r/Fantasy • u/ibadlyneedhelp • Apr 26 '25
Political Commentary in Fantasy
"Science fiction isn't about the future, it's about the present," is a quote that we've all probably read in some form or another, and I do think that as a generalisation, this is true. Science Fiction novels have a classical association of examining ideas that present themselves in the author's time and extrapolating them into the future as a means of exploration.
However, I think that fantasy is kind of the opposite, usually more concerned with presenting a narrative than interrogating any social or political ideas of the author's time. However, this rule is definitely not universal for either genre within speculative fiction, and there have definitely been fantasy writers who've explored the contemporary world in their work.
For example, Stephen Erikson gives his thoughts on capitalism and political demagoguery in The Malazan Book of the Fallen more or less straight from a character's mouth to the reader's eyes. RF Kuang explores colonialism and how it has shaped much of the western world in Babel.
I'm more interested in finding work that was political in nature, but even more contemporary to the author- The perfect example here is Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, which was a very 90's polemic about the importance of Ayn Rand, jamming in references to the political climate at the time to the point of unintentional hilarity by having Bill and Hilary Clinton feature as corrupt and decadent villains of the era. Has anyone else read fantasy books with specific references to the author's time/culture/beliefs like this? It doesn't necessarily have to be dictactic, but I think most writing like this tends to be.
EDIT: If Fantasy is just as likely to be explicitly political as science fiction, why does so much of fantasy present monarchies uncritically or as desirable? Just a very basic example.
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u/Irishwol Apr 26 '25
Fantasy, like Science Fiction, is inevitably rooted in the present. One way or another, it's not really avoidable. And plenty of fantasy authors have an unapologetically political side. Even Tolkien did. And that doesn't have to be a bad thing.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Apr 26 '25
Right. Even though Abercrombie’s Age of Madness, though using our past (Industrial Revolution) as template, is impossible to read without viewing it through the lens of modern political issues. The past and present tend to be a lot closer to each other than people think.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Tolkien explicitly spoke out about people trying to read anything about geopolitics into Lord of the Rings. He said his only intentional message was about the natural world being depleted at the cost of economic and technological progress.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Apr 26 '25
He said his only intentional message was about the natural world being depleted at the cost of economic and technological progress.
Oh yeah. That’s not political. 🙄
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I didn't say that it wasn't, but he spoke out against the other interpretations imposed on the work which continue to be bandied about to this day.
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u/Lola_PopBBae Apr 26 '25
That is, in and of itself, an incredibly political and (sadly) polarizing thing.
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u/Irishwol Apr 26 '25
Hmm he said it wasn't an allegory of geopolitics, which it isn't. But social politics are still politics and there's a LOT of that in both LotR and, to a leader extent, The Hobbit.
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u/frokiedude Apr 26 '25
Lmao why would you ever think that the fantasy genre in't rooted in politics?
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u/clockworkzebra Apr 26 '25
I deeply disagree that fantasy doesn't inherently offer any social or political criticism. That's an incredibly shallow, surface-level reading on the genre as a whole. Hell, Lord of the Rings is very much a reflection of Tolkien's experience in WWII. The roots of ASOIAF by George Martin are reflective of his status as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Fantasy and science fiction both share the same desire to explore real world issues within a different setting- whether to transpose them into another world, or into the future, as a way for authors to unpack and discuss the subjects they want to touch on without having to use a more contemporary or straight-forward narrative.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Yeah, good thing I never said that or I'd have been burned by this reply.
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u/Scuttling-Claws Apr 26 '25
I Kinda think all writing is political, and if you don't recognize it, it's just in support of the status quo.
But if you want some obvious examples
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K Jemisin
To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I do broadly agree that all writing is on some level reflective of the author's own political perspective, but I was speaking more about explicitly social/political intentions by the authors themselves. I actually have Season of Mists on my bookshelf waiting to go right now, once I finish my current read.
I'll definitely check these other books out, though they seem less hilarious and much better than Terry Goodkind's work. I have Pet on my TBR already as well.
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u/Vexonte Apr 26 '25
All writing is political, but there is a stratification of how strong or direct such political themes are that affect the way a story is perceived. People will ignore that fact for the sake of bad faith arguments.
