However, before we go into detail on the Draka stuff, let me take a moment to address something that some few in my audience may be wondering about:

Why is it necessary to only write 'moral fiction', in which, presumably, wrong fails and right prevails? Why can’t a writer, if he or she so chooses, decide to explore an arguably more ‘realistic’ form of fantasy, in which darkness, violence, immorality, and viciously anti-social violence are shown to be triumphant over gentility, empathy, and those who behave in a more socially enlightened manner? Why should that be so thoroughly objectionable, to the point where I simply insist that Stirling’s Snowbrother, and now, his Draka series, are simply morally unacceptable as works of fiction?

As a long time debater, I'm well aware that the argument 'just BECAUSE' is never particularly persuasive. Yet in this case, it seems to me so self evident that it is a writer's basic social responsibility to write moral fiction, especially if that writer is aware that they have a large audience who will be reading, and therefore, most likely, influenced by, their work, that I'm almost forced to simply default to it.

It's like explaining why we need a space program to one of these emotional infants who wants to run the government like a business, and who insists that every single thing that gets public funding show a sizable profit. How do you explain to someone with an abacus for a soul, that mankind's first, best destiny is to be an explorer, and space is the frontier we have left?

Similarly, it seems to me you either get the basic social contract, or you don't. If you do, then you won't need to have it explained to you that a writer... a published author... is someone who is so intrinsically dependent on the web of laws, of intricate social mechanisms governing acceptable and unacceptable behavior, on the various economic and moral and ethical covenants that all people of good will, or who possess even the most vestigial level of enlightened self interest, everywhere, subscribe to, on some basic level, that it utterly behooves them... it is simply such an author's duty, as well as their responsibility, to the society as a whole that supports them... to not undermine that society and its covenants by creating strongly influential pop culture artifacts specifically intended for profitable mass consumption that will corrupt and corrode the very foundations of that society.

Honestly, it just seems like I shouldn't have to explain all that. But, there are doubtless some out there who have never grasped the social contract, and for all I know, one or two of them are reading this now. So, the Cliff Note's Version:

If you can survive on your own, without any help from anyone else at all, without any contribution whatsoever from the efforts or abilities of anyone else, and you choose to do so then, fine. You do not need to subscribe or adhere to any social contract. You may, if you wish to, immediately travel beyond the perimeter of any and every society of mankind and there, in the anarchistic wilderness, make your own laws, beholden to no other man, engaging in your own personal Manichaean struggle with very forces of chaos themselves. And hurray for you.

If, on the other hand, you cannot create your own shelter, clothing, food and potable water from raw materials, would like to be able to go to sleep while feeling relatively secure that you won't be killed and eaten by some predator as soon as you do so, and are not entirely confident in your ability to protect yourself while awake in your newly chosen, utterly savage and lawless environment from whatever threats there may be to your safety and well being... if you'd like to enjoy something created by the labor and efforts of another person, if you think at some point you may need to make use of the hard won skills and abilities of another person (like a health care professional, say), well, then, guess what... you're part of society. Yea, my brother, verily, my sister, I say unto thee, you need society, or even if you don't, you choose to benefit from associating with society, and however much you may dislike the notion, you owe society something back.

That’s why we call it the ‘social contract’. It isn’t necessarily anything as structured (or profoundly unrealistic) as ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, but still, a social contract does basically depend on civilized people of mutual good will all agreeing that they won’t stalk each other through the streets, beat each other over the head, steal each other’s chattels, rape each other’s unconscious bodies, and then either enslave each other, or just pop each other into the stewpot for dinner.

Now, I'm not a social extremist. I've never much liked the whole 'if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem' idea, because it offends my fundamental desire to be lazy and utterly self centered. I personally think that it's perfectly feasible to not be part of either the problem or the solution; to, in fact, be socially inert. But I do think that, since I do not kid myself that I could survive for so much as seven successive picoseconds without the social matrix that surrounds and supports me (my eyesight, without corrective lenses, is very nearly non-functional; I'm vastly overweight, I have bad teeth, my only useful skill is typing, which has no value in a non-technological, subsistence level society, and frankly, I'm the sort of naturally obnoxious, dislikable person who would be the first one the cannibal tribes chucked into the bouillabaisse about four hours after the fall of civilization), I do owe that basic social matrix, at the very least, the consideration that I will not do stuff to actively attempt to subvert or undermine it. And, as a wannabe professional writer myself, that very much includes, not creating works of fiction in which my protagonists perform viciously anti-social deeds and seem to prosper therein.

People read that stuff, and they think to themselves "gee, you know, if Hannibal Lecter can escape from prison, triumph over all his enemies, and in the end kidnap and brainwash the delectable Starling into being his slut puppy, well, my God... why not be a sociopath and run around killing, eating, torturing, and raping people? I mean, shit, sounds like fun to me!"

Which brings us neatly back around to S.M. Stirling's brilliant, but fundamentally flawed, Draka novels.

The Draka conceit is a very well conceived one, an alternate history that turns on the smallest and yet most plausible of historical variations. Towards the end of the Revolutionary War, the British take over control of the southern tip of Africa from the Dutch, and use the inglorious colony thereon as a dumping ground and refuge for the Hessian mercenaries and former Tory colonists of North America who find themselves unwelcome in the newly independent United States. A hundred years or so later, the 'Drakeland' colony (named after Sir Francis Drake) gets a fresh influx of Yankee-hating refugees, when the bitter diehards from the losing, Southern side of the Civil War emigrate there, as well. (Bear in mind, there’s nothing wildly unlikely about any of this; the Brits did own the Cape territory for a while, and they also did ally themselves with the Confederacy during the Civil War; not for moral reasons… Britain was one of the first of the civilized nations to outlaw slavery… but for economic ones… Britain wanted cheap textiles from the South.)

