The Domination Totally Explained

Everything about The Domination totally explained

The Domination is a dystopian alternate history series by S. M. Stirling. It comprises a main trilogy of novels as well as one crossover novel set after the original and a book of short stories.

Historical background

The Draka books were written and published shortly after Apartheid South Africa succumbed to intensive international pressure and was forced to adapt itself to the rest of the world's current norms of racial equality. Though Stirling never made an explicit connection in any public statement, what the series clearly depicts is a diametrically opposite scenario - implausible in the view of many critics - whereby a "Super South Africa", founded upon manifest, utter inequality, eventually succeeds in imposing its own norms on the rest of the world and extinguishing the very concepts of democracy and equality.

Drakan society

Origins and demography

The world of The Domination diverges from our world at the time of the American Revolutionary War, when the Netherlands declares war on the UK, resulting in the loss of its Cape Colony to the British. After defeat in Revolutionary War, the Loyalists who historically went to Canada are instead resettled in the new Crown Colony of Drakia (named after Sir Francis Drake) in South Africa. The Crown Colony of Drakia (later, the Dominion of Draka) is an aggressive militaristic slave-owning society reinforced over the course of the 19th century by Icelanders, French royalists, defeated American Confederates and other reactionary refugees.
The Draka capital city is Archona, on the site of our own world's Pretoria.

Citizens and "serfs"

Citizens, who are free and can vote, comprise only a small fraction of Draka's population. Over 90% of the population are slaves (officially referred to as 'serfs', as the Draka maintain the fiction of obeying the British Empire's ban on chattel slavery). In fact the entire Drakan society, from sex to the economy, is based on slavery. Almost all Draka citizens own at least a few slaves. Because the Draka are so heavily outnumbered, meaning that a general slave rebellion could well mean their extermination, the Draka are utterly ruthless. Impalement is the favoured Draka method of executing rebellious slaves. Nonetheless, many Draka, especially those who are central characters in the novels, aim to create an idealised, "rural community under a lord" feel on their lands. Such an idealistic image is often spoiled, however, when punishment - always severe - has to be enacted.

Draka Military

The citizen Draka army is made up of shock troops, meant to be used as the arm of decision in maneuver warfare. For attritional warfare the Domination uses Janissary slave soldiers, who make up 60% of the Draka army. Draka soldiers neither ask nor give quarter—all captured enemies are killed or permanently enslaved.
In the books, Draka equipment - from tanks to tank-busting aircraft- seems delibrately evocative of late-20th century military equipment, enhancing the otherworldliness and superiority of the Draka in technological as well as purely physical sense. The assault rifles used by Draka citizen-soldiers feature integral bipods and optical sights, while support weaponry includes nerve gas grenades and magazine-fed mortars. Descriptions of the Draka Hond tanks evoke images of modern tanks such as the M1 Abrams, while one particular aircraft - right down to placement of the engines - resembles an A-10 'Warthog' tank-killer. When placed alongside the Gewehr 98 bolt-action rifles, Panzer IVs and Focke-Wulf FW 190s of the Third Reich it's easy to feel sorry for the inevitably doomed Nazis. In a similar vein, flashbacks involving some of the older characters reveal that the Draka had a large dirigible air force capable of strategic bombing during the First World War.
From 'Under the Yoke' onwards, Draka equipment takes an even more science-fiction turn. Genetically-modified gorilla shock troops, starfighters and pain-inducing irremovable bracelets for troublesome slaves make tantalising appearances. While in 'The Stone Dogs' the Protracted Struggle is still primarilly a Cold War-esque arms race of nuclear capability, modified, genetically-targeted diseases and advanced computer viruses also make an appearance.

Culture and ideology

During the 1790s the Draka trade extensively with India (Ceylon is an early conquest), which leads to a fad for Mughal artwork. Some new Draka cities are also given Indian-style names including Diskarapur (Newcastle) and Shahnapur (Maputo). From early in the Nineteenth Century the Draka develop a craze for Classical Antiquity and draw from it much of their military and political terminology. Antiquity provides the Draka with a ready-made model of "colour-blind slavery". The ancient Greeks and Romans saw no problem in enslaving people of the same skin colour as themselves, and even of the same language and culture - though with them, unlike the Draka, the wholesale enslavement of a defeated enemy was the exception rather than the rule, and their slaves could and frequently did gain manumission (see Slavery in antiquity).

