Politics and science-fiction aren’t strangers to each other. In fact, they’ve met a fair few times for coffee, had dinner and, for want of a better expression, even fooled around a bit on the sofa. The most obvious literary examples of this partnership have to be George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s equally brilliant Brave New World, although we doubt very much that either author would appreciate our sofa metaphor. What these share is an informed vision of the future based on the progression of politics in the modern day.
However, at Biteback we believe that this is all a bit easy, having the future written down nicely for you in artistic prose (note: this may have something to do with us not publishing fiction titles). Why not read about politics yourself and form your own reality?
There is a rather fascinating moment in David Laws’s book 22 Days in May in which the select negotiating team of Liberal Democrats, including Laws, are offered (what seems to be, by Laws’s account) a very reasonable deal for forming a coalition government with the Labour Party. I know I’m biased (working for Biteback) and stupid (forgetting it’s not fictional), but I was convinced for a brief second that it could go either way. The power of books, eh.
So there’s the politics and here’s the science fiction... what if the Labour Party had gotten into power? If we did fiction, or rather if we did science fiction, that would be a great book.
As recounted in 22 Days in May, one of the biggest issues on the table was the Labour Party’s initial stance on deficit reduction, which stated that action on this would not start immediately. It was only in their later draft to the Lib Dems that Labour submitted to the proposal that the economy needed to be dealt with swiftly and forcefully.
Obviously though, history can’t be rewritten, and Labour find themselves in opposition to a Lib Dem-Conservative government, who have had to make some tough political decisions in 2010 over the economy. David Laws, writing in the Guardian today, has defended those decisions and suggested that, despite the potential alternate realities chronicled in his book, the decisions made during the formation and early days of the current government were the right ones.
22 Days in May is the fascinating account of the decisions that still shape our country today from the man who made them.
Order your copy of David Laws’s book here for £9.99.