[rsynnott]

I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?)

I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.

[a1369209993]

> particularly the later stories.

That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well.

(My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.)

0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called.

1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is.

2: Really, believability versus any extreme.

[rsynnott]

The issues with believability in the first book are mostly just around the backstory; the history of the Draka makes no sense at all.

> My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent".

I mean, that's up there in the evil stakes. But also, the Draka were a lot more... messed up. Both had deeply alien (and arguably rather Spartan, to go back on topic for a second) value systems, but by the time Nazi Germany fell, the vast majority of the population had only had Nazi values inflicted on them for about 15 years; the Draka social system was _centuries_ old.