Guardians and Sages (with Ronlyn Domingue)

A novelist on the failures of the present and what the future has in store.

The Mapmaker’s War, the first book of the Keeper of Tales trilogy, tells the story of Aoife, the titular mapmaker, who in her wanderings stumbles upon an alternative society. The Guardians possess great wealth and even greater wisdom. They do not hoard their gold. They share. They help each other. They live in peace, in communion with nature. There may be desire—they are human, after all—but there is no want.

Aoife has stumbled on, if not a utopia, a system of government and societal organization very different from, and far preferable to, her own. And because the Guardians, by their very existence, represent a threat to the prevailing order, her own people—patriarchal, greedy, selfish, covetous—regard them as an existential threat. The accidental collision between the two societies animates the conflict in The Mapmaker’s War.

In building the world of the Guardians, Ronlyn Domingue—the author of the Keeper of Tales trilogy and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast—found herself pondering a simple question: “What does it feel like to be in a place where you are taken care of in every way that you could possibly need?”

It is easy to write off something found in a fantasy novel as just that—fantasy. Pure fiction. Make-believe. Even her own readers do so. “With The Mapmaker’s War, I get emails from readers or sometimes I do a book group, and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, the Guardians? I just don’t find any of that believable.’ And I look at them like, ‘What?’”

Domingue goes on: “Why do we think the way we live is believable? Why do we find this in any way acceptable? That people starve? That people don’t get the healthcare they need? They don’t have the housing they need? They don’t get paid a living wage to do what they need to do, to raise their families or take care of themselves? It’s absurd. And for us to continue living in this perception that this is how it should be or needs to be is a sickness. And I think we’re watching this sickness play out, with the mega-billionaires playing games with the rest of us and our planet, and that’s going back to what I said, that it’s all going to have to collapse before something else comes out of it. That’s where we’re headed.”

Objectively, Ronlyn is right. When we stop and think—really think—about how we live, and what the country looks like right now, it is absurd. The healthcare system in the United States, a nation that boasts some of the best healthcare providers on earth, is a joke. Every other world power has some sort of socialized healthcare system, but not us—the Republicans made damned sure of that when they shot down Hillary Clinton’s radical overhaul plan thirty fucking years ago. The harm that caused is incalculable. And so we have come to accept that if we get sick, or seriously injured, or our parents live too long in their dotage, we will go broke.

One way we can get seriously injured is by being wounded in a mass shooting, which, again thanks to the Republicans, happens all the time in the U.S.—so much so that other countries now issue travel warnings to their citizens visiting here. And not just fancy countries, either. Fucking Venezuela has a travel warning because of the “proliferation of acts of violence and indiscriminate hate crimes” here. Venezuela!

Wages have been flat since I entered the workforce in 1995, but CEOs make orders of magnitude more than their workers, as a percentage of annual salary, than they did even in the go-go Eighties. The wealthy pay considerably less in taxes, thanks to unconscionable tax cuts by Bush II and Trump. Corporations used the pandemic as a smokescreen to price-gouge, with nary a peep from anyone in government, on either side of the aisle. The richest men on earth—MbS, Putin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch—are also some of the worst humans that can be found; this is not a coincidence! Our media, protected by a First Amendment so mighty even this corrupt SCOTUS dares not to chip away at its power, chooses to gaslight and normalize instead of doing its job. Climate change is now right of boom; only the willfully ignorant cannot see what’s happening to the planet. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, threatens to upend the creative class.

“You ask about the future of writing,” Domingue tells me. “Well, assuming A.I. doesn’t write every fucking book that people read in the next five years, you know, we are the sages. Think about all the books that have given people hope or inspiration or ideas of what the future could be—in good ways or bad. Because, let’s face it, our sci-fi writer sages have already told us what A.I. is gonna do to us. This is no mystery. So why the fact that we’re so stupid as a group of humans to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do this A.I. thing, this sounds awesome.’ Our sages already told us what the end goal is, right, so why are we doing this again?

“At the same time, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. It’s people like us who are like, ‘Well, what about this? What about that?’ Kind of breathing into the space of possibility of what could happen once the end comes. We’re kind of giving voice to what’s coming in the next few years or decades.”

It’s tempting to write off her rant as a novelist defending the sanctity of the novel, at an historical moment when that art form feels moribund if not obsolete. But I would caution against grain-of-salting what Domingue is saying here—especially on the topic of sages. After all, she is the author of the Keeper of Tales trilogy, which third book, The Plague Diaries—about, yes, a devastating, society-altering contagion—was published in 2018, the year before the emergence of covid-19.

When Aoife, the mapmaker of The Mapmaker’s War, sets off on her great journey, there is no map to guide her. She has to find her own way. We—all of us; humanity as a whole—are in a similar position now. The future, more than ever, is uncharted territory.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S6 E5: The World is Ruled by Wounded People Wounding Us (with Ronlyn Domingue)

Greg Olear talks to the novelist Ronlyn Domingue, author of “The Mercy of Thin Air” and the “Keeper of Tales” trilogy, about growing up and living in Louisiana, ancestral memory, reconciling the national sin of slavery, A.I., alternative societies, the creative process, and the role of the novelist in a post-Trump world. Plus: a new fragrance. 

Buy Ronlyn’s books:
https://www.ronlyndomingue.com/booksetc

Ronlyn’s website:
https://www.ronlyndomingue.com/

The “Crone Energy” Substack:

Thanks HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50prevail and use code 50prevail for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months!

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Photo credit: Felix Mittermeier via Pexels.