On this day, it’s hard for an American to not think about revolution and rebellion. But what does it mean to revolt? And how can we incorporate that into worldbuilding?
In real life, revolutions are bloody business. Here, we’re familiar with the American Civil War. Essentially, the southern portion of the US declared itself an independent, sovereign state. The rest took exception to that, and the next four years were spent fighting it out. Less than a century before that, British colonists did the same thing, but with one key difference: they won.
Some rebellions are successful, like the American one or Russia’s October Revolution of November 1917 (don’t ask about the dates). Others, such as the Confederacy (1861-65) and the Boxer Rebellion of China (1899-1901), were crushed. In modern times, further examples are the Arab Spring uprisings of five years ago, the Sudanese Civil War that created the nation of South Sudan (now undergoing its own rebellion), or the seemingly interminable conflict in Syria.
All these have one thing in common: they were or are violent affairs. When Scotland attempted to secede from the United Kingdom, it was seeking to become recognized peacefully, and such a feat is nearly unheard of. Nationalism is a strong force, and those who have power rarely want to give it up; those factors combine to ensure that independence will almost always come from the barrel of a gun, not a signature and a stamp.
Building the revolution
For authors, that’s a good thing. Horrible though it may be to live through a revolution, writing about it from afar is safe enough. The setting is ripe with conflict, from the military to the dramatic. And since these times of upheaval are all but guaranteed to be laced with violence, they fit any of the bloodier genres, too.
What makes a good revolution, though? First, there needs to be a reason for it to exist. Why do certain people think they’d be better off without their mother country? The colonists in America complained about unfair taxation and, well, colonialism. So did India, for that matter. The Bolsheviks had a particular political ideology they wanted to enforce on their country. ISIS seems to want general discord and chaos. The reasons are varied, and the exact nature of the revolutionaries’ aims will determine much about the setting.
After you know why these guys are fighting, you can look at how. Pitched battles are nice if you can afford the manpower, the weapons, and the skilled officers, and if the time period fits. Nowadays, the mother country would just drop bombs on the front lines. But your options don’t have to go straight to armed conflict. Some revolutions might start that way, but many begin as political movements that later snowball into an unstoppable—or entirely stoppable, for those that failed—forces of change. Early on, a small, close-knit group can wage a war of words, spreading propaganda and information, whispering against the establishment, and so on.
Once the true fighting starts, then you’ve moved beyond a simple revolution and into a civil war. A civil war is, at its heart, a war, and we know how to write those. But its nature will add new dimensions. It’s not a case of fighting a bunch of strangers from a faraway land. Now you’re fighting your neighbors, your former countrymen. Nor will it be a symmetrical conflict. The rebels will most likely be outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. They’ll have, at best, the support of the people and whatever materiel they were able to smuggle, steal, or bring from home. They are what we might call an underdog.
That leads us to a third question, one that only the author can answer for certain. Are the rebels right? It’s not necessarily a case of good versus evil. The mother country may very well have a legitimate government, rather than being a tyrannical empire. The rebels could openly advocate terrorism. And there can be factions on both sides. Black and white worked for Star Wars, but some works need to take things more seriously, and that means shades of gray.
A simple illustration of our own time should make all of this more clear. Take Syria, as it has been for the entirety of this decade. Bashar al-Assad is the country’s head of state. By all accounts, he’s a nasty sort, with the dictatorial bent so common in the Middle East, but he has the legitimate claim to rule. The wave of rebellions sparked by Arab Spring came to Syria, and the populace rose up against him, just like they did in Tunisia, Egypt, Algiers, and elsewhere. Assad fought back, and the two sides have been locked in civil war ever since.
But here’s the rub. The rebels of Syria were not one cohesive unit. They were made up of a number of smaller groups, each with its own grievances and goals. But in 2011, most people would be rooting for their side, because they were perceived as fighting the good fight. All would have been well, except that one of those rebel factions was ISIS. A work as simplistic as Star Wars could never hope to convey the machinations of a revolutionary force containing a subgroup objectively worse than the Evil Empire, not while trying to maintain the “David and Goliath” narrative.
Revolutions, to put it plainly, are complex. They’re tricky business. Writing one is hard work, a juggling act that many might want to avoid. For those who try, I wish you all the luck in the world. Whether you go the easy “rebels fighting the empire” route or all the way to Game of Thrones-level political scheming, you know it’s gonna be alright.