Opinion: Waiting for Thermidor • by Bruce Bethke

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I am a science fiction writer. I get paid to think about the future. I do it a lot, have been doing it for decades, and have given a lot of thought to exactly how I do it.

Consequently, here’s a writing tip for you. If you want to write formulaic, derivative, science fiction-flavored prose product (which I will admit, can be quite lucrative), you should read and watch nothing but other people’s science fiction. Do this for years, without fail, and you will never be at risk of accidentally having an original idea.

Case in point, ten years into the Stupefying Stories saga I remain appalled by the amount of thinly disguised Star Trek fan fic that continues to show up in our slush pile. These stories bother me not because they exist, but because of the utter desolate poverty of authorial imagination they reveal. For pity’s sake, folks, if you want to write an “our navy at war in space” story, at least read the World War II Pacific theater combat history that Gene Roddenberry lived, and based his hopes and visions of the future on.

Do this, and possibly, just maybe, you might come up with an idea for a story that has not already been used and reused until it’s threadbare by every generation of SF writers for the past 75 years.

Which segues into our second writing tip for today. If you do want to think seriously about the future, and increase your odds of having an original idea once in a while and perhaps even of writing a story that might be of some consequence someday, read history. Knowing humanity’s past is not a perfect guide to imagining humanity’s future, but it’s a good place to start.

Personally, I read a lot of history, and the more I read, the more I realize the truth of one of my favorite quotations:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

—Karl Marx

The trick when you see an historical pattern repeating itself is to figure out which it is this time: tragedy or farce?

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In 1789 the French began their revolution against the ancien régime—which is to say, against pretty much everything old: the monarchy, the Catholic Church, their own history; they even revolted against the calendar, creating a new calendar composed of twelve thirty-day months divided into three 10-day weeks (décades) each. This new calendar retained none of the traditional month or day names; Year One began with the abolition of the monarchy and the founding of the Republic, on the date formerly known as 22 September 1792. Therefore, by the French revolutionary calendar, Friday, June 26, 2020, was 9 Messidor CCXXVIII—or Nonidi of décade 28, or for rural peasants who apparently weren’t thought to be capable of mastering decimal numbers, Échalote (Shallot) Messidor, each day of the year being named for a different agricultural product.

The next month in this calendar is Thermidor, which begins on July 19^th and runs through August 17^th.

The astute observer will note that in the revolutionary calendar a year is 360 days long, as opposed to be the more conventional 365(ish) days we know. The French were still trying to resolve this problem—along with the problems of how to get people in general to throw out their old clocks and accept dividing each day into ten 100-minute hours, and how to get workers in particular to accept only having the weekend off once every ten days—when the wheels came off the whole damned thing. Today, vestiges of the hottest month on the French revolutionary calendar survive in two things only: the name of the recipe for Lobster Thermidor, and the political concept of the Thermidorian Reaction.

A Thermidorian Reaction, in general, is the moment in nearly every revolution when some well-armed and disciplined faction, usually the nation’s army, says “Enough of this,” and steps in to restore order at bayonet point. Thermidorian Reactions are typically characterized by massacres of protesters, summary executions of revolutionary leaders, mass executions of their followers, show trials and long prison terms for those revolutionaries who survive, and the establishment of an iron-handed military dictatorship.

The original Thermadorian Reaction took place in July of 1794, when the French army finally decided it had had enough of Maximillien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety’s Reign of Terror and decided to put a stop to it—permanently.

Contrary to Star Wars this did not result in an immediate flowering of peace, freedom, happiness, and democracy, but in considerably more violence, leading eventually to the rise of the Emperor Napoleon, and all that meant to the bloody history of the 19th Century.

The first Thermidorian Reaction defined the term and established the pattern, but it was only the first. Leon Trotsky described the events that led to the rise of Stalin as the “Soviet Thermidor,” and was rewarded for his observation by being murdered with an ice axe. If you’re familiar with the history of the Weimar Republic the rise of Hitler would also seem to fit the pattern, as would the brutal Soviet reactions to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968 and the Chinese army’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Or very nearly, some might argue, as would the events that took place on the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the United States, which seemed to be teetering right on the brink of a Thermadorian Reaction, got a good clear look at what that would entail, recoiled in horror, and then found another way forward.

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The events of this past month have been deeply troubling, at times horrifying, and at still other times merely profoundly saddening. Some of the conversations that have followed these events have been extremely disturbing, though. From one side of the political spectrum I’ve heard people calling for a proper Thermidorian Reaction; for the government to send in heavily armed troops to reset the world to the way it was two months ago. From the other side I’ve heard people dreading the same possibility, for fear that the United States might be just one more executive order away from becoming yet another former democracy turned tin-pot dictatorship. And from the furthest fringes of both sides of I’ve heard people actually claiming to be eager to provoke a Thermidorian Reaction, in the belief that once the rotten core of the system is exposed and everything falls apart, people will flock to their banner and they will emerge from the chaos victorious and as the people in charge.