"Anti-America"

The Dominion draws substantially from the ideology of Friedrich Nietzsche and similar philosophers and can be viewed as an "Anti-America," in the sense that like the United States, the Draka nation started off as a British settler colony, but evolved along diametrically opposite lines. While the United States had slavery, even slave-holders had to pay lip-service to the American values of liberty and equality, and the contradiction was eventually resolved by the American Civil War. The Draka, on the other hand, view themselves as a master race and unlike the Nazis (who believed that their mere racial heritage made them superior), are keenly aware of the effort they must make to maintain this status; in the manner of ancient Sparta, all Draka citizen children attend sex-segregated boarding schools with an extreme emphasis on military prowess. While the United States in the 20th century set for itself the goal of equality for all regardless of race, the Draka worked to enslave all non-Draka humans, also regardless of race.

Government and economy

Politically, the Draka state is described as 'aristocratic republic' with a parliamentary system of government. The Archon is the head of state appointed for a 20-year term by a parliament (elected in free and fair elections). Draka citizens have a considerable degree of free speech, but fundamental criticism of the slave system is forbidden. The Draka economy is heavily dominated by cartels known as Combines, with ownership split between the state and the Landholders' League (Citizens can only own the right to use land, not the land itself, which can be confiscated in the event of neglect or misuse). There is also a considerable small-business private sector. The Draka economy is on the gold standard, with the basic unit of currency being the Auric. In the third novel, with gold becoming plentiful due to imports from space, the Draka switch to the Auric reflecting a basket of commodities

Drakan history

The nineteenth century

The Draka take over Egypt and Ceylon from the French during the Napoleonic Wars, and over the course of the 19th century, the Draka gradually conquer and enslave the entire continent of Africa. The last areas to be conquered were the jungles of the Congo, due to the danger of tropical diseases. Technological development is faster than in our own history, as the Draka put the wealth derived from their vast gold and diamond deposits to effective use by offering large grants to scientists and inventors who settle in their territory and develop new inventions. These include Richard Trevithick, inventor of the steam locomotive, who settles in Virconium (equivalent to our own world's Durban) in 1796, RJ Gatling, who settles in Diskarapur in 1850, and Louis Pasteur, who discovers malaria's mosquito vector in the 1860s while working for the Shahnapur Institute of Tropical Medicine.
   The United States is also much more expansionistic than in our own timeline - it annexes Canada after the War of 1812 (a conquest presumably made easier in this timeline by the absence of Loyalist American settlers to enlarge the Canadian population) and Mexico after the Mexican–American War (since, it's implied, the addition of numerous Northern, Free-Soil states following the conquest of Canada strengthened Southern demands for a reciprocal campaign to increase the number of slave-holding states with representation in Congress). William Walker's Southern adventurers conquer Central America; while Cuba, Hispaniola, Hawaii and the Philippines are annexed in 1854.
   During the American Civil War, the Draka supply massive amounts of aid to the Confederacy, including steam-powered armored cars. However, the Union still wins the Civil War (with the help of large numbers of Mexican conscripts), and annexes Walker's Central American empire. Cuba, Hispaniola, Hawaii, and the Philippines are granted statehood in 1898, with the Central American territories following later. The United States eventually has 62 states in total.
   The Empire of Brazil seizes control of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the 1870s, the same decade which sees Britain uniting Australia and New Zealand as the Dominion of Australasia, and the emergence of Gran Colombia. This exemplifies the trend in the series of fewer and fewer nations appearing in the world.
   In China, the Taiping Rebellion is successful, resulting in a China which is even more incapable of successful modernization than in our own history. The Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (which in the Draka timeline occurs in 1899) is even more decisive, with Japan not only annexing Formosa, but also Korea, Hainan, and several Chinese coastal cities. After victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japan annexes Manchuria and establishes a protectorate over the weak Taiping Dynasty.

The Great War and its aftermath

The Dominion of Drakia joins the Allied side in the Great War, and conquers the Ottoman Empire. It subsequently declared its independence from Britain and renamed itself the Domination of the Draka. The Domination then takes advantage of the Russian Civil War and seizes the rest of the Middle East, much of Central Asia, and China west of Xian and Wuhan. Up to 500,000 Janissaries die in pacification campaigns during this time in the Domination's new territories. Sixty-five percent of the population of Afghanistan is exterminated in retaliation for the fierce resistance of that nation's "Badmash" rebels. In 1921 the Empire of Japan deposes the Taiping Emperor and annexes all Chinese territory not in Draka hands. After the death of Lenin, a second civil war further weakened the Soviet Union, which is won by a faction led by Joseph Stalin—who subsequently orders a "hermit kingdom" (isolationist) policy.

