There’s a limit to the quality of fiction someone can write who has only state-sanctioned dogma. Without geometry, without a basic understanding of the way nature or human beings work.

One of the propogandas of the American/Western world, which is to say, one of the lies that people believe in order to maintain the government of it (colonialist, exploitative, expansionist, techno-appetitive, attention-captured, etc.), is that all of that—all of this—is inevitable. Fiction published in the English language increasingly rests in this weird belief: that human beings cannot possibly be any other way.

When there is a vast literary tradition presenting other human possibilities. (Much of it is pre-modern and has been labelled, by state-sanctioned intellectual authorities, as obsolete.)

When there remain territories of humankind yet unconquered by that authority, who to this day display a resilient invulnerability to it. (Much of which falls under the umbrella of a “developing country” or “emerging economy” and is labelled, by state-sanctioned authorities, as primitive.)

When it’s really just what happens when bad human habits are allowed to run rampant. (So is no more inevitable than tyranny, albeit one the English-speaking imagination increasingly cannot see beyond).

It is a cultural ignorance that results in dissatisfying fiction. History may be written by the victors, but fiction is beholden to no such law.