Legal matters

It was a coincidence, I guess, one of those confluences that nature furnishes unawares, tempting us to see it as replete with meaning, that both of yesterday's posts were about specific pieces of legislation posing Chevenga problems.

[Disclaimer: IANALBIWOIAPLNS (I am not a lawyer but I was one in a past life, nuff said).]

I won't say I wasn't fascinated in my earlier writing days by things legal; it was yet another thing I didn't feel I was really up to writing about, and on retrospect I might have been right. At that age I didn't yet understand that a jurisdiction's legislation is actually a system, a big verbal machine with parts that connect and fit into each other and, one hopes, make sense, and which is constantly being revised and added to, like full-featured software. On good days it runs as if it's well-oiled; on bad days it clunks and sputters and makes ugly mistakes that ruin lives. It is both conceived and operated by those most imperfect of creatures, human beings, and so is at times necessarily, as the saying goes, an ass.

And yet, generally speaking, people see law as necessary to facilitate that most human thing of getting along. Given their choice and a sense of ownership over the result, they'll enact laws and more laws. For those of a libertarian bent who think of laws as inimical to true human nature, individual or social, so that regular folks would choose to throw them all off if permitted by their oppressors, I rebut by giving you: Switzerland. This is a nation of direct democracy, a system in which citizens get to vote on proposed laws by regular, frequent, mail-in referenda (or so it was when I learned about it; if I were them now I'd do it online, and it looks like they're starting to). The result: such a massive, detailed, ornate plethora of laws that it's hard, if not impossible, to emigrate there. If you weren't born there, you just aren't going to learn what is and isn't legal well enough.

(And yes, in case you're wondering, I did steal ideas from the Swiss political system in creating the Yeoli political system. Just wait until the Yeolis log on to the Fifth Mill version of the Internet...)

Anyway, in the intervening time between publishing my dead-tree works and now, I've done such things as researched articles on legal questions, involved myself in the regulation of a health profession in the province of Ontario, and even been involved in three lawsuits and a criminal proceeding. And darned if I didn't find myself fascinated (at least when the clouds of the emotional horror of injustice, in some cases, cleared). Law is all words, of course, so that an exploration of law is an exploration of language and meaning... and I'm a writer. But it's also language that has to work, like computer code, because it's going to be used. The precision of legal language, and the questions of interpretation that come up when it isn't entirely precise -- because of course it can never be perfectly precise -- I find totally intriguing.

To go even deeper into my own motivation, I think I also find understanding the law of a society that upholds democratic and egalitarian principles an empowering relief from the arbitrary capriciousness I was raised in in my thoroughly-dysfunctional family. When you grow up in a weird cross between anarchy and dictatorship, a working system in which everyone, just for the fact of being human, has rights, feels a bit like Nirvana.

So I was much less bored at the dronings of Sichera-e than young teen Chevenga is, and I realized a while back while doing preparatory work for ak that by the time he's semanakraseye, he's a legal geek, and then, aspiring to be Imperator of Arko, he becomes a policy wonk as well. I was at one time unaware that pride in a legal system was an option, since I'm Canadian -- ours just hums along quietly, for the most part, and we take it for granted -- until I happened onto Daily Kos and found Americans who were noisily proud of their system. And while it's not Chevenga's style to be noisily proud, he naturally feels that the Yeoli system is far and away better than anything else in the world, would love to export it if he could, and prides himself on having geekishly mastered its intricacies.

It also occurred to me that fantasy literature, for the most part, is missing that legal aspect. Sophisticated, complex, literate civilizations are postulated without any apparent written laws, and legal questions don't come into plots. From Hammurabi to Egypt to Greece to the medieval Church to China to the USA to the International Criminal Court, you can't have civilization without laws. Some might argue, law is civilization. In fact human society occurs nowhere without law. Stone-age tribes are not anarchistic; their laws are expressed orally rather than recorded in writing, but their purpose is the same -- facilitating everyone getting along -- and they have jurisdiction as strict as any silicon-wired empire's.

So, in the new work, I've allowed legal matters to take their proper place in the action. Chevenga's youthful agonizing over whether to reveal his secret is going to be more... organized... and questions of law will produce some interesting plot twists, particularly in asa kraiya. Two of my favourite new ak characters are kick-ass legal types who both give new and different meanings, at least in the fantasy genre, to the term "strong female character." Oh, are they going to have fun with Chevenga (no, not that kind... get your mind out of the gutter.)

Final note: I quote a line that my eleven-year-old son Raphi has been singing a lot lately, penned by that modern icon of astute cultural observation, Weird Al Yankovic, in his song "Jurassic Park" (to the tune of "MacArthur Park"): "A huge tyrannosaurus ate our lawyer; well, I suppose that proves that they're really not all bad." The question -- does it mean tyrannosauri aren't all bad because they eat lawyers, or lawyers aren't all bad because they taste good? -- is one of interpretation, it seems. The jury is out.