A follow-up could be interesting! Them having indentureds semi-surprised me; it would be interesting to see the Gyges have a different practice of it. (OTOH, making them "good owners" invites comparisons with real-world minimization of harms.)
Common to your books is a more humanized and (sometimes dubiously) consensual romantic relationship involving indentureds and contract owners, though it's not clear that ever lead to more enlightened outlooks on the practice (Alcmene is really the only one with both the perspective and the opportunity).
I get the sense that Iphigenia is universally pretty conservative (though not a cultural monolith), and the "caste" system and the lack of questioning of it seems fairly in keeping with your Hellenic inspiration. You've mentioned that the wrong side won the war and I'm curious what remains of the losers, whether minority views or descendants.
Even as I finished Kyrie, I felt it was probable that Marko did invest in bound labor—I think he even alluded to the possibility. The work was labor-intensive and difficult, and for them to really make a go of it, additional hands would be required. From his perspective, a two-day drive from Hipassus in dubious, unpoliced borderlands, inviting other men in to work for wages in the presence of his two women and (relatively) easily obtained mineral wealth would be an unwise choice. A far more logical move, once he’d made a few hundred drachms in profits in a few years, would be to begin to buy contracts.
Forced labor mining in the ancient world (and today) is a nasty business with high fatality rates, which is why on Iphigenia, it’s the lot of the semi-dehumanized lambdas. Marko’s use of women in mining would be as unheard of as gold mining itself. However, it would not be any more onerous than what he, Kyrie and Gemma were doing, ie, basically panning.
Their views of indenture, coming from inside their society, would be different from our own on slavery, much more of the ancient viewpoint of its being a natural state. Marko wanted both of them, personally, as people and as love interests. Gemma he saw as made to be what she was and not unhappy that way; Kyrie, as the aristoi daughter, was a fantasy object who came to like him as well.
Gemma had the common clone-trained viewpoint of what was proper and what was not: once Kyrie was indentured, Gemma viewed her as inside that environment and trainable, including physical punishment, to accept and grow in the role.
Kyrie was appalled that it happened to her—the glimpses of her in Kingdom of Maids and the start of Betrayed into Bondage show her as an ordinary, wealthy young woman of her world. But there is no road back for her, she has suffered “social death”; her frenemy Miss Rhozenko gloated over this and would have dealt with her like Alcmene did Phala, given time and opportunity. However, as Kyrie is with Gemma and comes to love Marko, and her situation on the edge of civilization is not deeply oppressive, and since she views indenture as a positive good in her world, she comes to accept it.
Inside their miniature society, Marko, as male, as owner, and as a former militia authority figure, assumes the pyramidal top, and Gemma, as the slightly older and more experienced maid assumes the role of First Girl, and Kyrie assumes the lowest position. Marko would instinctively want to prevent Kyrie from assuming leadership that she might feel proper to her class, and Gemma, having got, if you will, the whip hand over her, would be very pleased to enforce her own dominance, as both proper and pleasant.
Complicating matters at once is Kyrie’s accidental pregnancy with Krisa. As established in Olava and onwards, a successful pregnancy elevates the indentured to the status of concubine. For Iphigenian legal purposes, this means if the child is a son, or as long as the father does not sell the contract if she is a daughter, child and mother are inalienable from each other and cannot be distanced from his household until the child reaches the age of majority. Unlike Roman and Greek bondage and in semimodern racial slavery, the child does not automatically follow the mother’s status. Alcmene (like Phala) is the granddaughter of an indentured, and through cloning tech "mothers" children on her maids herself, whose status is unchallengeably aristoi; this follows, say, Ottoman practice.
(In regular circumstances, though, the woman would be “unsalable” even after the child reached majority; even Iphigenians would view this as reprehensible, and it would not be socially “done”.)
