A Drop of Corruption

In the author’s note to A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett writes, “I feel there is perhaps no other genre of fiction more enamored of autocracies than fantasy” (459). He admits to being among the genre’s readers who, in the 2010s, “eagerly gobbled up tales of cruel, primitive worlds where petty resentment, sexual sadism, and sheer stupidity regularly led to the torture, deprivation, and deaths of thousands” (460), a possible reference to George R.R. Martin’s graphically violent and massively popular A Game of Thrones (1996) and its sequels. The real world, by contrast, Bennett opines, presently “seems replete with examples as to why autocracies are, to put it mildly, very stupid” (459). Bennett’s post-textual note positions A Drop of Corruption within a genre that—despite taking place in worlds not our own—is highly reflective of the real world. The novel illustrates a human view of autocracies, both the impulses that lead a people to willingly cede power to autocrats and the inevitable corruption that follows.

When Din arrives in Yarrow, he has no reason to trust in the rulership of kings. Din and serves an Empire with a largely vestigial Emperor and an egalitarian political ethos—a place where the role of every individual in nation-building is enshrined in the imperial motto.