Demarchists

The Demarchists (pejoratively referred to by outsiders as zombies) are a faction of humanity who have a political system of democratic anarchy, or "Demarchy". According to Reynolds' short story "A Spy in Europa", the Demarchy functions by means of a neural implant that constantly seeks the user's opinion on aspects of Demarchist life. This constant prompting eventually fades away into the user's neural background, much like the ticking of a clock might fade away into background noise for most people. The Yellowstone Demarchy, which is the main Demarchy in human space by the time of the events in Revelation Space also uses such a technique. The nature of the Demarchy's political process is further explored in The Prefect. The voting process is run by "Polling Cores" in Demarchist cities and space stations. Each core is tasked with collecting and processing votes, and also determining whether or not the elected decision was the best one in previous elections (voters who continually make "good" decisions are rewarded by having their vote count for more than one standard vote). Other known Demarchies include the Haven and Europan Demarchies (the latter appears to have risen and fallen multiple times) as well as Fand, Grand Teton and many other colonies in other star systems.

Until the time of the Melding Plague, there were several powerful families within the Yellowstone Demarchy, one of the most influential being House Sylveste which controlled Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, as well as Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation (before it was destroyed by Panoply during The Clockmaker incident). It later organized the archaeological expedition to Resurgam to research ancient Amarantin society. They were immensely wealthy, being the closest thing to royalty in the Yellowstone system. Notable characters from House Sylveste include Dan Sylveste, who led the Resurgam expedition, and Calvin Sylveste, who is known for the Eighty.

The Demarchists (particularly the Yellowstone Demarchy) used to have expertise in nanotechnology, life-extension, and biological alterations, among other things. They also utilised a sophisticated information network known as abstraction. Abstraction was used to simulate environments and co-ordinate servitors and other robots. The height of Demarchist society, the Belle Époque, was only brought low by the Melding Plague, which pushed Chasm City, the main city of the Yellowstone Demarchy, into a Dark Age lasting forty years.

Later, after the Conjoiners stepped in to help revive Chasm City, the Demarchists, unhappy with their new role as second fiddle, declared war on the Conjoiners; a war which first went well as the Conjoiners, thanks to their hive-mind nature, became predictable on the battlefield. The return of the war-hero Nevil Clavain ended that, and by the time of the events in the book Redemption Ark only the most partisan of Demarchists would even deny an eventual Conjoiner victory. In any case, human civilisation around Yellowstone was destroyed by the time of Absolution Gap by the Inhibitors.

Demarchist weaponry, among other things, consists of antimatter munitions (or "pinhead" bombs, called such as the tiny amount of antimatter necessary for such weapons to be stored in minute vessels), typically antilithium, and massive rail guns that accelerate foam-phase metallic hydrogen to a massive speed using a series of timed detonations along a barrel. They also utilise various ionisation-particle weapons and compact "fold-out" beam weapons.

Inspiration

In the afterword of Galactic North, Alastair Reynolds comments that the Demarchists are not his own invention. He credits the Joan D. Vinge book The Outcasts of Heaven Belt as the inspiration for the Demarchist Society.