Galactic Domination on Easy Mode

The races of the galaxy were helpless to stem the Dread Empire of the Shaa's conquering tide. Today, with the ethos of their Praxis at the forefront of their society, the Shaa are the undisputed rulers of all that is known, having never lost a battle in the millennia they've existed. But perhaps that sort of efficiency has a way of coming back to haunt an empire in the end... 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

A closed-minded part of me always kind of looked down upon military science fiction, at least until recently. I considered myself to be a very anti-war person, and I guess I've always had this preconception about military science fiction, or the military genre in general, that it saw violence as a solution, or even in some cases, an aspiration, rather than the failure that it is in reality. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love stuff like The Expanse and A Song of Ice and Fire and a hundred other stories that feature brutal military-style violence, but that brutal military-style violence is never the main attraction in these stories. And they never really revel in or glorify that violence. You know, they always had a little something else to say and a little bit of world to explore when the crazy stuff wasn't going down. Stuff like Halo, or at least the original Halo games, were great because, yes, it was the typical male power fantasy of punching aliens in the face, but it also had incredible world building and this super rich and subtle lore that hinted at a very deep mythology in the background. As well as these wondrous and awe-inspiring sights to lose yourself in. There was an extra layer of beauty that existed on top of the more action-packed aspects of the games. But I always felt, whether that thinking was flawed or not, that Halo was the exception rather than the rule when it came to military science fiction. I mean, there's so much interesting emotional and geopolitical territory that you can explore with a topic like warfare. And it was always my thinking that military science fiction, or military fiction in general, didn't always tap into everything it could tap into. At least not the ones that I've seen from my very limited and admittedly closed-minded experience. I think that's why for the longest time I avoided series that otherwise everybody was raving about, like the Honor Harrington series or The Lost Flea, because in my mind I had this image of books that were about little more than simply killing people. But recently I think my notions were tested a little bit. I think maybe I judged the subgenre a little too harshly, because if the rest of it is anything like the Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter John Williams, then it might warrant a fairer chance than I've given it up until now. So what is this story all about? Well, thousands upon thousands of years ago, humanity, which at this point in its history was this kind of interstellar civilization in its infancy, was swiftly and easily conquered by these aliens known as the Shah, and in all the millennia that have followed that event, the humans have been little more than just another vassal in this collection of vassals the Empire of the Shah has made for itself. The Shah are these biologically immortal creatures that use these kind of naturally occurring wormholes to get around the galaxy, and they operate under this very strict guiding philosophy known as the Praxis. What the Praxis is essentially is the Shah's code of conduct for what they believe to be a perfect society, or honestly, a perfect universe if they can never enforce things to that degree. It's sort of a statement of intent that tells you all you need to know about the Shah's ethos. It outlines everything from how the hieretical structure of the Empire is supposed to work, with obviously the Shah always being up top, to technological developments that can and cannot be researched and invested in. It goes on and on about how natural selection is the law of the land and that artificially tampering with evolution in any way to gain a better outcome is considered immoral and a serious violation of the praxis. It forbids in the strictest terms the research of artificial intelligence. Things like implanting an organic consciousness into a mechanical vessel is also illegal, as is genetic manipulation. There's also a very curious passage in the praxis that says, quote, no sentient may curse themselves with immortality. Even though the Shah themselves are immortal, they consider their immortality to be some kind of mistake or evolutionary fluke. And the praxis also has a very strong emphasis on submission. The Shah expect anybody under their dominion to follow the praxis to the letter, and there are extremely harsh penalties for not doing so. In the minds of the Shah, the enforcement of the Praxis isn't, you know, a let the punishment suit the crime kind of situation. They intentionally inflict these disproportionately extreme punishments so that the rest of the subjects kind of tow the line. For example, early on in the Shah's relationship with humanity, there were a group of maybe a dozen or two at most Terrans on some planet who were researching this bioweapon in order to use it against the Shah. When the Shah found out about this, they were not happy, yes, because it was designed to kill them, but also because the research of this weapon had genetic aspects and thus went against the word of the Praxis. And because of this, the Shah completely annihilated the entire planet, and all that was left for humanity to do was just to sit back and thank their lucky stars that the planet that had been involved wasn't Earth. The Praxis is the Shah's idea of a perfect society, and they want to impose that perfection upon anybody who's going to be living under their graces. The Praxis is all about