8 Ways to Topple an Empire
Friday, April 08, 2011
Our last final competition for the V Days of Rome asks why the Roman Empire fell. We thought you might need a bit of inspiration, so here are a few ways in which genre fiction has seen empires fall...
Protesters. Constantine Fitz Gibbon's When the Kissing Had to Stop was written in 1960, but contains a timeless warning (at least, as far as Daily Mail readers are concerned). A huge spate of anti-nuclear protests lead to a radical change in government: the extreme "Socialist" wing of the Labour party takes over parliament. Of course, they had help from their secret Communist overlords! The dominos all fall from there. The good ol' boys of the City, Fleet Street and the landed gentry are all pushed out of power by evil Irish/homosexual/liberal conspirators and, by the end of the book, the Crown has fled to Canada and Britain is a satellite state of the USSR. This is what happens when you march!
Plucky Teenagers. There's no question that teenagers are the number one cause of death for empires in genre fiction. You might have an army of unearthly warriors (Tad Williams), a pack of enslaved gods (NK Jemisin), a flawlessly-managed system of grinding taxation and control of all technology (Suzanne Collins), intradimensional bug-clad warriors (Raymond Feist), a monopoly on magic (Brandon Sanderson) or even all of the above... but the teens'll find a way to get you. Empire-destroying teens are the meat & veg of high fantasy and YA. Beware the adolescent.
Zombies. Zombies have proven the downfall of many civilisations. But this is the V Days of Rome after all, so the shambling hordes of Rebecca Levene's Anno Mortis take the cake. Poor Caligula just wants to have his orgies and rule his empire, but Egyptian cultists and an army of the undead have other plans...
Plants. Mind you, John Wyndham's Triffids couldn't do it on their own - they needed the help of a special human-blinding sunspot zap-ray to do it. But the combination of near-universal blindness and ambulatory carnivorous plants? That'll topple you a Britain.
Insects. Paul MacTyre's Doomsday, 1999 is actually about the fall of the empire AFTER the empire. At the start of the book, the post-nuclear-apocalypse Chinese empire is in control of Britain. But they are stretched too thinly and when a plague of mutant midges crawls forth from Scotland, the conquerors are forced to fight on two fronts: British liberationists and... radioactive bugs. Honestly, I've read this book and still can't fully explain it.
Dehydration. What happens if there's a big crack in the ocean floor? Clearly, the water would all run out and we'd die of dehydration. This is science. Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out isn't his best apocalyptic fiction, but it certainly isn't his worst. Maine's descriptions of the dying days of British bureaucracy are both detailed and really, really unpleasant. The characters, unfortunately, are mostly the latter.
The Inevitable Forces of History. As Isaac Asimov's Foundation series tells us (repeatedly) empires rise and fall not because of any single factor, but a combination of events. As far as the Foundation were concerned, these were all mathemetically predictable. To the point where, following the Empire's decline, the Foundation could take advice from their founder's virtually-recorded diary entries for centuries to come. Foundation actually has double-downfall points: the Foundation itself is later undone by a mutant, something so mathematically rare than even the Powerful Statisticians of the Future were not able to see it coming.
Cars. The problem with building your empire on the roads is that the cars could turn on you at any moment. In Stephen King's "Trucks", we see the end of the American "empire" from the point of trapped motorists at a rural gas station. Although they're able to hold out for a while, the sentient vehicles are unstoppable. Humanity are forced into cruel servitude - pumping gas for all eternity. The story is less goofy that it sounds, but only barely.