I regard my own proposal of S.M. Stirling's Under the Yoke for the Prometheus with a certain ambivalence. The novel is profoundly disturbing, not least in an unresolved tension between its explicit and implicit statements about its subject, a tension which the skill of its author only heightens. That subject is slavery, as envisioned through an imaginary society founded throughout on slavery and on military conquest — a thoroughly convincing and ugly dystopian vision. At the very least, though, I think such visions deserve to be seen by libertarians, if only for their power to remind us of what we are struggling against.

Under the Yoke is the second in a series of novels. The first, Marching through Georgia, was primarily a war novel, though set in an alternative history, in its world the British seized southern Africa during the American War of Independence; and offered land there to the Loyalists and the hessian mercenaries driven from the new United State—land which became the colony of Draka and eventually the Domination of Draka. Over the next hundred and fifty years the Draka conquered Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia, and in World War II were able to fight it out with Nazi Germany in the Caucasus — hence the novel's title. They also created a society where forty million citizens could control five hundred million serfs through absolute commitment to military skill and harsh punishment of the slightest revolt. Stirling was already doing something unusual in making explicit the kind of social conditions that nurture and grow up around the absolute military skill he portrays.

Under the Yoke portrays that society in depth. Four points of view predominate: those of two Draka citizens, a Polish man enslaved in the conquest of Europe and an American sent to Europe to encourage resistance and bring back information. Stirling presents all four with a degree of sympathy, encouraging reader involvement in the manner of Poul Anderson's earlier work, and he gradually links them together in building up to a vivid climax. His writing is mostly skillful, though in one chapter he began a flashback so suddenly that I didn't realize what was happening until halfway in and felt quite lost for a bit.

In many ways, the Drakas are best compared to the slaveholding societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Stirling is obviously aware of this, and makes many references to classical civilization; part of the Draka's history was an early nineteenth-century classical revival, inspired by the rediscovery of the lost literature of antiquity in a northern Africa ruin, and classical allusions are constantly in their thoughts. A speech at the end of the first chapter, for example, gives Aristotle's rationale for slavery — that some human beings are slaves by nature, the sign of this being that, faced with a choice of submission or death, they choose submission — with chilling precision.

Stirling has worked out the details of Draka society and culture with amazing skill. He avoids two dangerous traps in this project: he neither makes them an obvious imitation of any one other society nor shows them as monolithically unified. They have the complexities and conflicts of real peoples with real histories. Their statism is no mere ideological fantasy.

The basis of that statism is a unified project of conquering and enslaving other lands and peoples and ultimately, it appears, the world — though at the end of Under the Yoke they and the American-led Alliance for Democracy are in a nuclear standoff. They are prepared to use the harshest methods in accomplishing this. Slaves are harshly punished for any fault; for violence against a citizen, or — except in the case of janissary soldiers — for simple possession of any weapon, the penalty is death, commonly by impalement; often an entire group is punished if one of its members commits a substantial offense. The security forces, which are one of the state's two principal branches, can arrest them at any time for any reason and subject them to even worse treatment. Even at best, they are domesticated animals with no more rights than any other animals, and if they are often well cared for it is to make them serviceable to their masters and not because they have any entitlement to such care. Stirling makes all of this brutally clear in repeated scenes of appalling cruelty.

He also shows that the citizens of the Domination have no more real freedom than their slaves. They are raised from early childhood under strict discipline, aimed to shape them into superb soldiers. That discipline lasts into adulthood; for example, they are subject to regular physical examinations and can be punished for physical unfitness — such as gaining too much weight. Naturally they have universal military service for both sexes. Their reading is censored, and expressing the wrong opinions can get them arrested. A small percentage of them are subject to sterilization and institutionalization. Their economy, too, offers little freedom; the state, occupational guilds and a landowners' league over most of it and regulate the rest, looking above all to preserve reliance on slave labor against possible competition. Their ethic is one of duty; the standard exchange on parting is “Service to the state!”   “Glory to the race!”

What the citizens do have is privilege. Even the poorest of them is guaranteed a moderately comfortable income, including free medical care and free education through the university level. They are offered a variety of pleasures, including, from early adolescence, the use of slaves as sexual playthings. And above all, they have the pleasure of dominating other human beings. In the words of Tanya von Shrakenberg, one of the four major viewpoint characters, “Her sufferin' is incidental to what we do enjoy — the feelin' of another's will breakin' — leavin' obedience and humility. Pain is just another tool we use fo' the process.”

