The Wall of Storms (The Dandelion Dynasty, #2)

by Ken Liu

“Great lords—whether mortal or immortal—do what they do because their concerns are not ours. We suffer because we are the grass upon which giants tread.”

One thing that the sorry state of pandemic-inflected global politics has brought to the forefront for me is the degree to which this sentiment remains true. As great lords brandish their submarines and missiles and strut around the world stage, proclaiming to be champions of this ideal or that truth, drawing lines around this body of water or that mountain, asserting one group to be “good” and denouncing another to be “evil,” there’s almost nothing that the ordinary people whose lives are actually in the balance can do to alter their fate. Even moving away from a homeland under threat is a privilege that few can afford, and most can only pray that missiles don’t start to fly and bombs don't start to drop. This was true in the time of Thucydides and Sima Qian, and it was lived reality for all my grandparents. Despite the various narratives we’ve spun of “progress” and “advancement,” the essential powerlessness of the vast majority of the planet’s population has remained a constant, their fate at the mercy of a few ambitious lords (or at most, an elite of the educated but ignorant and unwise) who wish to see themselves live on in song and story, to be praised as heroes who stand against darkness but who in fact bring about that very darkness. This is a core concern of the Dandelion Dynasty: how do you build a political system that not only constrains the power of the elite against those within the body politic, but also limits their power against those outside it? In other words, how do you create a republic that is just not only to citizens, but also those outside its walls? Can you have a powerful, constitutional state that doesn’t oppress those who don’t get to vote in its elections, that doesn’t wage perpetual war on distant shores, that doesn’t pursue dreams of empire, that doesn’t project its own way of life as the ideal for everyone else? Thucydides struggled with these questions. Thomas Jefferson struggled with these questions. Kuni Garu and Zomi Kidosu and Jia Matiza and many others in Dara have struggled with it and will struggle with these questions in the rest of the saga. I can tell a grand story of hope in fiction, but fiction is much easier than reality