Gemma, of course, wants a baby as well, to forestall any inferiority to Kyrie, and Marko ultimately marries Gem. This is a form of manumission to freedwoman, and can legally happen after Gem turns thirty—for a fine to the State. Gem’s daughter is thus about ten when Gemma marries Marko, Krisa is almost eleven. Kyrie and Gemma in this vignette, which had better become at least a novella after all this essay, are about 46 local, (44 and a half Earth standard), and Kyrie has four more years to go to her manumission.
Marko would see no reason for the extra expense for early manumission; Gemma would prefer to remain a freedwoman in control of her former Miss; and Kyrie, not hating her life, would see no pressing advantage other than the occasional switchings or bastinados would stop.—I expect, as to the last, though, that since these were already more sensualized, as they grew older and their daughters began walking and talking, that correction would become a rarer, private, and ritualized practice.
(Also, I imagine that the Gyges household would always wonder what Nestor Kaleva would do if Kyrie were manumitted *too early* … )
[ … takes a breath … ]
Iphigenia certainly has a rigid caste system. At the base, the lambas (relatively few in number) and the indentureds, about 80% clones and 20% former citizens, with the former citizens viewed as inferior. A bit higher: freedwomen, and the militia and Biosphere Corps conscripts. (Sidebar: there is virtually no prison population on Iphigenia, for obvious reasons.) The rural agrios population and urban dolemen are equivalent but separate. The mercanters—tradesmen and traders from belt-makers and shopkeepers up to factory owners and labor-brokers like Miss Scyros—are above them, with internal layers worthy of Mughal India. The epistarchs—technicians, teachers, doctors, scientists, priestesses, bureaucrats—occupy a smaller layer, with fine interior divisions as well; and lastly the aristoi, the landed gentry, who were the masters and instigators of the Caballardo.
Conscripts, after their five-plus year terms, return to their former classes but with a client-patron relationship to their former officers. Freedwomen have no social or economic existence outside of their client relationship to their former contract-owners and in that sense are not fully “free”. Other castes can marry up, or down, but at a significant cost varying with the step, and a potentially huge social cost to the hypogamous partner. (“You married a mercanter?!”)
And why the Caballardo? How is the gap bridged between the optimistic “kibbutzim” world of Safiya and the feudalistic struggle two centuries later? I think it came down to labor. There was a huge priority on terraforming, and entrepreneurial farmers, spreading out to the edge of inhabitable regions, were provided effectively unlimited labor by the polis governments of the loosely woven planetary governments, and effectively zero oversight. Their remote locations removed their need to treat the clones—male and female—as anything but slaves in all but name. (See: coffee and rubber plantaos.)
The Famine was brought to an end under (not necessarily by) a united Provisional government, which also championed idealists who felt the “boer-trekker” type landowners were abusing the labor. The horse-mobile landowners, though not inspired by racial terrors*, would have feared bankruptcy if they were denied additional labor and if manumission were made compulsory, if indeed the clones were not bound by contract to them at all.
The war spread across the solar system and the globe, resulting in the suppression of the Provisionals and several independent polises, such as Penesthelia, that sought to forge their own paths. Male clones were no longer produced due to security concerns, except for the new lambdas. During this time, female POWs and ideological criminals were indentured; citizen indenture and conscription began.
I’ll conclude here because we could then move into discussions of gender relationships and their connections to classism, sexism, and misogyny (Iphigenians would look at you blankly if you suggested they were misogynists), along with obvious LGBTQ issues, etc. Lastly, I do want to remark that there are still intellectual currents supporting the abolition of cloning and indentureship. Such movements are a profound fear for the Conciliar government. The Air Fleet Week riots mentioned (see “Zenaya and Isobel”, etc.) are student-led protests related to this and the arrival of the *Yi So-yeon* in Iphigenian space. The epilogue of Kingdom of Maids suggests that the current society will prevail for at least a few more decades. Social, economic, political, and cultural stagnation is the *sine qua non* of the government.
___________
*Racism, at least, is not one of their hangups, and genetic engineers and aestheticians as they are, they would fail to grasp the idea as anything more than a primitive atavism.
