leonard leo fuming rn

I hope you can find this clip you mentioned. Norwich was an early gateway for me as a teenager. It didn’t hurt that people are always impressed for some reason when they see you reading about Byzantium. Norwich is a good writer but not the best historian. I also read and enjoyed his histories of Venice and the Normans. Obolensky I’ve read a little of. The one I was really avidly consuming while writing this trilogy was Anthony Kaldellis, who has a fantastic podcast about everything Byzantium. He also just released a new one-volume history of Byzantium maybe six months ago. I exchanged a few emails with him and learned so much from his research and the people he interviewed. However, I have my criticisms. The guy is not a Marxist, and if any mention of class struggle comes up in his work, he invariably attacks it. I read maybe ten or twenty percent of his newest book (I’ve read similar portions of his other books, all of which are interesting), and discovered, much to my horror, that he had adopted Ezra Klein’s theory of history: namely, that people just sort of attach themselves to identities for some reason (don’t ask why), and then proceed to mindlessly fight over these identities for centuries. It’s depressing for me to see this kind of reactionary and superficial viewpoint, one pushed by an Iraq War supporter, especially because Kaldellis has specifically complained about how neoliberalism is destroying his entire field (Byzantium doesn’t really fit into STEM). You hate neoliberalism, yet you deploy neoliberal methods to explain the rise and fall of your beloved Byzantium. Hmm, interesting.

Thank you, I hope you like it! Yeah, I got into Byzantium thanks to Medieval: Total War when it first came out. It was just this huge thing that no one had ever told me about, and I wondered (ignorant liberal that I was) how it was possible that an entire civilization could just be totally ignored in the American public school curriculum. Another obvious question is: why was/is it ignored? (The short answer I would venture is that Byzantium, like the medieval Muslim world, medieval China, and plenty of other medieval places, complicates the liberal view of the medieval world as a time of backwardness and barbarism (as well as the fascist idea that medieval Europe was racially “pure”), and therefore calls a lot into question about Western civilization’s supposed progress.) Unfortunately, asking these sorts of questions and researching Byzantium isn’t a guaranteed path toward communism; plenty of reactionary people are obsessed with Byzantium, and so far as I know, Marxist historians haven’t really paid it much attention for decades, since they tend to have bigger fish to fry.

I used this series for research. It’s on YouTube now. There’s hundreds of episodes.

I think it also has something to do with the bourgeoisie wanting an escape from bourgeois problems. This is one reason why stories like Game of Thrones or even Dune (space feudalism) are so popular. Capitalist class struggle infuriates the bourgeoisie, since they are so obviously the bad guys, which means that they prefer to escape to simpler times, when the bourgeoisie was the underdog, and the evil, petty, but entertaining feudal ruling class was running things.

I recommend an obscure, fun, bonkers SF novel called The Killing Star, which features accelerating metal slugs to 90% c before flinging them into planets. There’s also a chapter that takes place on the Titanic. And TNG makes an appearance toward the end. Supposedly the ships in this novel inspired the interstellar vehicles we see in the Avatar movies. There’s also an earlier book in this series which features wooden spaceships piloted by kangaroos (though it’s all hard SF, I assure you!).

Feel like I should post a link to the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Byzantine Wars, which defies all or nearly all of these annoying tropes. You can read the whole thing there for free, although that website is kind of not my favorite. I can also just send an epub to those who message me. All I ask is that if you like it, please share it with other people who might be interested. The story is basically Jumanji in Byzantium, plus slave revolt, with a magic system mostly inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The tropes I countered were:

• chosen one(s): peasants and workers are the heroes, people can only change things by working together in the name of universal human liberation (the “bad guys” can only fight them by acting like vampires); it’s not good versus evil, it’s imperialists versus workers; anyone can learn how to use magic;
• the only people who care about bloodlines are imperialists;
• good characters look like shit, bad characters are beautiful;
• Many different cultures are represented here, with many different characters belonging to one culture or another; there are many good and bad Greeks, Muslims, Jews, etcetera, along with plenty of Kurds, Iranians, Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Roma, Assyrians, Turks, Georgians, and more!
• the story is about the Roman Empire versus a slave republic; the Roman government is generally depicted negatively, but most Romans support it; the slave republic is generally depicted positively, though its leaders and people argue with each other and question one another;
• the slaves aren’t afraid to do violence against Romans and rarely hesitate to use their own weapons against them;
• I’m super annoyed at how the most popular fantasy series (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter) just ignore economics almost completely. We see cities that consist of a castle, and that’s it. How do these people get their food? Where are their farms? So I definitely paid a lot more attention to this, but worked it into the story. I’m not a fan of writers like KSR interrupting their stories with miniature magazine articles.
• the series mostly takes place in what is now Turkey, Georgia, and the Middle East.
• honestly I like how GRRM includes disabled people in his work (even if he sucks in many other ways) so that was one thing I went for;
• no SA or very little SA;
• the barbarians are more civilized than the Romans;
• women can be horny but are not just objects of lust;
• four main characters: two good ones, one “morally gray” one (sorry), one bad one;
• plenty of trans people (redditors call this “presentism”: CW transphobia but

I struggled with this as a writer because I had, for decades, wanted to write a fantasy epic, yet after becoming a communist it became extremely obvious to me that nearly all, if not all fantasy and science fiction is reactionary. The genre itself is the problem, because it basically functions as a way for white guys to escape from real world problems (i.e., the world’s teeming masses are getting stronger and cannot be stopped).

