Zsolt Bugarszki's Blog: Stories That Shape Us - Posts Tagged "politics"

When I began shaping the world of Icarus, I knew I did not want to write a political thriller. I was not interested in taking sides or commenting on today’s conflicts. The world is already full of real tension, and I had no desire to mirror it directly. Instead, the geopolitical background in the story serves a different purpose. It builds dramatic pressure, gives weight to the characters’ decisions and creates a sense of realism in a setting that is otherwise far from our everyday experience.

To make this possible, I chose to push some elements beyond the boundaries of our real world. In the book, China is not the modern nation we know, but a dynastical empire, something closer to an alternate timeline than a prediction. This exaggeration was intentional. By changing recognisable reality, I wanted to make it clear that Icarus does not portray contemporary politics. It is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination rather than by real world agendas.

At the same time, the entire story is deeply political in a broader sense. Not the politics of governments and headlines, but the politics of human nature. The tensions between settlements, the unwritten rules of survival, the fragile alliances, the grudges, the sacrifices and the moral choices that come with living in a hostile world. These are the places where the story becomes political, because human relationships always carry the echoes of power, fear, hope and responsibility.

Mars, in Icarus, is a harsh world. That harshness exposes our old dramas in a new environment. The geopolitical tension is simply a frame that raises the stakes, while the core of the story remains focused on people: their loyalties, their conflicts and their struggle to protect something meaningful in a place where everything is fragile. My goal was not to recreate the divisions of Earth, but to explore how those ancient patterns of human behavior follow us wherever we go, even to the red planet.