"Fair point, but information costs. Reading books requires far less investment than travelling overseas, so I should do that first. I mean, I have to do it at some point anyway. I can't skip over the other side of the story."

"Yes, definitely, read as many books as you like, just keep in mind that someone paid for the books to be copied, right?"

"Well, yes, but someone has to pay to make every information source public. Is there really such a limited range of people who pay to print things? Or who are legally allowed to? Or is it just that the libraries are very selective about what they'll contain?"

"Books are very expensive. Most people could never afford it, and those who can are almost definitionally among the aristocracy that we would expect to benefit from promoting certain narratives. And yes, politically troublesome books are banned."

"Books are expensive? Huh. You said that underground newspapers are a thing, so it can't be inherent to the cost of printing. Do you have to import paper at high prices? I guess you could still have low-circulation newspapers with small pages. Or are you culturally opposed to binding your books with any material that isn't super expensive? Because my people have a pretty cool innovation where we bind books with hard paper and make them super cheep."

"No, it just takes forever to write them. It's not considered a book if it's printed, that's for nonsense like underground newspapers. The library will only take respectable, scribed books."

"You still write books by hand? That is so dumb. Like, honestly, your use of slaves for industrial labour was stupid and inefficient - but handwritten books? For status reasons? If you had press freedom and I had bad priorities, I would start a competing library with better variety and modest prices, get a bunch of patron, and steal all the status, just to teach these people a leason. Alas, I actually care about doing worthwhile things with my life. What a shame."

"That sounds...valuable. I think you would get in trouble. The press is very new and is associated with revolutionaries and troublemakers, it is not yet widely used. You would get the wrong kind of attention. The rich people live very long times, they do most things for status reasons."

"OK. Step one is to print and disseminate a bunch of totally non-threatening yet popular-among-working-class-people literature that the government can't reasonably object to. Get the populace as a whole to associate the printing press with corny romance novels with lots of poorly-written sex - unless you have obscenity laws, in which case you'd need some other trashy thing that everyone wants, but no one of a certain class considers worth paying attention to. Then you get more and more people using it for more and more basically-descent things, until everyone reads printed books and the government would look weird if they tried to ban them, but the rulers have also only realised too late that there are simply too many things to effectively censor them."

"I like the way you think. We don't have laws against romance novels."

"Great. You want to make them trashy. This is actually important. If you're a revolutionary, it's in your interest to make it so that the upper classes aren't reading these books to begin with, because then you can write things that subtly discredit them. Set stories in decent countries that are ruled by Men, because it implies you don't need semi-Elves. Write about Elves doing stupid things, which implies they're fallible. Basically, write things that make people less trusting of the current order, but not in a way that makes the government anxious until it's too late. You want to maintain plausible deniability...

...Because that's worked where I'm from. Just saying, in my professional and unbiased capacity as someone who knows about history. Do what you want with that information."

"You're brilliant, you know that? I can do that, and I can't even get into very much trouble for it, because I have to lie low for a while anyway. And i know people who own a printing press!!! Trasky romance novels in which Elves are stupid. Izindal'll have ideas for that, too. Wait, what happened where you're from? What do you mean that 'worked'?"

"Thank you. It is my pleasure to consult on this thing I am definitely neutral about.

Anyway, it's not so much that someone masterminded creating a genre in order to people overthrow their government. What happened was that people already had a genre of poorly written pornography which no one of refinement read, and the... I don't know if you have an equivalent movement. If I try a really literal translation, then it was social-ism. Anyway, the social-ists of this country decided to make a ton of books about how rich people abuse poor people, and how poor people need to fight back. It was pretty subtle at first, but also super popular. Popular enough that attitudes about employers shifted until they were associated with sexual predation. This was probably a contributing factor to the social-ists getting a lot more members and conducting a lot more successful strikes.

I don't know how well it would work if you're trying to create a genre from scratch, but it probably won't hurt... Unless you fuck up and get caught, in which case it will hurt a lot. But, like, you were planning to burn ships. I assume you've made peace with this."

"No one thinks I'll live to 30. It's ...worth it, for me."

"Oh, wow, shit. That is... Sub-optimal. The fact that you guys die at 200 is bad enough. I feel like this is a problem that could be solved by you being more like revolutionaries of my world who lived long, but they mostly had their underlings do the dangerous things, and this seems incompatible with your personality. Hmmm... Have you tried focussing your effort on less fatal things? I mean, even if it's worth it for you, there are probably multiple possible things that would be worth it..."

"I couldn't forgive myself for doing less important work just so I could stay alive, not when these policies kill so many."

"Hmmm. Like, it's possible that there is less dangerous work that is more important. On the other hand, I can already see you giving me a look and saying 'well isn't it suspiciously convenient that the way to do the most good is also the way to take the least risks'. OK. I... Don't want you to die. I like you, and am also principally opposed to death, so I would prefer you to live. If that means ensuring that you do dangerous things in a minimally-stupid way, I'm willing to keep consulting you. But, please, do consider that there are ways to make the world a better place and live past thirty."

"You have a good sense of me. Many people have said that to me and that has always been my answer, that it seems very nice how the right thing to do just happens to be the self-serving one, but you have good suggestions and if you have one here I'll listen. I don't want to die. I just can't close my eyes the way everyone else can."

"I'm willing to admit that I don't know the situation well enough to say with confidence that your approach is wrong. If in the future I find out that there is a higher-value route for you to take, I will not hesitate to tell you."

"Encouraging piracy sounds appealing," she says, "but I can start with books while I'm constrained by my current notoriety anyway."

"The dissident-turned-romance-author." She teased. "The nobles will talk about how their compassionate approach to criminals has led you to become a valuable and productive member of society."

"Oh, they don't know who I am or I'd be way more screwed. And I don't think they'll consider this productive, not the sort of story I want to write - see, there's a way to be subversive and appealing at the same time, and I'd barely even have to make anything up-"

"Oh? Then who is keeping track of you? What do they want? And what are the true stories that you are hopefully going to fictionalise enough to not get caught...?"

"Just the local authorities and the people whose job it is to get people in trouble for subversive activities. I wouldn't tell true stories, that'd be an invasion of privacy.  But you aren't supposed to have romances between two women, because the Valar say so, and I happen to have had quite a few of them, and people like reading that kind of thing."

"Well, that's one way to be subversive, assuming it's legal. I know relationships between two men are considered bad in a few religions, including the majority religion of my home country - even though most people these days are too secular to care. There are laws against it in some nearby countries. However, I've never heard of people who thought relationships between two women were anything more than really odd. Why are your gods opposed to this?"