Worldbuilding Blogfest #2: History & Politics

[layla]

Still no Internet at home … aargh. Obviously this is going to make it slow to reply to comments. Bear with me.

Also, for anyone coming in via links from elsewhere, I have anonymous commenting turned off on the WordPress blog because of the spampocalypse. However, all these posts are crossposted to my Livejournal account, where I do have anon commenting turned on! Anyway, on to Day 2.

Day 1: Geography & Climate – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth
Day 2: History & Politics – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth

Karamanda: Political Overview

The city has an interesting, uneasy push-pull between the elected government who run its day-to-day workings, and the Angels who are the ceremonial and religious leaders.

The exact history of how things came to be this way is something that I’m still working out. The Angels are a different species, though they look very similar — the main visible differences are the color of the wings and a slightly different bone structure that’s especially visible on the face. (Think dogs and foxes, perhaps.) They’re more suited to the warm lowlands, but have come to rule the considerably more numerous mezzano, who hold them in religious regard. I don’t mean that they worship them (they don’t), but the Angels are considered holy and, to a certain extent, untouchable up in their high aeries. In the past, the Angels took a much more active role in running the city. Their political power has slowly slipped to the point where nearly all the political decisions are now made by a council that’s elected from the city’s twelve districts. (The city is divided like sections of a pie, as viewed from above, though in practice the district boundaries are wobbly and fuzzy and not at all clear.) Most mezzano can vote; no one else can, including the Angels. However, the Angels have their own internal government, their own police force, and their own process for punishing lawbreakers; they are not bound by mezzano laws; the two parts of the city (the aeries, and the lower levels) operate as nearly independent political entities.

Franza, the narrator in the Karamanda stories, is part of Karamanda’s mezzano police force. In “Angelcutters”, the murder of an Angel forces her to work with the Angels’ internal police force, the Silver Guard. From the story:

I had never dealt closely with the Angels’ secret police before. He wore a black mask and gloves, and voluminous white robes, with his silver wings folded behind him. He could have been old or young, fat or thin. I knew that he was male only from his deep, resonant voice.

Kae looked terrified, poor kid. He’d probably heard the same stories I had–that the Silver Guard made their own laws, that they had only to point and you’d be taken away. Normally they dealt with the Angels’ internal affairs, rarely venturing down to the levels of the city occupied by my own caste, the gray-winged mezzano who made up the bulk of Karamanda’s population. I didn’t feel easy myself. This was Silver Guard business, and those of us in Saskia’s office were the only people who knew about the body.

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.