Draka development of world domination ideology

Under the influence of Draka philosophers such as Elvira Naldorssen, the traditional Draka white-supremacism is replaced by Draka-supremacism, with the Draka viewing all of non-Drakan humanity as their cattle, which is also highly remniscient of the Talmudic Jewish view of Gentiles, or non-Jews. Elvira explains the ideology of the Domination, the utter amorality of which will lead enemies of the Draka to refer to them as 'Snakes':
� "...so the Draka are not different from other peoples because they violate the Golden Rule or Bentham's derivative idolatry 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. Everyone does. We don't violate them, we reject them.

� "Others have conquered and ruled; we alone conquer for conquest's sake and Dominate for no other purpose than Domination itself; the name we half-consciously chose for our state is no accident. We and we alone have spoken aloud the Great Secret; that the root function of all human society is the production and reproduction of power—and that power is the ability to compel others to do your will against theirs. It is end, not means. The purpose of Power is Power.

� "The Draka will conquer the world for two reasons; because we must and because we can. And yet of the two forces the second is the greater; we do this because we choose to do it. By the sovereign Will and force of arms the Draka will rule the Earth, and in so doing remake themselves. We shall conquer and beat the Nations of the Earth into the dust and reforge them in our self wrought Image; the Final Society without weakness or mercy, hard and pure. Our descendants will walk the hillside of that future, innocent beneath the stars, with no more between them and their naked will than a wolf has. THEN there will be Gods in the Earth."

The Eurasian War

The first book of the series Marching Through Georgia is a war story set during the Eurasian War, the Domination timeline's equivalent of World War II. In this war, the Nazis utterly crushed the Soviet Union, with only a Siberian rump state beyond the Urals surviving under a junta led by Marshal Timoshenko. The Nazi success derives from the Soviets suffering two recent, devastating civil wars, and needing to defend a long southern border with the Domination. Additionally, the Lend-Lease between the United States and the Soviets was rendered ineffective by Nazi U-boats effecting a powerful blockade in the Atlantic, Japanese naval hegemony in the Pacific, and the Domination's refusal to allow lend-lease supplies through its territory.
   The Domination entered the war just before the Nazi invasion of Russia and conquered Italy with the Nazis' tacit consent. The Draka then attacked the Third Reich in the Caucasus region, attempting to cut off a large part of the German army. Much of the story is told from the point of view of the Draka centurion Eric von Shrakenberg and the American journalist Bill Dreiser.
   The German Wehrmacht is somewhat more advanced than historically, with a fully mechanized supply train and Panther and Tiger tanks used as standard rather than the older Panzer IV. The Waffen-SS units facing the Draka Citizen Airborne unit the novel centres around are also in possession of numerous 'hybrid' armoured vehicles made from German and captured Soviet parts, but they're still no match for the Draka army. The Draka citizen soldiers, female as well as male, are honed killing machines, each equal to several of their enemy on the battlefield. The Draka also have superb weaponry, including 14,000 Hond III tanks with armor, engine size and gun caliber approaching those of the actual present-day M1 Abrams, and a ground attack aircraft similar to the A-10 (albeit without jet power). By 1944, all sides are widely using nerve gas, jet- and rocket-powered fighter aircraft and ballistic missiles.
   The United States is forced into the war when the entire Pacific Fleet is wiped out at Pearl Harbor. Japanese forces occupy the U.S. States of Hawaii, the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Additionally, Japan occupies northern Australia, raids California, and the Imperial Japanese Navy shells Acapulco. Consequently, the United States can't open a second front in Europe. Alliance with the Nazis against the Draka is also impossible, due to the influence of the Jewish lobby and a Draka threat to supply Japan with nuclear weapons-related materials in the event of U.S.-German peace.
   In 1943, the Alliance for Democracy is formed—comprising the military alliance, free trade area and monetary union. This Alliance includes the Americas, the United Kingdom, India and unoccupied Australia. The United States turned the tide against Japan with victory in the Battle of the Sea of Cortez, in which jet fighter-bombers armed with guided bombs played a crucial role. Hawaii was liberated in late 1943, and half of the surviving Imperial Japanese Navy was destroyed in a nuclear cruise missile attack on the Truk naval base. In late 1944, Tokyo was destroyed by a nuclear cruise missile—killing over 150,000 people including the Imperial Family. A fanatical military government takes over Japan. The Draka overrun Europe as far as the Pyrenees, with the decisive blow made with five atomic bombs against the industrial areas of the Ruhr. Adolf Hitler himself, it's revealed in later flashbacks, was assassinated by a cadre of generals in 1942. Without his meddling, the German Wehrmacht puts up much more stubborn and effective resistance than it did historically against the Soviet Union, but the memory of Hitler means that the rest of Europe is loathe to unite behind the Germans to halt the Draka. Numerous Draka characters credit Hitler's memory as a key factor in ensuring Draka victory in Europe.
   In 1945, the Draka completed its conquest of Europe by using its remaining stockpile of 12 atomic bombs to force the Pyrenees—finally defeating a communist Spain (following a different outcome to reality's Spanish Civil War). The United Kingdom remained free and was inundated with refugees. The Draka then turned its attention to the Far East, attacking Japanese-occupied China. Despite the rapid Draka conquest of Eastern China and Korea, the loss of the remaining Japanese naval units in the Battle of the Philippines, the nuclear destruction of Osaka, and the Alliance invasion of Kyushu, Japan continues a bitter resistance, only surrendering to the Alliance in July in fear of a Draka invasion of the Home Islands.
   The Eurasian War claimed some 200 million lives, over three times the death toll of our own World War II. The liberated South-East Asian Federation and Indochinese Republic become members of the Alliance for Democracy, as does a reconstructed Japan in 1954. The Domination and the Alliance thus control the entire world between them.