what is logical and real and scientific, and it states that the Empire has no place for archaic belief systems such as religion. Which is kind of funny because the Shah oppressively impose the praxis upon their subjects in the exact same way they fear religion would be opposed upon them if it were allowed to exist. There's a theme of utter domination that is pervasive through every aspect of Shah society. The praxis outlines the general arrangement of the Empire, that being the Shah up top, and then there are the peers, which are essentially this ruling class of nobles of all races the Shah have conquered. And then beneath the peers are, you know, the sort of clients that the peers are obligated to look over and protect, and the clients in return are obligated to serve the peers. And this is a very rigid structure that isn't really organically broken. You are born into one of these scenarios, and social mobility just simply isn't a thing. To drive home how serious the Shah are about upholding the praxis, they have these sort of execution channels that run all day, every day, that show people who have broken the praxis being put to death. And these aren't sophisticated painless deaths either, these are people being garreted and strangled to death, or if we're doing mass executions, there will be machine gun squads that'll just mow people down. It is brutal stuff, and the Shah makes sure that as many people are exposed to this kind of imagery as possible. And the people of the Empire can get pretty creative about this kind of thing too. For example, there's a part in the series where a kind of rebellion breaks out and the rebels are subsequently driven off the side of a cliff by civilians. And the Empire decrees that any further acts of rebellion are to be punished by throwing the perpetrators from a high place. There's legitimate debate in some scenes on how to execute any given person when high places aren't readily accessible. There's also the fact that much of the Shah's navy serves as a kind of physical reminder of the crimes they've inflicted upon the species they've conquered. When the Shah first met humanity, we had gotten to a few different planets, but they had such a superiority over us in terms of space warfare that it wasn't really much of a war. All the Shah had to do was surround our planets and then bombard them from orbit until we surrendered. And even thousands of years after that, they still have ships in their navies called the Bombardment of Delhi or the Bombardment of Los Angeles and so on and so forth. A person is never not reminded of just how powerful the Shah are and how much of an insect you are compared to them. Their ships are a history lesson and a promise all in one, and anything that isn't named for war crimes is usually named something along the lines of the piece of the praxis and whatnot. And then you have the Empire's utterly draconian military practices. A soldier's at-attention stance is very similar to the at-attention stance in a lot of Earth militaries, but with one major difference. That difference being that the soldier is required to bear their throat in the event that their superior officer wishes to take out their ceremonial dagger and slash their throats. It is expressly, explicitly permitted within the Shah military for superior officers to kill any of their underlings for any reason or no reason at all. Granted, this isn't exactly a common occurrence, because when you start offing clients, the peers tend to get a little pissed off and it results in a lot of legal litigation. But the fact is that on paper, officers are well within their rights to kill any subordinate they please and just get away with it. It's not common, but the fact that it exists as a rule at all and has been used numerous times in the past should speak volumes about the state of the Shah's dominion. This all paints the picture of a really intimidating war machine comprised only of hardcore and disciplined zealots. And maybe that would have been the case a few thousand years ago, back when the empire was still expanding. But the thing is, the Shah have been playing this game of galactic domination on easy mode for their entire history. They have never once encountered anyone who ever challenged them in any significant way. The only real war they ever fought was against a race called the Lions, which happened to have built space navies and armadas in the time that the Shah came to conquer them. And even then, the battle only lasted for hours at most before the Lions too were brought into the fold. The Shah have never had to do anything except for fly into the skies of a specific planet and then obliterate cities until the race that was living on that planet surrendered. The Shah don't really have any concept of a war because nothing of the sort has ever happened to them. In essence, Dread Empire's Fall paints the picture of an Empire's endgame. It shows what happens to a society that has had it so easy for such untold spans of time. Despite being this indomitable force in the past, the Shah have ironically grown weak in their success. I mean, you needn't look any further than the structure of the Empire itself. Like I said, the Empire is typically arranged with the Shah on top, the peers in the middle, and everybody else at the bottom. And because of that extremely rigid social structure, who is going to make it to the top positions in government? It's going to be other peers or other Shah. One of the benefits of being born a peer is guaranteed admission into the military academy, which is a privilege that regular commoners would have to fight tooth and nail for. There's a huge amount of nepotism that's going on within the empire, and otherwise capable people are sort of left in squalor because they just happen to be born in the wrong family. Even certain peers have many doors close to them