Cliff mentioned that in the Ottoman empire, assassination was the way to go to assure succession, and that it must have been weird knowing all your siblings and half siblings would have to die for you to achieve power.
In Jenn Lyons' The Ruin of Kings, there is a battle royale that happens in a prescribed space, so the king can't choose the Heir.
Kat wanted to see a story told from the perspective of someone who is not wily or strong and is stuck just waiting for someone to off them - the story of the non-victor. In this vein, "I, Claudius" was mentioned, as was Pillars of the Earth. An interesting story might involve someone saying, "Screw you, I'm just going to live as long as I can." In the Vorkosigan novels, everyone thinks they can co-opt Miles or his brother. Kate felt that a Peter story would be amazing. Cliff mentioned The Goblin Emperor, in which an unexpected heir turns up because everyone else was killed in an airship accident.
Historically, Henry IV became king of France when the previous king had no heir, and they had to search back along the genealogy and back down again to find someone who had blood relation to the royalty. They found Henry IV in Navarre and told him he was the king of all France.
Much is implied about a society by the kinds of competitions they set up - both for power successions and for other purposes.
Kat wanted to see more exploration of cooperative games as opposed to winner-take-all games. What would a world look like if it were based on cooperation and measured by cooperation? Even D&D has an us vs them mentality.
When you are looking at a siege, it's easy to think about how the people who are trapped might get supplies, but make sure also to consider how the besiegers get their supplies.
There is a large-scale assumption in narrative that we have to have competition, particularly antagonists.
Our sense of competition is often gendered. How do competitions designed by men or boys differ from those designed by women or girls? Would there be differences with non-binary gender?
Cliff told us that Babylon 5 featured coexisting competitive and cooperative philosophies which ended up striving against each other.
Do we need to have competition in order to foster excellence? How else might it be done?
Competitions often create pressure to divide groups by different criteria, and the selection process can be a site of shaming.
In classes, we tell people to do group projects without teaching them how to do group projects.
We ask companies to compete for bids on government projects without considering how competition encourages people to cut corners, which harms results.
Not all stories require people to compete against one another. We also imagine adventure stories that pit people against their environment, etc.
Why don't we have more stories about seed growers?
Cliff said he liked hacky sack because it was a cooperative game. He noted that Stephen King's The Stand involved people who were trying to build community. The show Jeremiah talked about trying to rebuild civilization after an apocalyptic disease.
Paul mentioned that the game Dead of Winter requires players to cooperate to win. He also mentioned that Spirit Island, while it has colonial tropes, has spirits working together against colonial invasion.
Kat talked about the game Terraforming Mars, which is not cooperative, but in which people can find themselves inadvertently contributing to each other's success. Settlers of Catan, she described as "let's go invade this place with individualistic goals." Monopoly is clearly competitive, and was originally designed to teach the evils of capitalism, but was interpreted by most in a non-satirical way. It's essentially "Gentrification, the game."
In Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, the alien species called the Oankali does not have a competitive drive but an acquisitive one. Butler specifically examines the ins and outs of these differences. It does feature xenophobic humans, and the Oankali have a dodgy sense of consent. It's not posited as a utopia. The Oankali's critique of humans is that they are both intelligent and hierarchical. The story plays into fears of someone taking your germ line.
Dune has a grand game competition. The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge has a foot race. Game of Thrones has a lot of bloody battles. Nine Princes in Amber also centers a competition, but the pursuit of the throne changes to a larger project.
What it would be like if a potential leader were required to have a 5 year, a 50 year, and a 500 year plan?
Paul recommended Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire.
Romance often involves competition in the form of rivals for a relationship. Why not have that become a three-way relationship?
Kat said she's seeing more poly stories, but none that have made a major splash. Kate mentioned that there were such relationships in Sarah Gailey's hippo stories. Kat said Laurell K. Hamilton has some non-monogamy. There is an audience for fiction that features such relationships but perhaps less of one at the publisher level.
We all felt we would love to see "Cozy Marvel stories" where the day to day life of Marvel superheroes got explored.
At that point I brought up The Hunger Games. One of the reasons I feel this is such a brilliant series is that Suzanne Collins gets readers deeply invested in the outcome of the games, and then points out that readers have become complicit with the viewers of Panem. There is a tension between rooting for the hero and indicting our sense of competition.
The book A Player of Games by Iain Banks features a person paid to go and disrupt an empire. In this story the winner fo a game competition becomes Emperor. The book critiques the notion of competitive games. At the end, you find yourself wondering who won and who lost, what is left for the empire, and whether the intervention was good.
Competitions are not all one versus one. They can be one versus many, or many versus many. Many times, competition is not equal or simple.
Ritual combat is a way to simplify a larger competition, but it has drawbacks.
Many competitions are rigged. Either the competition itself is skewed so not everyone has an equal chance, or entry to the competition is limited.
Cliff recommended the book Interface by Stephen Bury, talking about electoral politics in the United states and how it functions differently from what we are told. He said he found it very disturbing. Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for the writing team of Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George.
We touched briefly on the question of competition in writing. Are we competing with each other? This question's answer depends a lot on the gatekeepers of canon. Marginalized people can be told that there are limits on the number of stories about their issues, while mainstream people get fifty slots for the same kinds of stories. Outside the mainstream, people thus get forced into competition. If you are visible, you end up doing emotional labor. Are you allowed to be just "a writer" or are you slotted into a niche?
Genre culture can be very competitive because of the limited number of slots for writing workshops, awards, etc. It often runs along socioeconomic lines. Money should always flow to the writer, but we are often called upon to make investments in our careers like paying for workshops, or even developmental editing etc. If you have limitations on your free time, this can also become a factor, when workshops run for long periods of time.
We didn't even have a chance to do much about science fiction and fantasy sports! Sigler has a football-based novel with aliens. Fonda Lee wrote Zeroboxer. Matt Wallace has a book with wrestling martial arts. Run Time by S.B. Divya and Achilles' Choice also came up in this context. We wondered whether people are still publishing sports stories, and whether demographic changes have influenced this at all. Kate Elliott has sport in Court of Fives. J.K. Rowling created quidditch. In DS9, aliens play baseball.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Tuesday, April 2 to discuss Monuments. I hope you can join us!
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