A hopeful tale of a fight against hopeless odds
You know the failure modes that democracy can fall into: the formation of cliques that don’t share information, the hoarding of resources facilitated by positions of high prestige, the avoidance of accountability after decisions are made in secret. It’s a massive challenge to devise a system of full and equal participation, and a no less daunting one to keep it in healthy functioning condition. Multiply that by a whole order of magnitude if the geographical neghbors of your egalitarian welfare society are puppets of a warmongering corporatocracy.
In the future described in Dilman Dila’s novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, while the great industrial and economic powers were busy fighting World Wars 3 and 4, a large portion of southern Africa has turned into a league of communitarian, decentralized polities with self-sufficient production thanks to an innovative technorganic method that involves hijacking a silkworm’s metabolism to turn it into a natural 3D printer.
In parallel with that invention, a blend of digital code and traditional divination has given rise to a whole new computing paradigm, which allows spiritual forces to be put into mechanical automata. With a horizontal model of governance, where via ubiquitous digital connection every single citizen is a member of Parliament with an equal voice, and every remote village acquires the productive capabilities to sustain a city-sized population, this new state has in-built mechanisms to make corruption all but impossible; and its technological development is quickly making it an indispensable provider of post-petroleum products to the world.
But things get complicated when an American weapons manufacturer, which operates as the de facto government of half the planet, orchestrates an invasion of this new state to steal the secret of its 3D printing process.
The unlikely hero upon whose shoulders it will fall to repel the invasion is Adita, an elderly peasant woman who would rather be left alone to keep growing her garden, but by a process similar to sortition she’s been given a position of leadership in her village, plus she’s the closest thing her country has to an actual Minister of Defense, so it’s up to her to lead the meetings and coordinate the efforts to save her nascent utopia.
One problem: by natural temperament, she has an intense dislike of social contact. So all the variables seem aligned against her mission: How do you get collective consensus when you can’t stand people? How do you win a war when you very deliberately refuse to have a weapons industry? And how do you protect national security when the structure of the state is designed to make official decisions open to all citizens?
There’s a sense in which The Blossoming of the Big Tree resembles classic hard SF, except this time it’s about finding a creative solution to a puzzle of political theory instead of rocket science. Just like in the pulp novels of old, we’re given the measure of the problem, the type of resources at hand, and the urgent stakes in pley, and then we watch smart characters reason their way out of an impossible scenario. So the plot proceeds almost like a thought experiment, a proof by example so cleverly constructed that its logical conclusion feels inevitable in hindsight.
To give only the tiniest of spoilers, it’s precisely the monolithic model of hyper-centralized power that turns out to be the enemy’s weak spot. The world that emerges afterwards is one where such large-scale military operations aren’t possible again. It may sound far-fetched to posit such an outcome in these times, but as the best of SF keeps reminding us, creating a future worth living in requires that we first dare to imagine it.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
Reference: Dila, Dilman. The Blossoming of the Big Tree [Ododo Press, 2026].
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.