Fantasy author Andy Duncan was inspired to write his story “Senator Bilbo” after noticing that the segregationist senator Theodore Bilbo shares a name with J.R.R. Tolkien‘s hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins.

“‘Senator Bilbo’ is this parody in which you have this racist demagogue stomping around the world of the halflings, in a sort of desperate holding pattern to keep at bay all the change that is coming about as a result of what seems to have been the War of the Ring,” Duncan says in Episode 336 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

The story, which appears in Duncan’s new collection An Agent of Utopia, was also inspired by Michael Moorcock, who has criticized Tolkien for depicting creatures such as orcs, trolls, and goblins as intrinsically evil.

“It’s hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some peoples are just worse than others,” Duncan says. “And this seems to me—in the long term, if you embrace this too much—it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.”

“Senator Bilbo” first appeared in 2001, but its references to border walls and a “Shire First” policy make it seem more relevant than ever. Duncan says that’s because the story deals with themes that are, unfortunately, timeless. “In many ways President Trump is unique, but in many ways we have seen his like before,” he says. “We have seen the forces that he has tapped into on the ascendency before.”

Duncan believes that these reactionary waves come in constant cycles, so it’s important for the response to be cyclical as well.

“As Tolkien well knew, the war is never quite over, and it has a tendency to show up right there in your own hometown when you’re least expecting it,” he says.

Listen to the complete interview with Andy Duncan in Episode 336 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andy Duncan on his story “An Agent of Utopia”:

“There’s a vivid scene where the agent meets Thomas More, and then I’m pretty much done with More, except of course for the matter of More’s head, because More’s head turned into a character all its own. There’s a great deal of almost literal skullduggery going on in the story eventually, with the severed head of Thomas More. And one of my friends of many years, who is much more Catholic than I am anything in terms of religion, heard me reading from this story not long ago, and sidled up to me later and said, ‘Just for the record, you realize that to many, More is a saint?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ So we will see whether this story strikes people as blasphemy, or as merely silly, or as something in between.”

Andy Duncan on racism:

“Batesburg was at the time this utterly segregated town, and as Martin Luther King argued a few years before, the hour of church services every Sunday was probably the most segregated hour in American life. Batesburg had its black churches and its white churches, and my United Methodist congregation was absolutely a white church. Once a black person came as a visitor and sat alone in the sanctuary during a church service, and a few people said hello and greeted him after the service, and then everybody congratulated themselves about it for the next five years, so remarkable was this. And now I look back and see that that was nothing but utterly bizarre.”

Andy Duncan on UFOs:

“There was an article in the Fortean Times about not the ‘abductees,’ but the ‘contactees,’ because UFO-ology has gone in waves, of course, and there was a wave in the ’50s and ’60s of the people who claimed to have not been abducted, but to have been happily invited into the spaceship to visit the Space Brothers, and see Earth from their point of view and so forth, and come back with these wonderful messages about the Great Souls of the galaxy who were welcoming us to join them. And these folks are easy to make fun of, but they also are speaking to some utopian ideal on the fringes of American society in particular, and I just find them endlessly fascinating.”

Andy Duncan on science:

“I always want to ask everybody running for office, even at the school board level, ‘Who is your science advisor? Where do you get your science information?’ I mean, often the answer is ‘nobody’ and ‘nowhere.’ I think that would more often be the case than not. But we don’t have a single problem facing us where we are not going to need a lot of science, and a lot of knowledge, and a lot of expertise to help us think our way around. I’m not a complete technocrat, I do not believe that every problem has some magical scientific lever, but I do know that if we’re acting in ignorance of what the science tells us then we are doomed, pretty much, and I don’t like to think we’re doomed.”

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