"It strikes me as singular that, in van Vogt's stories, nearly all of which deal with the future, the form of government which occurs most often is the absolute monarchy; and further, that the monarchs in these stories are invariably depicted sympathetically, (one of his heroes being) a ‘benevolent dictator' if you please.
"... I shall not say what I think of a man who loves monarchies... neither do I think it relevant that these stories were written and published during a time when both van Vogt's country (Canada) and ours were at war with dictatorships..."
"... The absolute monarchy was a form of government which evolved to meet feudal economic conditions everywhere, and which has died everywhere with feudalism... Modern attempts to impose a similar system on higher cultures have just been proven, very decisively, to be failures... It is no crime for Van Vogt as a private citizen to wish this were not so; but ignorance, for an author, is a crime..."
Just so.
The second quote is far better known:
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887:
"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Equally true.
And so it was absurd for us that science fiction, in spite of its loud bannering of thinking of the future, in fact spends all too much of its substance sucking the empty husk of a false past.
Therefore... Sten.
We used all of the hard, cynical knowledge that we'd gained in fourteen years each in mainstream journalism of just how politics and raw power works.
We would create an empire, we decided, that would be big enough and old enough to contain all our bizarre notions of that great, dark, comic figure, the Human Race. We would see this empire through the eyes of an ordinary, working-class man who is overtaken by extraordinary events.
He would be just smart enough, swift enough, and—this was most important—have enough of a sense of humor to survive. And grow into a bona fide hero. Or, at least, our idea of a hero—someone with enormous clumps of clay for feet.
It would be a long story, we both agreed. It would take eight books to tell it all. One novel—in eight parts.
We guessed it would take about a million words.
Today we passed that mark.
And the story is done.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHRIS BUNCH is a Ranger—an airborne-qualified Vietnam Vet—who's written about phenomena as varied as the Hell's Angels, the Rolling Stones, and Ronald Reagan. ALLAN COLE grew up in the CIA in odd spots like Okinawa, Cyprus, and Taiwan. He's been a professional chef, investigative reporter, and national news editor of a major West Coast daily newspaper. He's won half a dozen writing awards in the process.
BUNCH AND COLE, friends since high school, have collaborated on everything from the world's worst pornographic novel to over fifty television scripts, as well as a feature movie. This is their second novel.