Europe under Draka rule

The second book, Under the Yoke, is a horrific vision of Europe under Draka rule. Tanya von Shrakenberg established a plantation in formerly-French Touraine Province. Her slaves include Marya Sokolowska and Chantal Lefarge, formerly a Polish nun and a French Communist respectively. Chantal Lefarge is raped by her master, and impregnated with twins. Later, she escapes to the USA on a submarine. In New York City, she gives birth to Fred and Marya Lefarge (named after her rescuers), who will later become key intelligence assets for the OSS during the Protracted Struggle.
Fred Kustaa, agent for the Alliance secret service (the OSS), attempts to keep a resistance movement alive in Europe. He smuggles weapons to guerillas in Finland, and later attempts to smuggle the German professor Ernst Oerbach, who has vital knowledge on nuclear fusion. Marya Sokolowska is Fred's contact in this second mission. Fred Kustaa's American perspective on precedings in the Domination cuts through the pretenses of Draka rule much more effectively than the occasional, self-aware and arrogant statements of Draka characters and brings home to the reader the sheer horror of Draka society, especially in regard to the blinkered and mildly sociopathic mindsets of the serfs who wish to simply get on with their lives, the resistance characters are an intense breath of fresh air as the minds of both Draka and serf become more and more alien to the reader.
Eventually, Draka ruthlessly crushes all resistance in Europe. Finland almost completely depopulated and, in 1952, when a rebellion takes over the city of Barcelona, the Draka respond with a thermonuclear bomb. Under the Yoke contains a deliberately horrific description of the impalement of several guerrilla soldiers, disgusting even the Draka who ordered it—who nevertheless considers it a necessary means of impressing upon the slaves that resistance is futile. Thus, that'll obey more willingly, making it possible for the Draka to be less harsh—giving rise to even further willingness to obey. The Draka have been slavemasters for two hundred years, and have applied modern science to the problem of breaking human wills; they're extremely good at it. Indeed, this feeds further into their ideology of the Draka as a master race, capable of enforcing their will with no other tool than raw willpower.

The Protracted Struggle

The third book, The Stone Dogs, tells the story of the Protracted Struggle—the ultra-nasty Cold War between the Domination of the Draka and the Alliance for Democracy. There is a far more intense space race in this world, with pulse-drive interplanetary spaceships and colonies and military bases established on the Moon, on Mars and in the asteroid belt. Over a period of several decades, the Alliance secretly constructs an antimatter-driven starship for transporting 100,000 people to Alpha Centauri. The Draka employ the policy of "No peace beyond Luna," leading to frequent skirmishes in the inner solar system. The third book also details the life of Eric von Shrakenberg's niece, Yolande Ingolfsson. Eric later becomes the Archon during the "Final War."