A follow-up could be interesting! Them having indentureds semi-surprised me; it would be interesting to see the Gyges have a different practice of it. (OTOH, making them "good owners" invites comparisons with real-world minimization of harms.)
Common to your books is a more humanized and (sometimes dubiously) consensual romantic relationship involving indentureds and contract owners, though it's not clear that ever lead to more enlightened outlooks on the practice (Alcmene is really the only one with both the perspective and the opportunity).
I get the sense that Iphigenia is universally pretty conservative (though not a cultural monolith), and the "caste" system and the lack of questioning of it seems fairly in keeping with your Hellenic inspiration. You've mentioned that the wrong side won the war and I'm curious what remains of the losers, whether minority views or descendants.
I have one or two ideas …
Even as I finished Kyrie, I felt it was probable that Marko did invest in bound labor—I think he even alluded to the possibility. The work was labor-intensive and difficult, and for them to really make a go of it, additional hands would be required. From his perspective, a two-day drive from Hipassus in dubious, unpoliced borderlands, inviting other men in to work for wages in the presence of his two women and (relatively) easily obtained mineral wealth would be an unwise choice. A far more logical move, once he’d made a few hundred drachms in profits in a few years, would be to begin to buy contracts.
Forced labor mining in the ancient world (and today) is a nasty business with high fatality rates, which is why on Iphigenia, it’s the lot of the semi-dehumanized lambdas. Marko’s use of women in mining would be as unheard of as gold mining itself. However, it would not be any more onerous than what he, Kyrie and Gemma were doing, ie, basically panning.
Their views of indenture, coming from inside their society, would be different from our own on slavery, much more of the ancient viewpoint of its being a natural state. Marko wanted both of them, personally, as people and as love interests. Gemma he saw as made to be what she was and not unhappy that way; Kyrie, as the aristoi daughter, was a fantasy object who came to like him as well.
Gemma had the common clone-trained viewpoint of what was proper and what was not: once Kyrie was indentured, Gemma viewed her as inside that environment and trainable, including physical punishment, to accept and grow in the role.
Kyrie was appalled that it happened to her—the glimpses of her in Kingdom of Maids and the start of Betrayed into Bondage show her as an ordinary, wealthy young woman of her world. But there is no road back for her, she has suffered “social death”; her frenemy Miss Rhozenko gloated over this and would have dealt with her like Alcmene did Phala, given time and opportunity. However, as Kyrie is with Gemma and comes to love Marko, and her situation on the edge of civilization is not deeply oppressive, and since she views indenture as a positive good in her world, she comes to accept it.
Inside their miniature society, Marko, as male, as owner, and as a former militia authority figure, assumes the pyramidal top, and Gemma, as the slightly older and more experienced maid assumes the role of First Girl, and Kyrie assumes the lowest position. Marko would instinctively want to prevent Kyrie from assuming leadership that she might feel proper to her class, and Gemma, having got, if you will, the whip hand over her, would be very pleased to enforce her own dominance, as both proper and pleasant.
Complicating matters at once is Kyrie’s accidental pregnancy with Krisa. As established in Olava and onwards, a successful pregnancy elevates the indentured to the status of concubine. For Iphigenian legal purposes, this means if the child is a son, or as long as the father does not sell the contract if she is a daughter, child and mother are inalienable from each other and cannot be distanced from his household until the child reaches the age of majority. Unlike Roman and Greek bondage and in semimodern racial slavery, the child does not automatically follow the mother’s status. Alcmene (like Phala) is the granddaughter of an indentured, and through cloning tech "mothers" children on her maids herself, whose status is unchallengeably aristoi; this follows, say, Ottoman practice.
(In regular circumstances, though, the woman would be “unsalable” even after the child reached majority; even Iphigenians would view this as reprehensible, and it would not be socially “done”.)