Even relatively leftwing SFF (Star Trek, Star Wars) is so often unclear about where it stands, politically, that it appeals to reactionaries. One has to dig to realize that Luke is supposed to be with the Viet Cong; Star Trek is basically Horatio Hornblower in space, and spends maybe a total of five minutes (across hundreds of hours of TV and cinema) talking about about socialism (except for DS9). Just a few days ago I told a coworker who liked Episode One that it might be the most racist movie ever made; he had no idea about the Gungans being caricatures of Jamaicans, the Neimoidians being Japanese caricatures, and Watto being a caricature of basically every different race that lives around the Mediterranean, although to my coworker’s credit he didn’t argue with me when I told him. A small amount of less-famous SFF is a little clearer about where it stands; liberals like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, but fascists don’t (as far as I know).

I needed to figure out if there would be fantasy races in my trilogy, and I decided pretty quickly that there wouldn’t be. I would throw in some interesting monsters, but that would be it. As for fantasy powers, they would be like Crouching Tiger, but democratized. Anyone who wanted to could learn them, and to avoid the liberal obsession with individualism, they would be based largely on solidarity (with the bad guys using magic like vampires—in order to prey on people).

Fantasy races basically function (as the amazing Graeber quote ITT shows) as an excuse for people to be racist. Tolkien’s orcs are basically the Nazi vision of African oriental working class Judeo-Bolsheviks. The Eye of Sauron is Big Brother / the Panopticon / the superego. Rather than in a caricatured form of Europe, my fantasy trilogy would take place in a real historical place (11th century Byzantium) with real historical groups of people (Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Jews, Persians, Assyrians, Arabs, Laz, Georgians, Varangians, Normans, Venetians, and more!) fighting over land many of them have inhabited for centuries if not millennia. This would get sticky and complicated, but I would do my best to do justice to these different groups and keep them human (not idealized) but also entertaining. I wouldn’t clothe them in head crests like Star Trek does (much as I love Star Trek) so that I could turn them into easy caricatures and then make fun of them.

That project is finished, and I’m currently posting it chapter-by-chapter here. Eventually it’ll be released in paper / ebook form. I’ve been thinking a lot about releasing it on hexbear to see if anyone likes it (there is a chapter midway through the first book that involves throwing landlords out of their mansions, and two main characters are trans, so there’s a lot of hexbear bait, basically).

I’m currently writing a StarCraft fan-fiction, but with all the names and a number of concepts changed, and the racism that is inherent to SFF has come up once again, because StarCraft is fundamentally about three races with inherent strengths and weaknesses battling each other in the Korprulu Sector (the word means something like “bridge” in Turkish). If you look carefully at the OG StarCraft storyline, there is so much weird liberal fascist shit it is fucking unreal (the trope about the revolutionary leader betraying his own followers, the communist-like Zerg only being interested in slavery, genocide, and eugenics (the infested marine is literally a brainwashed suicide bomber), the Protoss basically fighting for landback on Aiur but never really having the strength to pull it off even though they’re supposed to be super advanced and powerful, every cinematic involving Terrans basically being about white dudes with southern accents getting brutally killed, and on and on and on…).

All of this ultimately comes down to a dialectical contradiction: everything is similar yet different at the same time.

Sometimes I think Graeber is overrated but this is brilliant.

Hi, thanks so much for the questions.

Is this your first novel?

Nope. I think this is around my fifteenth? I’m not sure, I’ve lost count because I’ve been cranking these fuckers out for twenty years. I had to unpublish a bunch that I had written before my radicalization because they were too liberal / racist / sexist etc. You can find a communist SF series I wrote here.

What inspired you to write it?

I first found out about Byzantium when I was a teenager playing Medieval: Total War, and I was amazed that I had never heard of this vast empire before. I read the John Julius Norwich history books about it, and was always kind of interested and appreciative of Byzantium, while also being mindful of its mysterious, near total lack of presence in Western culture. Then, a couple of years ago, I finished that last series I just linked you to, and needed a new project to work on. I actually had a few ideas and asked hexbear which one they liked the most. Somebody said Byzantium (one of the ideas), and here I am. The series is a trilogy, and it’s complete. The first two books are finished, the third book is in its second draft form and will be completely done in a couple of months. If I post three chapters a week, it will take two years to post everything, at which point I will publish the books in their complete form on amazon. I also really enjoyed researching the fuck out of Byzantium and learning a lot more about it, and wrote this series because I thought Byzantium deserves more attention (with a communist twist, of course). I also wanted to write a fantasy series in which anyone can have magical powers (rather than just the specials versus the poo people), and where you can’t really do anything cool unless you work as a team with workers / peasants / slaves / women / colonized people etc. in the name of universal human liberation.

Have you find found it easy to write?

Writing is easy. Making money from writing? That’s hard.