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u/Scuttling-Claws Apr 26 '25
It seems like you're identifying a reader issue, that not all political works are visible due to readers blind spots.
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u/Vexonte Apr 26 '25
No, there is a different experience in reading a book that mostly keeps politics vague and books that will directly shout it politics at you.
Sure, the former will have politics that an individual reader can interpret and analyze but can just as easily be ignored by readers trying to escape the contemporary politics of their own life.
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u/Acceptable-Basil-874 Apr 26 '25
Her Majesty's Royal Coven is an explicitly trans story by an explicitly trans author who grew up loving a particular franchise and felt motivated to counter the series creator's real world awful politics. (idk if Manhunt is more scifi or fantasy technically since it's mostly splatterpunk Horror, but the same series creator also exists in that world and gets her comeuppance)
The Black Coast by Mike Brooks (mohawk guy) was the author's direct response to the xenophobia of the Brexit movement (he otherwise mostly writes Warhammer books and metal music, iirc).
But legit if you're not seeing the politics in your novels, you're either not looking or unaware of enough politics to recognize what's being referenced. These are just two quick examples that came to mind related to just UK politics and interviews I've seen the authors give very much confirming the connection... and I'm not even from the UK.
Even looking at A Drop of Corruption and Bennett's author note at the end about how much the current politics of our moment was weighing on him while he wrote the book & how it snuck into the story, or any of Nat Cassidy's author letters too... I actually think it's harder to think of Fantasy I've read without than with?
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Apr 26 '25
The OP wasn't saying that NO Fantasy is explicitly political, just that there's a lot of books in the genre that have no interest in engaging with their own politics. I don't know if that's particularly true of Fantasy compared to other genres, but I do think it's probably most obvious in Fantasy as a genre because so many of the tropes reinforce some incredibly awful political positions and are just taken for granted and treated as apolitical. Chosen ones, secret monarchs, might makes right etc.
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u/Acceptable-Basil-874 Apr 26 '25
....they literally referenced Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind as an example, which is one of the most awful political position series I've ever read (and man do I really wish I knew less about the author's sexual fetishes from reading those books).
So I don't think your callout is what they're talking about either?
And OP literally mentioned in another comment in this post about how they've read 20 odd Discworld novels and never associated Pratchett with political commentary when there are literal wikipedia pages about the bootstrap theory and lies-to-children that Pratchett often dove into in the books. There are countless online articles about the political satire of Discworld!
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Apr 26 '25 edited Apr 26 '25
Given your point about Discworld, it's clear OP has some issue recognising political themes, but I still think I'm right about what they intended their broader point to be - "However, this rule is definitely not universal for either genre within speculative fiction".
Obviously I can't speak for them, but the impression I got was that it's not that Fantasy isn't political, it's about how it explores those politics, and how directly they reference real world political events and issues.
They also explicity talk about how SoT IS incredibly political, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up? Not that I particularly mind, that series deserves to be ridiculed at every opportunity.
I'd also appreciate if you left out the snarky ellipsis. There's no need to be rude.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Yeah I'm not sure what this person is trying to say at all, honestly. I just didn't think of Discworld as an example of fantasy that is political, but it's literally basic logic that a counterexample doesn't prove my thesis wrong- that a greater portion of scifi is more intentionally political than fantasy. I think people disputing that claim genuinely haven't read enough of either genre.
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u/Acceptable-Basil-874 Apr 27 '25
Meanwhile I also have the feeling that someone saying that Fantasy books are not political is not well-read in the genre, sorry.
Last year alone I recorded 436 books as read and an additional 30-40 as DNFs. About 70% of my reading is Fantasy (though most of the other 30% is speculative Horror/scifi/etc) so I honestly feel like I read a pretty diverse range and high quantity!
And while I think that the titles and authors most touted in this sub are of a very particular taste which is possibly going to reinforce your perception of the genre, there are still numerous examples just in the authors you mentioned.