just because they haven't been born of a bloodline that is as pure as the others. There's a lot of talent that goes to waste in this empire because of all that. I mean the peers certainly don't see it like that. They believe that they were born into their positions because of divine right and as a reflection of their own excellence. There's a scene in which characters are asking the hypothetical question of what is more tragic, a provincial or a commoner, who tries to rise above their station and fails, or one who succeeds, and the peer without hesitation answers the latter. It is more tragic for a commoner to achieve peer status, because it's a reflection of the failure of the praxis to weed out the less desirable amongst their society. And then you have the condition of the military. Because the Shah have never fought an actual war, and there has never really been a real pitched ground battle, the military technology of the Shah is, while formidable, it's really more ceremonial than anything. Because of this nepotism issue that's prevalent throughout the empire, it's not the most capable and talented people being promoted to positions aboard these starships and in military command, but it's the people who are of the purest bloodlines, or the peers who were owed favors by higher-up peers, usually from a marriage alliance or something. The soldiers and crews of ships that comprise the Shah's military are more concerned about their favorite yacht racers' performance or whether their ship's team will win the football tournament than they are about maintaining actual military discipline. And all this is to say nothing of the military tactics. They appear to be sound on paper, but the thing is they've never had any real-world application. The crews of starships run combat drills day and night, but it's under the assumption that the enemy is going to be using the exact same tactics as they do. And these tactics, as you might imagine, have been thoroughly infected by the ethos of the praxis. In this universe, the space warfare plays out with a lot of respect for real-world physics. Nothing travels that faster than the speed of light, and crews need to make serious considerations about G-forces upon their bodies. Light delay plays a major role in all this. If you want to stay on the same page as the rest of your compatriots, you can't spread your fleet out too thin. And because of the praxis' over-emphasis on command, of course the Shah's forces are never going to be very far from one another. In fact, the typical strategy is to clump every ship together as tightly as possible so that the commander can give their orders more efficiently. There's not really a lot of room for autonomy in the typical Imperial strategy. It's usually the machinations of a single mind rather than the collaboration of a bunch of independent ones. Training maneuvers are judged more on a crew's ability to follow orders than it is on damage done to the enemy. Improvisation is strictly discouraged. The tactics are very rigid and they're almost like the memorized plays of a football game but applied to a battlefield. Having a plan is a good starting point, obviously, but if something goes wrong with that plan, then you're committed to it, for better or worse. If things go wrong and you don't have a capable commander, it's very easy to have a lot of your forces wiped out in the blink of an eye. It's all a pretty distinct reflection of the Shah's role in this empire. It's all about unquestioning loyalty to your commander or to the Shah. The typical Shah space battle, or you know, the typical simulated Shah space battle, I should say, plays out in these really distinct phases. Phase one involves detecting the enemy fleet and then moving towards them for an engagement. At this point, your fleet is still really tightly packed together and your commander is still exerting his control over events. And this phase is all about masking your movements from the enemy by using slingshot maneuvers around planets or detonating antimatter warheads in order to shield yourself from visual or sensor detection. And then phase two happens when you are very close to the enemy and the commander has exerted all the influence they're ever going to exert over the situation, and the fleet formations break apart in this maneuver called a starburst. And then phase three is the chaotic exchange of fire with the enemy that inevitably sees, you know, a quarter to half of your own fleet dead. And by the way, Dread Empire's Fall also subverts a very prevalent and maybe outdated science fiction trope in which the space battles look a lot like World War II battles with like fighter planes and bombers and whatnot. Small manned craft do have a role on these battlefields, but it's not to shoot at other ships or anything like that, at least not directly. Because the Shah don't like artificial intelligence, and because the speed of light is very much a limiting factor in all this, a human operator is required to guide antimatter missiles to their targets. And that's exactly the role that these smaller craft play in these battles. They're there to be that guide for the missiles. Granted, the survival rate for the pilots is pretty grim, and more often than not, they're blown up by the very explosions they cause, but it's still a pretty neat twist on something that we've seen a hundred times before. There's something to be said about the intention of keeping everybody in your forces on the same page, but the thing is, the weapons that the Shah use are extraordinarily destructive. If an enemy gets to jump on you with these antimatter weapons, they can wipe out your entire fleet of like 40 ships with one shot. In any other empire, the tactic of grouping yourselves together and leaving yourselves open to be wiped out in one fell swoop would have been phased out thousands of years ago. But