This in fact is where the novel begins to become most truly disturbing. I have described Draka society as founded on the two institutions of war and slavery; in fact it appears to be founded on three, and the third is rape. Being the victim of rape is not merely an accident of a slave's life, but a permanent condition: she — or he, for the Drakas accept homosexuality casually — has in fact no right of refusal. At most, using another's slave for sex without permission could bring a civil suit; but the slave still cannot resist and would be executed for trying.

Both men and women citizens share in this sexual exploitation, thus avoiding one of the perennial tensions of, say, the American South. (Indeed, I'm left wondering if Stirling might be a woman and one of the so-called ‘libertarian feminists’ who defend lesbian sadomasochism as the ultimate liberation of women from male-imposed servility.) <Editorial Note: Sorry to disillusion you, William, but S. M. Stirling is Steve Stirling and is male. — WAR>

The situation is not quite symmetrical, though, for while men can make use of either wenches or pettybucks as suits their fancy, women face hanging for sexual intercourse with slave men—for the Draka believe in racial purity and their women's wombs are too valuable to be wasted on slave get. Male homosexuality appears to be slightly stigmatized, never taking place ‘on stage’ in the novel; but we are shown a husband and wife, Edward and Tanya von Shrakenberg, who seem to be more sexually active with slave women — some of whom they have passed back and forth — than with each other. The first novel made a point of a brother and sister in another branch of the family taking turns sexually with the sister's maid.

In all of this, though less explicitly, Stirling has essentially reproduced the standard fantasy content of pornographic fiction. Such fiction, written almost wholly by and for men, presents scenes of heterosexual intercourse, commonly with the woman involved resisting, being forced to submit, and experiencing arousal and orgasm as a result; it shows lesbian scenes, which men commonly find stimulating; but male homosexual scenes are absent or minimized, being threatening or uncomfortable to many men. Scenes of women dominating men are also relatively rare. Stirling has all of this, combined with extensive appeals to sadism, recurrent anal and fecal references (hard to avoid in a culture which executes slaves by impalement, and an odd bit or two of bestiality — the perfect contents for a work of pornography.

An argument within the feminist movement asserts that pornography as such is inherently violent and sexist. I have never been persuaded by this, but Stirling nearly convinces me. At the very least, Under the Yoke shows how close a link can be made between the political and the sexual. This content is more troubling because Stirling's own attitude is unclear; the Draka's actions are usually explicitly condemned, but they are described in detail and in a way that conveys a hint of admiration.

Just how far does Stirling intend the reader to sympathize with the Draka? This is hard to be sure of. There is the obvious inducement of their open sensuality, modelled on that of ancient Rome. There is the subtler inducement of admiration for their virtues — for Stirling grants them a variety of virtues, ranging from a tough-minded realism that disdains any illusions about the kind of society they have built, to a genuine concern for the welfare of their human livestock, even a tenderness toward them — so long as they remain domesticated. The Draka are Nietzsche's “brute blond beasts of prey”, and invite the aesthetic delight recent decades have learned to feel in predation, mixed with a horror we have begun to leave behind: for such predators might prey upon us.

Above all, Stirling has given them the most powerful thing a novelist can grant a character: a rich, strongly flavored use of language. Here is the direct opposite of Orwell's Newspeak, not a reduced vocabulary but one enriched with loanwords, not standardization but numerous dialects, above all not blurring of detail but harsh realism. Consider, for instance, Andrew von Shrakenberg's final speech:

Yo' bourgeois have such a tiresome gravity about serious mattahs, takes a gentleman to bring the proper levity to the grave. If it's one thing I've learned in thirty-two years, it's that the only thing mo' amusin' than this farce we call life is the even more absurd farce knows as death…. So, since if one is goin' anyway, one might as well go with a grand gesture ….

With all this, I was left with the disturbing awareness at the novel's end of how much I had enjoyed reading about these human predators and with the equally disturbing suspicion that Stirling had meant me to do so. But that very enjoyment may be one of this novel's most powerful warnings to its readers. Stirling never lets you forget that you are enjoying a system of privileges built on murder and torture and exploitation. He shows you a state that fully accepts its own nature, indeed celebrates it — for example, in victory parades exactly modelled on those of ancient Rome. After reading this novel you will take opposition to the state a bit more personally, and you will feel a bit sick at the sound of the Draka's two slogans: “Service to the state!”   “Glory to the race!”