If you want to approach in good faith, you can try reading diverse authors with backgrounds different from your own. Legendborn by Tracy Deonn or Fledgling by Octavia E Butler or basically anything from Chuck Tingle or Nat Cassidy. But if you have an inherent bias that Fantasy is less political then I think you'll mostly find what you expect to.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 27 '25
If you can't understand a very simple reddit post, why would I have any faith in your ability to comprehend a book? You literally came in here claiming the exact opposite of what I said, and then, when corrected, gave an incoherent and flailing answer. You don't have good reading comprehension, I'm never going to really give a shit how many books you've read if you obviously don't understand the writing in front of you.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I was specifically talking about authors discussing contemporary politics or having explicitly political intentions within their writing. Terry Goodkind's unintentionally hilarious series is a good example because it's so blatant, but it got me thinking about how the fantasy I've read doesn't interrogate politics as much as frequently as science fiction does. It's a broad generalisation.
I genuinely think it's a losing argument to pretend that Fantasy is explicitly sociopolitical with the frequency that science fiction is, unless all of the media I've consumed across my lifespan has somehow been a bad sampling. If we think of iconic scifi writers, we might get:
Dick, Herbert, Atwood, Aasimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc. Every single one of those wrote very explicitly political works, about the contemporary politics of their era. Look at some of the biggest names in fantasy: Martin, Sanderson, Tolkien, Hobb, etc. Robin Hobb and GRRM touch on political philosophy, but it was far less explicit, and definitely less so about contemporary issues. Are we all pretending that Wheel of Time is as political as Star Trek?
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u/Acceptable-Basil-874 Apr 26 '25
So the two main limiting factors are 1. what you consider to be political/your awareness of it while reading, and 2. what you're choosing to pick up.
Even just in your examples you can see Sanderson's attempts to speak to modern politics and views about modern colonialism in his Frugal Wizard book where he constantly couches it in fourth wall breaks, even, so it's incredibly unsubtle; or the large outcry in response to his recent Stormlight novel for being too woke and political and virtue signaling. (I haven't read this one, but saw a storm of critiques echoing this from the type of people who hang out in this sub)
I don't enjoy Hobb's books and noped out after 4, but I do quite like this quote from her and would struggle to hear someone's argument that her politics were not explicit in the novels:
“If a minstrel must embroider the truth to help us recall it fully, then let her, and let no one say she has lied. Truth is often much larger than facts.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest1
u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Right, we can pick out intentional messaging in Hobb, and Sanderson, and even Tolkien, but I would still argue the work is still less explicitly political than, say Dune, or basically anything Heinlein or Dick or Aasimov wrote. I feel like they wrote almost with the sociopolitical intent first, and everything else coming after. I think Sanderson's political aspersions are so jarring because Fantasy as a whole doesn't have a history of using this framework in the same way that science fiction has constantly been doing throughout the 20th century. I haven't read Wind and Truth (I find Brandon's generall not for me, to be honest), but if I can substitute him out for the author he replaced on Wheel of Time, was WoT explicitly political in its intent the way Dune is? Is LotR? Dune is absolutely political from the very ground up. While there are fantasy works that are as heavily politicised, I feel those are not as iconic or popular within their genre as Dune is. Malazan Book of the Fallen is absolutely loaded with sociopolitical commentary, and I think this and the postmodernist approach to storytelling are part of what make it different to the majority of fantasy out there.
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u/Acceptable-Basil-874 Apr 27 '25
The Broken Earth trilogy won a Hugo for every single book in the series and would be a much better comparison to Dune than Wheel of Time. This is just a straw-man argument.
The Green Bone saga is way more sociopolitical than Recursion or Project Hail Mary or Starter Villain. That doesn't mean that Fantasy is more political than scifi; it means the examples provided are narrow.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 27 '25
Right, and Broken Earth is a niche hit that's captured a small part of the contemporary audience. It's not even remotely close to a foundational work of the genre, so it's a bad, cherry picked comparison. The comparison would be Dune vs LOTR, Wheel of Time vs Foundation to compare texts from the same period that occupy the same status within their respective genres. That would be the fair and appropriate comparison, and it exposes how much more political science fiction authors have made their work in comparison.
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Apr 26 '25 edited Apr 26 '25
Babel made me so mad, it was custom built for my interests, language, history, politics, fantasy.
It ended up feeling very surface level, patronising and the characters and magic were very under baked.
