The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire, volume 2) by Andrea Stewart

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/for-whom-these-vile-shackles
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On 10/4/2021 9:35 AM, James Nicoll wrote:

> The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire, volume 2) by Andrea Stewart

From your review...

The Empire has a weirdly simple structure, requiring a lot more
hands-on work from Lin than I’d expect from an empire with a
bunch of satrapies. (Such empires have often let the satraps
do much of the governing, as long as the satraps remitted a chunk
of the taxes they collected and refrained from challenging the
shah’s control of the army and the state religion.) It’s
unfortunate, then, that Lin’s father seems to have been a
glorious example of failure modes for highly centralized
autocratic states. In particular, his love of secrecy has meant
that the new ruler is facing several crises of unknown origin
and nature.

I was intrigued by the rudimentary attempt at democracy described
in the book. I was confirmed in my cynicism re idealism in the
powerful when Lin and at least one other aristocrat agree that
the system must change … as long as they keep their personal power.
In Lin’s case this is understandable — her goals were survival,
getting rid of dad, and putting an end to her father’s abuses — 
but the other character has pretensions of being a revolutionary
without being quite being able to imagine a regime ruled by
consensus rather than autocratic decree. Ah, well. Baby steps!

>
> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/for-whom-these-vile-shackles
>

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, the abstract
mathematical structure for the ideal democracy. Which happens
to be the very same logical structure for the ideal
evolutionary system, or nature.

A crucial mathematical relationship for democracy or evolving
systems in general is seen in the Power Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

I think you'll see the relevance to this in your
comments about satraps or distributed control.
The abstract form of a power law relationship could
be seen in a pyramid comprised of many thin
horizontal layers.

The power law relationship exists if each layer
has the same total power as every other layer.
So the power at the peak would equal the power
of the lowest and largest layer. The ruler and
the people would share power equally, and so too
with every layer in between, whether courts, state
and local govts.and so on.

When this relationship exists, the whole is said to
'tremble' and the ability to self-organize and evolve
spontaneously emerges.

The whole becomes more than it's sum.

Creation and evolution emerges as if by magic
and all the beauty, creativity and resilience
we see in, say, an old growth forest can be
created over time.

This is the fundamental mathematical relationship
necessary for all visible order in the universe.

The fractal nature of nature: power laws, ecological
complexity and biodiversity

The twentieth century saw the triumph of reductionistic science.
Complex nature was pulled apart to reveal its fundamental parts,
from subatomic particles in physics to genes and other molecules
in biology.

Powerful new tools provided unimaginable quantities of
information. Enormous variety has been revealed.
Now we are faced with the challenge of understanding the
structures and dynamics of the complex systems themselves.

We know that this cannot be done simply by assembling
the parts in ever larger subsystems. There are just
too many possibilities. Power laws and other emergent
general features of these systems offer invaluable clues
to the universal mechanisms that constrain the diversity
of life and the complexity of nature
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692973/pdf/12079523.pdf

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