The conquest of India

In the 1970s, there's a major setback for the Free World. An OSS covert operation, designed to discredit a Hindu nationalist party and keep India in the Alliance, backfires as a suicide note is found implicating the OSS in the scandal. As a result India secedes from the Alliance—and is conquered and enslaved by the Draka within weeks (except Burma, which counter-seceded back to the Alliance). After the 'Indian Incident' the Alliance for Democracy is formally converted into a single superstate. During the Draka conquest of India, Marya Lefarge is taken prisoner. She becomes a serf to Yolande Ingolfsson, who after torturing her repeatedly with a neural weapon, forces her to become a "brooder" (for example a surrogate mother) for her offspring, Gwendolyn. Yolande also swears vengeance on Fred Lefarge after he kills her lover, Myfanwy Venders, during the Indian Incident.
The much larger free population of the Alliance gives it an edge in physics and computer technology, while the Domination gains the upper hand in the biological sciences allowing them to perfect their genetic engineering techniques by using their slave population as test subjects. They finish the Human Genome Project and are performing significant genetic alteration on mammalian organisms, including humans, by the mid-1970s. Both sides develop super-weapons with which to launch the first strike of the inevitable final war. However, both sides recognize that the long-term trends are in the Alliance's favor. Due to its much-larger economy and free population the Alliance's lead in overall scientific progress slowly grows, with the stagnant Draka increasingly dependent on espionage and Alliance defectors for new innovations.

Draka victorious

The war finally breaks out in 1998 when the Draka, about to lose the secrecy of their superweapon, decide to use it preemptively instead. Drakan advantages in bioscience allowed it to create a bio-psychological virus, "The Stone Dogs" (implicitly derived from HIV). This virus lies dormant but causes the host to go violently insane when activated by precisely modulated radio waves. The Alliance counterpart, a computer virus designed to disable Draka systems, works well but isn't as effective at disabling whole military hierarchies.
Due to the Stone Dogs virus, Draka forces ultimately succeed—if barely—in wiping out all significant Alliance populations and military forces in the Earth-Luna sphere, suffering approximately 15 percent total casualties. The Alliance, though, wins in trans-Lunar space, including the Belt. A truce is declared, allowing the Alliance remnants in the Belt to launch the starship, while giving other Alliance remnants in space limited Draka citizenship (the new Drakans won't be able to vote, though their children will be). The war itself proves to be devastating to Earth. Ultimately, the Solar System belongs to the Draka. The planet's ecosystems were pushed nearly to the breaking point, with a nuclear winter lasting for several years (there are references to ice forming in the Adriatic Sea)—despite the near exclusive use of 'clean' fusion weapons.

The struggle continues

Drakon takes place in the distant future, where the Domination is pitted against the Centauri world of Samothrace, which is populated by the descendants of the Alliance's peoples. A failed experiment intended to research wormholes for FTL travel causes a single genetically-engineered Draka, Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, to be sent into an alternate universe almost indistinguishable from ours (the only notable difference is that Kenneth Branagh played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels, as he'd been rumored to be the favorite when the book was published). The Samothracians rush to counter the impending invasion by sending one of their own agents, cyborg soldier Kenneth Lafarge, a distant descendant of Chantal LeFarge, to stop her. The showdown between the Draka and the Samothracian agents culminates in an epic clash in New York City. At the same time in the Domination's home timeline, the Samothracians attack the Earth via a series of wormholes they'd laid between Alpha Centauri and Sol.
The end result of the clash is that both Kenneth and Gwendolyn are killed. Their technology falls into the hands of NYPD cop Henry Carmaggio, who according to the frame story of "The Domination" patents and licenses it, becoming "the richest man in the world" within twenty years. Back in the Domination's home timeline, the Draka defeat the Samothracian assault, barely.
In 2000, Stirling edited Drakas (ISBN 0-671-31946-9), a collection of short stories by other authors who develop plots based on the Domination premise. In addition, Draka-based fan fiction can be found in various places on the Web.

Criticism

The series has been criticized for giving the Draka an impossibly fast-spreading and technologically advancing society, as well as stating that the British wouldn't have tolerated the Draka's harsh slavery tactics (see External links). Also, the Domination is never attacked and no alliances are made against it throughout its history (until the midst of the 20th century); rather, the threatened countries prefer to fight each other. This could be put down, as one reviewer suggests, to Stirling simply being too fond of his creation, no matter how evil. It is, however, noted throughout the series that all of the nations which could have stood up to the Draka before they became a global threat were willing to ignore the Domination's sins because it was 'only' blacks, Arabs, Asians and some Slavs going Under the Yoke, and so no-one seriously considered their system a threat. The very idea of them forcing the institution of Serfdom upon the civilised, industrialised nations of Europe was dismissed as lunacy right up until the end of the Eurasian War—after which they were taken seriously.
Stirling's use of the Draka as point-of-view characters has led to accusations that he's some sympathy with them (for example, in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction), to his dismay. He describes the Draka series as dystopias based on "suppos[ingthat] everything had turned out as badly as possible, these last few centuries." The title page of his non-Draka novel Conquistador has the quotation "There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is 'idiot'."

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