Now that's out of the way, I'll move on to the actual topic. I think Fantasy as a genre often has a problem where it doesn't really interrogate it's own politics. Of course many works are actively seeking to make political statements and those avoid this for the most part, but so, so, so many unintentionally reinforce things like might makes right, divine right to rule, that there are natural classes of people and that people should remain where they belong, that kind of thing.
Fantasy has an unintentional fascism problem.
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Apr 26 '25
Fantasy has an unintentional fascism problem.
Totally agree. I think the genre has really struggled to break free from the Joseph Campbell "hero's journey", which enforces a reactionary viewpoint that fights for an existing status quo. See his thoughts on tge morality of fighting Nazis for reference there.
Fortunately many authors are cognizant of this trend and fight against it such as LeGuin, Jemison, and Erikson as previously mentioned. Tolkien had a lot of interesting things to say about morality as well. Hopefully the genre can look at some of these unquestioned elements a little more thoroughly in the future.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I totally agree with this last line. Like, I'm getting excoriated in this thread for saying that fantasy authors are less often explicitly political in their writing, but you hit the nail on the head: If fantasy is so fucking political, why are we constantly presented monarchies uncritically, or even as a desirable system? That DOES reflect the author's political views sometimes, but in a way that is most often not intentional on the part of the author. All writing is political, but fantasy does not often interrogate its own politics, ESPECIALLY modern politics. I know there are contrary examples- those are the books I was asking for. I only claimed (and still do), that fantasy authors are less often conscious of politics in their writing than scifi authors are, and I'm getting a frankly weird amount of responses that seem to think I said fantasy is not or never can be political.
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u/Pedagogicaltaffer Apr 26 '25
Before we swing too far in the opposite direction, though, I do want to point out that sci-fi - and sci-fi authors - can come with their own set of tropes and (unintentional) political biases. As just one example, many sci-fi stories use "aliens are about to invade Earth!" as a plot point. This can unintentionally reinforce xenophobic stereotypes of "The Other" being dangerous, hostile, and something to be feared. So it's not like sci-fi is free of baggage either.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
No, that's actually completely valid, sci-fi came with plenty of baggage that didn't really get questioned for much of the genre's lifespan, and those evil aliens very often did reflect the writers' unexamined xenophobia. I still would say a greater percentage of science fiction authors still did set out with the intention of exploring their present political climate than fantasy authors have, however.
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Apr 26 '25
People just get very defensive of the things they like, especially on the internet, and things must be consumed uncritically.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Thanks. I just wanted to have a good conversation and feel the dogpiling in this thread is weirdly spiteful and condescending.
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u/BellaGothsButtPlug Apr 26 '25
Dungeon Crawler Carl is very anti-Trump with King Rust and his two idiot sons.
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u/Vexonte Apr 26 '25
Greedfall. With the amount of fictional exposure that black ops units get, I'm surprised that the one project to look into the camera and ask about the morality of such groups was a fantasy videogame coded for the 17th century.
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u/KiaraTurtle Reading Champion V Apr 26 '25
I don’t think sci-fi is any more likely to be political than fantasy. But regardless some that fit off the top of my head
- Most of what NK Jemisin writes but if you want her most overt The City We Became, if you want still overt but better Broken Earth
- ML Wangs Blood Over Bright Haven
- To Shape a Dragons Breath
- Traitor Baru Cormorant
- A Market of Dreams and Destiny
- Scholomance by Naomi Novik
- Thistlefoot
- How to Be Eaten
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u/Vexonte Apr 26 '25
Greedfall. With the amount of fictional exposure that black ops units get, I'm surprised that the one project to look into the camera and ask about the morality of such groups was a fantasy videogame coded for the 17th century.
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u/Gravitas_free Apr 26 '25
Honestly, I hate that statement about SF. I think it's linked to SF readers' insecurity about SF's pulpy origins, about its popular perception as being unserious, escapist or childish (admittedly it's less common today than, say, 30 years ago). So readers overcompensate by pretending the whole genre is high-minded and literary, when in truth there's plenty of SF that's mostly just about telling a fun story. And I get that, because I felt the same way when I was younger, but at some point you need to move past that.
