Piers Anthony's epic novel Bio of a Space Tyrant acts as a macrocosm of the treatment of refugees and their journeys to freedom. At the time of its creation in the early 1980's, the novel represents the Vietnameseboat people? more specifically, but can still stand for what refugees of all times and from all parts of the world have gone through and continue to go through. Through five volumes, the main character, Hope Hubris, progresses up the societal chain of power, starting as an impoverished refugee fleeing from his home on Callisto and eventually rising up to become President of the United States of Jupiter. It is needless to say that a refugee, even in contemporary America, could never rise to the highest position in the government, however, the novel serves to show that Hope Hubris could work extremely hard to break the pattern of harsh and unfair treatment of refugees, at least for a brief moment in time. The first volume in the series, Refugee, focuses on Hope's difficult life as a refugee and his emigration to the futuristic United States. This volume shows Hope Hubris and his family as a part of aboat people? community escaping their homeland.
             ?After the fall of Saigon in the summer of 1975, hundreds of thousands of people began fleeing [Vietnam] for fear of political persecution. They were all secretly escaping the country in small, rickety, and un-seaworthy wooden boats? (?Vietnamese Boatpeople Connection?). In Vietnam, the boat people were escaping the Communist rule that was left after the end of the Vietnam War. The boat family in the novel was also escaping political persecution. Due to the Hubris? low place in society, when Hope got into a fight over his sister's safety with a scion who had a much higher place in society, the family was evicted from their home and forced to start all over again from scratch. Then, when they were leaving their homeland, Callistan authorities followed them: The nether ha...