Gemma, of course, wants a baby as well, to forestall any inferiority to Kyrie, and Marko ultimately marries Gem. This is a form of manumission to freedwoman, and can legally happen after Gem turns thirty—for a fine to the State. Gem’s daughter is thus about ten when Gemma marries Marko, Krisa is almost eleven. Kyrie and Gemma in this vignette, which had better become at least a novella after all this essay, are about 46 local, (44 and a half Earth standard), and Kyrie has four more years to go to her manumission.
Marko would see no reason for the extra expense for early manumission; Gemma would prefer to remain a freedwoman in control of her former Miss; and Kyrie, not hating her life, would see no pressing advantage other than the occasional switchings or bastinados would stop.—I expect, as to the last, though, that since these were already more sensualized, as they grew older and their daughters began walking and talking, that correction would become a rarer, private, and ritualized practice.
(Also, I imagine that the Gyges household would always wonder what Nestor Kaleva would do if Kyrie were manumitted *too early* … )
[ … takes a breath … ]
Iphigenia certainly has a rigid caste system. At the base, the lambas (relatively few in number) and the indentureds, about 80% clones and 20% former citizens, with the former citizens viewed as inferior. A bit higher: freedwomen, and the militia and Biosphere Corps conscripts. (Sidebar: there is virtually no prison population on Iphigenia, for obvious reasons.) The rural agrios population and urban dolemen are equivalent but separate. The mercanters—tradesmen and traders from belt-makers and shopkeepers up to factory owners and labor-brokers like Miss Scyros—are above them, with internal layers worthy of Mughal India. The epistarchs—technicians, teachers, doctors, scientists, priestesses, bureaucrats—occupy a smaller layer, with fine interior divisions as well; and lastly the aristoi, the landed gentry, who were the masters and instigators of the Caballardo.
Conscripts, after their five-plus year terms, return to their former classes but with a client-patron relationship to their former officers. Freedwomen have no social or economic existence outside of their client relationship to their former contract-owners and in that sense are not fully “free”. Other castes can marry up, or down, but at a significant cost varying with the step, and a potentially huge social cost to the hypogamous partner. (“You married a mercanter?!”)
And why the Caballardo? How is the gap bridged between the optimistic “kibbutzim” world of Safiya and the feudalistic struggle two centuries later? I think it came down to labor. There was a huge priority on terraforming, and entrepreneurial farmers, spreading out to the edge of inhabitable regions, were provided effectively unlimited labor by the polis governments of the loosely woven planetary governments, and effectively zero oversight. Their remote locations removed their need to treat the clones—male and female—as anything but slaves in all but name. (See: coffee and rubber plantaos.)
The Famine was brought to an end under (not necessarily by) a united Provisional government, which also championed idealists who felt the “boer-trekker” type landowners were abusing the labor. The horse-mobile landowners, though not inspired by racial terrors*, would have feared bankruptcy if they were denied additional labor and if manumission were made compulsory, if indeed the clones were not bound by contract to them at all.
The war spread across the solar system and the globe, resulting in the suppression of the Provisionals and several independent polises, such as Penesthelia, that sought to forge their own paths. Male clones were no longer produced due to security concerns, except for the new lambdas. During this time, female POWs and ideological criminals were indentured; citizen indenture and conscription began.
I’ll conclude here because we could then move into discussions of gender relationships and their connections to classism, sexism, and misogyny (Iphigenians would look at you blankly if you suggested they were misogynists), along with obvious LGBTQ issues, etc. Lastly, I do want to remark that there are still intellectual currents supporting the abolition of cloning and indentureship. Such movements are a profound fear for the Conciliar government. The Air Fleet Week riots mentioned (see “Zenaya and Isobel”, etc.) are student-led protests related to this and the arrival of the *Yi So-yeon* in Iphigenian space. The epilogue of Kingdom of Maids suggests that the current society will prevail for at least a few more decades. Social, economic, political, and cultural stagnation is the *sine qua non* of the government.
___________
*Racism, at least, is not one of their hangups, and genetic engineers and aestheticians as they are, they would fail to grasp the idea as anything more than a primitive atavism.