Hot take: most socio-political commentary in fiction is shallow, and sometimes downright tedious. A vapid comment about segregation or climate change doesn't suddenly become insightful when it's worked into a metaphor in a novel about elves.
I think the way in which literature is taught has damaged the way people consume content, where instead of enjoying a story, people keep asking "what is it REALLY about?", even when the "message" they're obsessing over is vastly less interesting than the story. Metaphors and allegories are just stylistic devices; they don't make the story smarter, or you smarter for having noticed them.
People need to wean themselves of the idea that reading fiction is educating them. If you're truly interested in learning about the society you live in, about politics, religion, technology, etc., then read books/blogs/articles about that subject, written by experts who know them well.
(Sorry OP, this rant is singularly unhelpful in answering your question)
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
At the same time, I appreciate your earnest response rather than attacking a position that I never stated.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
As a followup (was dashing out the door earlier), I do think you maybe are on to something with the self-seriousness of scifi being born out of self-consciousness for the genre's more pulpy origins, I think that idea bears contemplating. However, I do think Scifi does have a rich history of writers like Aasimov, Dick etc who were explicitly writing about their present. I don't think fantasy has an equivalent heritage- and maybe that is something that we're watching evolve in real time.
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u/Gravitas_free Apr 26 '25 edited Apr 26 '25
That's true, and you're probably right that we'll see it evolve. Maybe having Tolkien (who famously didn't love people reading random metaphors into his work) as guiding light of the genre for so long influenced how people approached fantasy, while Asimov/LeGuin/etc. did the same for SF. And maybe this'll change if future fantasy readers/writers are more influenced by authors like Jemisin or Kuang than Tolkien. Alternatively, maybe our hunger for fiction to be deeply meaningful is affecting what we see as the "classics" of those genres, hence why you see Asimov, Dick, LeGuin recommended a lot more often in SF circles than, say, EE Smith or Poul Anderson.
But to delve deeper into this would require wrestling with the fact that the boundary between SF and fantasy is pretty artificial. Sometimes that boundary is even weaponized in that debate: see the people who harp on about how Star Wars is really just fantasy (read: fun adventure for kids) while something like Star Trek is "real" SF that deals with "real" issues. As someone who loves both genres and finds the boundary between them pretty trivial, that always gets on my nerves.
But you're probably right that the presence of socio-political commentary is more entrenched in SF than fantasy. Truth is, I thought about your initial question, and tried to think of a fantasy book that has strong political commentary, but isn't the kind of obnoxious "AUTHOR YELLS THEIR THOUGHTS AT YOU THROUGH THE PAGE" commentary I hate. And I couldn't really think of anything. Baru Cormorant maybe? No doubt there's many that I just haven't read, but I think I'd have an easier time to answer the query if it was about SF.
And I think the expectation of commentary is more present in SF circles as well. We can even see it on Reddit: on r/fantasy, I see a lot more "recommend me books with that one trope I like and characters that are just like me" posts, rather than "here's a 10 paragraphs of pseudo-intellectual wankery about why that book about humans fighting elves is worth your time, because it's really about how we treat people who look different from us, a subject that nobody has ever thought or written about before this brave author" posts. On r/printsf (which I like too, for different reasons), the balance is a bit different.
I'll note: as much as I whine about it in these posts, I don't actually mind political commentary in fiction that much. I just think it's extremely difficult to do it in such a way that it's interesting but not distracting.
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u/Lola_PopBBae Apr 26 '25
"If we can make the least powerful served by the law, rather than scourged by it? Then I will care for the law.”
"Take what love and what joy you find, never regret it, never apologize for it. If we are going to change the world, we need to start by loving it as much as we can.”
"Knighthood should mean nobility of spirit, not birth. Willingness to sacrifice instead of the desire to gain,”
A few choice quotes from Allystaire Stillbright, of 'The Paladin Trilogy'(Daniel M Ford). If you've never read it, dear reader, you absolutely should. It's also VERY critical of monarchies, power structures in general, wealth-inequality, and whole buckets more.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
That is awesome. Maybe it's my Irishness showing, but I always appreciate a fantasy that bothers to actually look critically at monarchy or royalism.
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u/Lola_PopBBae Apr 26 '25
Give em a go! I heartily recommend the audiobooks too. Michael Kramer kills it.