'Drakia' is a harsh land, one where the former European/North American settlers are perpetually outnumbered and surrounded on every side by murderously hostile African natives. This gives rise to a violently xenophobic, insular, and extremely martial society, which in order to survive must dominate the less technologically advanced savages around them, slaughtering the utterly intransigent by the thousands and domesticating the more pliable ‘bushmen’ as much needed slave labor.

Stirling points out that this sets up an unstable social dynamic, whereby the 'Draka' are always in the minority, constantly surrounded by a barely domesticated slave race that could, at any time, rebel against their vastly outnumbered masters and slaughter them all to the last man, woman and child. In order to prevent this, the Draka create and come to believe in, as a culture and as a society, their very own uberman mythos, a self fulfilling prophecy they set about bringing into being by sending their children off to military boarding schools from near infancy onward, transforming their future generations into training hardened, athletic and intellectually overachieving near superhumans.

More important even than the hardening of their children's bodies through lifelong martial training, however, is the hardening of the will that comes from the lifelong steeping of the nascent Draka in their poisonous and toxically anti-humanistic 'Will To Dominate' mythos. For the Draka to continue to survive in their unstable and untenable position, they must firmly believe that they are an elite race, born and destined to rule all non-Draka the way humans rule the beasts of the field, and more importantly, they must continually impress this mythos on their slaves, which always by necessity outnumber the Draka, as well. If ever the Draka ‘serf’ class rises up in universal rebellion, the Draka will all die, and they know it. Therefore, they have to make this Uberman mythos real, both to themselves and to those they have conquered. It’s not simply a matter of convenience, it’s literally life and death for all Draka everywhere.

Over generations, the Draka truly come to believe that they are superhumans; literally higher on the food chain than non-Draka. To the Draka, all non-Draka are serfs, either already domesticated and useful, and therefore entitled to the beneficent protection and dominance of the Draka ruling class, or feral and savage and dangerous, still not yet brought 'Under the Yoke'... something that they inevitably will and must be, for the Draka to survive as a people, a culture, and a race.

The Draka culture is probably the best and most utterly hateful embodiment of sheer sadistic evil I have ever seen in a fictional milieu, and Stirling brings them to life in chilling four dimensionality, making them seem to live, breathe, strut, swagger and sneer across the pages of his first three Draka novels, Marching Through Georgia, Under The Yoke, and The Stone Dogs. And beyond simply being one of the most utterly fascinating literary studies of pure twisted loathsomeness ever done, these novels are wonderfully entertaining adventure fiction, as well. Stirling weaves an epic, multigenerational tale of a monstrous and yet still palpably human Draka family, the von Shrakenbergs, following Erik von Shrakenberg from his early adulthood as a minor officer during World War II, helping the Draka defeat the Nazis and secure all of Europe for their global 'Domination of the Draka', up through Erik's eventual ascension to the title of Archon, the Draka's highest elective office and leader of their government. Along the way we see other von Shrakenbergs have their own adventures, including, in probably the most fascinating twist, two agents of the Alliance for Democracy, the American led social, moral, and political opposition to the Draka, who, although they aren't really more than peripherally aware of the connection, are actually von Shrakenbergs themselves, due to their mother being repeatedly raped in Draka occupied France just after WWII, before she was smuggled out at the end of Under The Yoke.

That Stirling is fascinated with his viciously sociopathic creations is obvious throughout the series, and not necessarily a flaw for the bulk of it. Where another writer would have been content to let the Draka be flatly black, cardboard, undifferentiated Klingon or Orc stereotypes, investing detail and dimensionality only in their heroic counterparts, Stirling focuses much of his narrative on Draka characters, often making them his protagonists, if not necessarily his heroes. This gives the Draka a truly fascinating credibility, and makes their world a very vivid and believable one... and makes the reader long, through the several thousand pages of Stirling's stirring narrative, to finally see the Draka crushed into smoking, flaming goo once and for all, in the final conclusion of the epic.

Unfortunately, Stirling proves to be more than merely fascinated with the Draka, he's enraptured, bewitched, and ensorcelled by them, and somewhere around the middle of The Stone Dogs, he abandons any pretensions he might have had towards writing a moral conclusion to this series and simply (completely unacceptably) lets the Draka win in the Final (nuclear) War between them and the Alliance, chasing the last remnants of democratic, egalitarian human self-government off the near-ruined Earth, setting the stage for the horrors of an utterly Draka dominated globe for the next thousand years…. which he then takes ghoulish delight in detailing at great and enormous length for the first several thousand words of the truly reprehensible Drakon.

As a climax to one of science fiction's better story arcs, the Draka’s triumph over the Alliance for Democracy is a moral and ethical grotesquerie, and while The Stone Dogs is a beautifully written piece of fiction, and one of the finer pieces of speculative science fiction I've ever read, the disfiguring blotch of this completely intolerable resolution makes it impossible for me to fully reread the entire final volume with any real pleasure. In fact, it's probably the reason Under The Yoke remains my favorite Draka novel, since this is the only one where the Draka arguably lose in the end... and even then, they don't lose much, and the final resolution of The Stone Dogs makes even that minor victory on the part of the Alliance utterly moot.