because the Shah have had things so easy and have been such a dominant force for basically their whole history, they've never hit that brick wall of consequence and have never needed to adapt as a result. Despite all of the outdated tactics and the very inefficient military practices and technology, and the sheer overwhelming amounts of nepotism, the Empire of the Shah has been enjoying a very prosperous golden age for the past few thousand years. But of course, we wouldn't have our story if this golden age were to last, and sure enough, the opening chapters of Dread Empire's Fall are just rife with anxiety over the future of the Empire and the future in general. When we first jump into the first book of the series, the Praxis, we find that there is only one Shah left alive in the entire universe. The Shah have all lived for a very long time, but because of their general attitude towards immortality, as well as this species-wide sort of cognitive decline, the Shah have all one by one begun killing themselves. And now the last Shah, anticipation of victory, is making preparations to join the rest of his people in death, and the entire empire is just waiting with bated breath to see what happens next. It's the only thing on anybody's mind, and scores of peers of all species from all aspects of peer society, whether it be in the military or politics or just socialites, plan on killing themselves in order to follow anticipation of victory to the grave. They believe that committing suicide alongside the last of their rulers will bring them more honor than they could ever achieve, than anybody could ever achieve in life. It's the ultimate example of how broken and docile and housebroken the Shah's subjects have become. It's an empire full of sycophants who are very soon not going to have any bosses left to suck up to. And perhaps the greatest sycophants of all are a race called the Naxids. The Naxids were the first race ever to be conquered by the Shah, and they have lived and breathed the praxis for most of their history. The Naxids are these insectoid creatures that have a very strong pack mentality and are very willing to give themselves to what they perceive to be a strong leader. Back in the day when the Naxids were free on their planet, their society was arranged in these kinds of hunter-gatherer knots that were led by a sort of alpha. But in the present day, the Shah are sort of playing that alpha role for the entire race, and since the Shah are about to no longer be a factor, it's their code of conduct, the Praxis, that's going to play that role of strong leader for the Naxids. The Naxids are amongst the staunchest supporters of the Praxis, and they believe that they are meant to be the stewards of the Empire going forward. It's the typical opportunism that you would see in any power vacuum situation like this, but you also get the sense that this sort of Naxid compulsion to take things over is a direct result of the role that the Shah have played for them for so long and their evolutionary reaction to that. In subjugating a species that responds so well to submission instinctively, the Shah have inadvertently created this whole legion of fanatic followers who are willing to uphold their principles even after their deaths. Or at least that's how the most devout amongst the Naxids see things. And when you combine that Naxid self-image with the fact that the Shah already left behind a convocation comprised of all races who are going to lead things in their stead, you get a recipe for a little bit of violence. And just like the races of the Empire, a lot of the characters that we follow through this conflict are so indoctrinated and conditioned by thousands of years of submission under the Shah that they don't even consider a different form of government from the empire that they've languished under all their lives. This isn't a story about intrepid freedom fighters who are fighting to replace this broken authoritarian regime with democracy. It's a story of schemers who are using this conflict to secure as much wealth and influence as they possibly can for the day that things finally settle down. Even for the people who aren't politicking and trying to take advantage of the situation, the war isn't meant to destroy the status quo that the Empire represents. There's a great quote towards the end of the series that sums up events perfectly in my mind, and that is that they are fighting to replace a vicious tyranny with another tyranny that at least possessed the grace to be inept. It's very much a grimdark setting that we're playing with here. It might not be as, you know, insane and miserable as something like Warhammer 40k, but it's definitely not as idealistic as something like, say, Star Wars is either. The story isn't concerned with finding all the different governments that would be better than the Shah Empire, because, let's be honest, you'd have to try pretty hard to make an empire that is more static and inefficient than the Shah Empire, but it's more about reinvigorating the civilization. More often than not, it feels like the main conflict in the series isn't between the Imperial loyalists and the Naxids, but rather between our sort of free-thinking characters and the old stuck in the mud establishment of the peers. Yes, the characters are, as I said before, fighting to uphold a vicious tyranny, but they're also raging against some pretty self-destructive structural problems within the empire, at least within the military. And there's some pretty foreboding acknowledgement that the structural societal problems in the empire might one day come back to haunt them. There's this sense, even in the midst of this great crucible, the first crucible the empire has ever experienced in its history, that there's still going to be a lot of work to be done in reforming the empire, no matter who ends up inheriting it.