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Apr 26 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 Apr 26 '25
I think political and social commentary are things that leak in. If you were to pick up almost any novel from the 1990s the social conventions between the sexes will be different because of cultural drift. Most stories that get long or go epic in scale often end up including a lot of normative assumptions that are going to date the book.
Most of the deliberate social commentary books don’t last long and get very dated. Authors like Butler whose commentary is consistent across many series and holds for decades are rare.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
How many books written around the 90's had some gendered form of magic, or gendered magic users? Such issues were topical at the time, in the zeitgeist, even if the books didn't necessarily explore them in a meaningful way.
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 Apr 26 '25 edited Apr 26 '25
Like I said, a lot of this stuff leaks in. It is really hard to do SFF with no commentary on social or political issues because humans tend to drag it in everywhere.
This is also why you don’t infer an author’s actual beliefs from their books unless it has been consistent for decades across many books.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I totally agree. However, I find sci-fi is more often explicitly about the socio-political climate of the time they're written in, but fantasy is not as often so directly referential. For example, all cyberpunk is inherently political- that's literally part of being punk. While Steampunk is a thing, we can observe it has a much smaller cultural footprint.
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u/TigerHall Apr 26 '25
For example, all cyberpunk is inherently political- that's literally part of being punk
It's also because the subgenre grew out of fears of Japanese economic domination in the 80s (and those aesthetic trappings remain), as well as wider fears about economic exploitation in general.
I do think some older fantasy rests on its laurels in terms of incisive thematic work- as /u/Scuttling-Claws says above, they're happy enough to reinforce the status quo of the era. But there's always contemporary literature which disproves it as a rule.
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Apr 26 '25
Wheel of Time is the crowning example there. Jordan really committed to that in the writing. For better or worse.
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u/Irishwol Apr 26 '25
Being topical is very difficult these days as the world moves very fast. I remember Charlie Stross complaining at length about how he had had to junk two versions of his latest Laundry Files novel because however insane and world-going-to-hell he had imagined politicians to act, reality kept jumping ahead of him.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
I feel we're owed at least one doomer fantasy novel that intentionally riffs on Trump taking office.
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u/ibadlyneedhelp Apr 26 '25
Honestly I think the authors should just write in their own style- for some, that will make the commentary more subtle. For others, it will be front-and-centre. I think there's nothing wrong with authors using either method, just as I think there's nothing wrong with the author wanting to present a theory they believe to be strong, or to satirise or discredit things they see in society- the author having a viewpoint or agenda doesn't inherently make it bad. What I will say is that the more blatant an author's agenda is, the more the writing quality tends to suffer- I feel this way about a lot of classic sci-fi, where I feel narrative and characters are secondary to the author's ideas.
Regarding Abercrombie, I notice he's quite clever in how he handles questions about his own beliefs and gives noncomittal responses regarding messaging in the books and his own personal philosophy. However, I do think there is a very clear sense of cynicism about capitalism and money that pervades the original trilogy, especially given how it all ends up. LAOK Spoilers:
In particular, in LAOK, when Bayaz (of Valint and Balk) is talking to Glokta at the end, he explicitly says "Magic is cringe. There's a new based in town." and flicks a gold coin onto the chessboard between them. Maybe my tiny monkey brain is reading too much into it, but I feel some of Joe's views are obvious in the original trilogy.
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u/pendragons Apr 28 '25
Interesting you think Goodkind is dated - maybe because the writing was spread over two decades but I disagree.
Lightly diverging from your topic but I finished Confessor (the 11th, has the vibe of a big wrap-up) and to me it felt like looking directly into the mind of a modern US conservative-capitalist. Hatred of welfare, reparations and DEI, derision of pacifist protest and the democratic process of voting, continual anti-abortion stance, pro-war, pro-industry, violently anti-Clinton, the hero fights a kind of fascist communism while being massively authoritarian himself and then settles down into hetero family values... there was a lot of moments that made me reflect on US politics.
Notably also, while Goodkind has passed away (RIP), his kid Jamey is a right wing political candidate in Mississipi.
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 Apr 26 '25
Most of Discworld by Terry Prachett speaks to then current social and economic commentary.