The Gilt

They say only a handful of people belong to the Gilt. They say that the Gilt is so rich, so powerful, they have their own kingdoms operating in secret behind our own.

-True North (True Born Trilogy, Book 2)

Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash

The purpose of dystopian fiction is to hold up a mirror to our world. The genre follows the breadcrumbs of history even as it peers into the dark mists of the future.

In writing the True Born Trilogy, my goal was to tell the story of a world in which the minute cabals of the rich determine the life and livelihood of the masses. In Dominion City, to be rich is to be immune to the certain death brought on by the Plague. With enough money and the right connections, your faulty DNA can be rewired (‘spliced’), saving you from the illness that decimates the rest of the populace.

Sometimes that doesn’t work out.

In the second instalment of the Trilogy, True North, Lucy Fox follows clues to her kidnapped sister’s whereabouts aboard a public cruise ship, the S. S. Bostonian. There, she meets meets a man whom she instantly recognizes is above her set.

Stepping back a moment: Lucy hails from what she believes is the ruling class. As someone jokes in the novel, Lucy’s family “put the ‘Upper’ in the ‘Upper Circle.’”

But when she meets Christopher E. J. Turner on board the ship, Lucy realizes that the world as she knows it—an upper class, pampered world—effectively hides the true levers of power and influence. This is the world of the Gilt:

This is not the Upper Circle, however much it looks like wealth. The Gilt don’t play by the same rules. They’re above rules.

What is the Gilt? A year ago I might have answered: It’s a group of people richer than all of Dominion’s Upper Circle put together. I reckon I know differently now.

The Gilt can remake the world to a time before the Plague.

In the novel, as in real life, the Uber-rich prefer the secrecy of their affairs; their name out of print, their arms mere shadows and innuendo as they move the chess pieces of the world to their advantage.

Plagues, though, are events that level the playing field between the rich and the poor. World events can make visible what was once invisible: the strings of wealth, power and influence.

The Gilt may reimagine the world, but not truly remake it. And even Christopher E. J. Turner, the cypher representative of this gilded group, cannot buy his way out from the jaws of death.

In our own post-pandemic world, similar cabals of the ultra-wealthy do exist, both historically and contemporaneously. More comfortable in shadows, the oligarchs of today are the power brokers of governments and peace deals. They throw the levers of power in attempts to bend legislation to their whims of fortune, and they punish—through their government puppets—those who rise against them.

In the world of the dystopian novel—in True Born—it is the mutant bodies legislated literally out of existence (the True Borns, and the Lasters) who bring down the rule of the upper classes. They do so with violence, and they do so with cunning—because that is what history teaches us. But I think the truer story is that the greed of the Upper Circle and the Gilt ultimately leads to their downfall.

In trying to create a world that functions only for them, the Gilt forget the golden rule: you cannot rule where no kingdom remains.

That is another lesson of history, and it stands as a prognostication for the coming age.