consequences for the vulnerable masses.

'Dystopia Goes to Hollywood': a look at the popularity of dystopian films and the opportunities they offer to widen serious political discussions.

'Redrawing the Utopia-Dystopia Roadmap': on some of the ideas that may inform a remapping of utopian and dystopian writings.

Utopian Jekyll & Dystopian Hyde

Utopian portraits of the ideal society and dystopian depictions of dysfunctional governance may at first glance appear to be as different as heaven and hell. With the former, perfected laws and customs are shown to banish negative dispositions, and enable harmony and cooperation to prevail. Whereas with the latter, people are seen as systematically oppressed, and caught up in fear and atrocities fuelled by the worst of human traits.

But the utopian impulse may actually have a much closer and darker relationship with dystopian scenarios. J. C. Davis, in his book, ‘Utopia and the Ideal Society’, reviewed the works of a wide range of utopian writers and found one distinctive feature that characterised their output – namely, the prescription of detailed rules and practices that regulated human interactions to such an extent that individual spontaneity was largely displaced by socio-economic rigidity.

Davis noted that utopian blueprints contained extensive proposals on the premise that these would transform human interactions comprehensively. Unlike the reform projects of thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Robert Owen, whose ideas were often considered too pragmatically open-ended to be truly utopian, the utopian plans in the tradition from Thomas More to Edward Bellamy were admired precisely because they offered to bring about total social unity in every key sphere of life.

Although the reformist followers of Bacon and Owen have often been attacked by critics for not coming up with a guaranteed path to reinvent society within a fixed timescale, they are the ones who have steered progressive changes over time to bring about the tangible betterment of people’s lives. By contrast, utopian ideas have historically had three outcomes.

First, they had been taken up in small communities but the demands on those involved would prove to be too much, and those communities were not sustained beyond a short period of time. In the second type of cases, their proponents adapted their practices so that on the one hand, human nature would not be forced into remoulding itself to fit a purist ideal, while on the other hand, collaboration with the wider society was developed to pave the way for gradualist reforms elsewhere.

Thirdly, there were the notorious cases of blueprints for the ideal society uncompromisingly implemented on a national scale even though they had not been embraced by the general public. In all these cases, the new laws and arrangements imposed on society to make everyone conform to the unquestionable ideal led inevitably to repression.

Ultimately the problems facing society can only be tackled effectively if we engage in a process of inclusive and continuous learning. By adapting their proposals experimentally in the light of what people think and feel about them, the Baconians and Owenites successfully secured improvements for our common wellbeing. But anyone proclaiming to have come up with an absolutely thorough and unquestionable solution that has to be delivered without exception, regardless of what subsequent experience may show, can only be inviting us to go down the most dangerous path.

Dystopian writers have been at the forefront in exposing utopian fantasies – the communist revolutionary, the plutocratic ‘free’ market, the fundamentalist theocracy, or the dogmatic anarchist – and their warnings must continue to be heeded. Otherwise, the utopian Jekyll would once again transform into a dystopian Hyde.

--
Read ‘Whitehall through the Looking Glass’, for a satirical dystopian novel about an attempt to create the perfect corporate-run society.

Or give ‘Kuan’s Wonderland’ a try, for an allegorical dystopian novel about an ideal world where everyone lives in pre-planned harmony.