If I have learned one thing from reading history, it’s that that last outcome almost never happens.  It’s far more likely that the people trying to provoke a violent reaction, be they on the right or left, will be the first ones up against the wall once the reaction begins.

Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot in this past month is people saying that this year has turned into 1968 all over again. As someone who clearly remembers the summer of 1968, I would say, “Close, but wrong year, and wrong country.”

If you seek a historical model for what’s happening in the United States right now, look to China, in the summer of 1966.

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The Red Guards began as a student-led social movement in the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Socially conscious, ideologically driven, and very often privileged, in the sense of being the sons and daughters of Communist Party cadres, they set off on a self-appointed mission to improve their society through rigorous Marxist criticism and by rooting out intellectual elitism and bourgeois tendencies. At first denounced as radicals and suppressed—imagine that, Marxists who were too Marxist even for the People’s Republic of China—in time they were given tolerance, then support, and ultimately political legitimacy, after which the movement quickly snowballed.

In August of 1966 the Red Guards were directed by the Central Committee to attack the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. While this instruction apparently was intended to produce critical and metaphorical attacks, with the acquiescence of some local police and government officials it quickly turned into the real thing. Libraries were burned, museums looted, temples and shrines destroyed, historic streets and places renamed—often by taking a hammer and chisel to ancient carvings—and archaeological sites were looted and destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated; the remains of long-dead emperors were dragged from their tombs, defiled, and burned.

Worse, the Red Guards quickly turned on their own teachers and other intellectuals, sometimes killing them outright, other times destroying their lives and careers with accusations of politically incorrect thinking and driving them to suicide in “struggle sessions” that amounted to public torture and humiliation. Penultimately, thousands of innocent victims died at the hands of the Red Guards; this being China, the exact toll will never be known. In August and September of 1966 the Red Guards murdered nearly 2,000 people in Beijing alone, typically by beating them to death.

Ultimately, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said “Enough of this,” and stepped in to restore order at bayonet point. Thousands of Red Guards were killed resisting the PLA. Unknown numbers more were captured and then died in some of the largest mass-executions in Chinese history. In the end more than 16 million Chinese students were rounded up and exiled to the countryside, to be “re-educated” by being forced to become subsistence farmers or unskilled factory and foundry laborers. The number of students who died in the process, from starvation, disease, or harsh treatment, will never be known, but it’s believed to have been enormous.

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Sixteen hundred words into this column, assuming you’re still reading and haven’t gotten bored and wandered off already, you are no doubt wondering what all this history has to do with writing science fiction. As I said when I began, over the past four decades I have given a lot of thought to how I write science fiction.

Only lately have I begun to think seriously about why. Or as one of my less tactful co-workers once put it, “Why are you wasting your time writing this sci-fi crap when you could be writing real literature?”

The answer, when it finally came to me, was something of a surprise. I read, write, and enjoy science fiction because deep down, as strange as this may sound, of all the modern literary tropes and genres, science fiction is nearly unique in that it is the literature of hope.

Sometimes that hope is hard to discern. Sometimes it is found only in subtext. Sometimes the message is buried so very deeply, and overlain with so many thick and nearly impenetrable layers of grim darkness, that it is nearly lost in the background noise. But the one idea that almost all science fiction has in common is very simple, and yet incredibly important: people—people recognizably like us—are there.

That’s the core message of science fiction. Humanity has a future. Our species will survive. And not just at the basic, lowest, animalistic level, living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short: we are a work in progress, and that progress isn’t over yet. Our future doesn’t have an eschaton—a fixed end-point—at least not yet, and not anytime soon.

What message could be more hopeful than that?

Okay, you in the back there, raising your hand and waving it like a preschooler with a bladder control problem and all too eager to blurt out, “But my religion says...” Yes, yes, that message is hopeful too. The difference here is that in science fiction, humans have agency. We have free will. We are not sitting on our butts waiting or down on our knees praying for someone else to solve all our problems and make everything all better.

We have a choice.

We are not the victims of fate. We are not the pawns of callous deities. We are not mindless automatons still running the programs installed in our ancestral genes four million years ago in Olduvai Gorge. There will be setbacks, yes. We are capable of doing terrible things. We can make horrible, stupid mistakes. We can blunder about and break things and say and do things that will have miserable consequences for years to come that we can’t even begin to imagine at the time we do them.

But we are not the prisoners of our past. We can learn from our history.

We have the power to choose to become better.

Then the ever-present tentacles of contemporary news slither into my consciousness again, and I see what new atrocities and idiocies were wrought overnight, and somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the concussion as the Taliban dynamite the Bamiyan Buddhas, and feel the thuds of fists and feet on flesh as the Red Guards beat historians and teachers to death, and smell the smoke as the Deutsche Studentenschaft burn books in the State Opera square in Berlin, and hear the creak of the wheels and the crying of the condemned as the Jacobins drag them in tumbrels to meet the guillotine...

And I think: yes, we have a choice. We can learn from our history, but only if we still have it. If not, we’ll be stuck forever in Year One of the revolution, and that would be a tragedy.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

—George Santayana