The Albion Courier, Features Desk 

[George Wickham, Member of the House of Commons for Bond Street, agreed to speak with the Courier at a café near Parliament. The interview ran considerably longer than scheduled. He did not appear to mind.] 

There are politicians who make you feel like the most interesting person in the room. George Wickham is one of them, and he is good enough at it that you are halfway home before you start wondering how he managed it. 

He is tall, broad-shouldered, and possessed of the kind of easy confidence that reads as warmth rather than arrogance, a distinction that matters more in politics than most professions. He arrived at our meeting slightly late, apologised with complete sincerity, and within ten minutes had asked three questions about this journalist’s own career that suggested he had done his research. It is the sort of thing that should feel calculated. Somehow it does not. 

Two Worlds 

George Wickham was born in Albion Space, but his origins are more complicated than that single fact suggests. His parents were Hellenic, children of families who had lived for generations under the governance of Helles, the rival faction whose asteroids sit across a contested boundary from Albion’s own claims in the Hector-Sabrina family. They defected to Albion before Wickham was born, a decision he addresses without apparent discomfort when asked. 

“They wanted something different,” he says. “Helles is a remarkable civilization in many ways. But it asks certain things of people, particularly of women, that my mother found she could not accept. Albion offered her a different set of possibilities.” 

He says this with the measured fairness of someone who has given the question considerable thought. He does not editorialize. He does not need to. What he does not say, though the public record does, is that his mother was a hetaira, an entertainer of the more cultivated kind, whose relationship with his father had no legal standing under Hellenic law. In Helles, the categories of women who may marry and women who may not are old and well-defended. His mother chose a jurisdiction where that distinction did not exist. 

Understanding why his parents were obliged to make that choice requires some understanding of what Helles is, and is not. Where Albion’s culture draws on the Regency period of old Terra, Helles reaches further back, to ancient Greece itself, one of the acknowledged wellsprings of the Regency’s own intellectual tradition. From Athens, Helles borrowed its philosophical ambitions and its civic identity, along with, critics would note, Athens’ rather more limited conception of who counts as a citizen.  

The Athenian inheritance also includes a stratified understanding of women’s social roles that Helles has never seen fit to revise. Respectable women occupy a protected domestic sphere and are never seen on cameras or in public life. Women in performance, entertainment, or certain intellectual professions occupy another category entirely, one that carries its own freedoms and its own permanent ceiling. The two categories do not cross. It is a system that its defenders describe as orderly and its critics describe as convenient for men. It is one of the more reliable sources of friction in any formal negotiation between Helles and Albion. 

From Sparta, Helles took a collectivist approach to resources that makes Helles internally cohesive and externally opaque. The result is a society that is, by most accounts, intellectually serious, communally organized, and considerably less hospitable to individual ambition than Albion. It also has a smaller industrial base, a fact with consequences for the Albion-Helles rivalry that neither side discusses entirely honestly. 

The Bridge 

Wickham represents Bond Street in the House of Commons, a seat that covers one of the more densely populated residential areas in Albion Space and one with a notably mixed heritage, including a significant community of Hellenic immigrants and their descendants. It is, he acknowledges, not an accident. 

“I understand both sides,” he says. “I grew up in Albion. I grew up in a Hellenic household. Those are not contradictions. They are just two parts of the same person.” 

He is careful, throughout the interview, never to criticize Helles directly. He is equally careful never to idealize it. When pressed on the Albion-Helles rivalry, which has defined Belt politics for as long as either faction has existed, he offers the observation that most conflicts of this kind are sustained less by genuine incompatibility than by the interests of those who benefit from the conflict continuing. 

It is the sort of thing that sounds wise in the moment. It is only later that you notice he has not actually said anything. 

Parliament and the House of Commons 

Wickham’s position in the House of Commons rather than the House of Resources is worth noting for what it implies. The House of Resources represents the economic interests of Albion’s asteroid owners, the mining operations, the Marcher families, the industrial claims. The House of Commons represents everyone else: the populations who live on those asteroids, work in those operations, and have no hereditary title or ownership stake to their name. 

Wickham is, in other words, a representative of the people rather than the property. He appears to consider this a distinction worth making. 

“The House of Resources does important work,” he says, with a smile that is pleasant and entirely unreadable. “But Albion is more than its mining operations.” 

He is asked whether he has a view on the Marcher families, whose hereditary titles make them the single greatest anomaly in a Commonwealth that otherwise has none. 

He says that the Marchers provide an essential service and that their history is genuinely distinguished. 

He is asked whether he knows William Darcy, Marcher of the Last Repose, whose profile appeared in these pages recently. 

Something shifts, very briefly, in his expression. Then the smile returns, as easy and open as before. 

“We have a history,” he says. “I wish him well.” 

He does not elaborate. He changes the subject with the grace of someone who has had considerable practice at it, and somehow, again, you let him. 

Pride & Planetoids is a space opera retelling of Pride and Prejudice, set among the asteroid families of the outer solar system. George Wickham, Member for Bond Street, plays a significant role in the story.