Secret societies

A popular sf'al ploy is to include a secret society -- a society that has been operating within, or parallel to, our own. Thus novels can be presented in something like today's society but with an overlay of the secret knowledge, secret technology, secret society, or secret species.

Many vampire stories follow this scheme -- in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer world, most normal people ignore the existence of vampires, witches, and demons; but the secret society the Watchers keeps an eye on them. Similarly in Anne Rice's vampire and witches books, the Talamasca is a secret society which operates to keep an eye on the vampires and other demons. In Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Jewelle Gomez's "Gilda" stories (including The Gilda Stories and other separately published stories), a race of vampires lives among human society.

Other stories posit a secret conspiracy -- as in "The X-Files", which posited a government / alien conpiracy. In "Alias" the Rambaldi collectors and quests are a sort of secret society.

Secret societies have popped up in feminist and anti-feminist sf, too. An ancient conspiracy of women in Sam Merwin's The White Widows plots to take over the world; they are thwarted by the manly hero. Theodore Roszak used the notion of secret society of priestesses maintaining matriarchal / egalitarian religion in his rewriting of Frankenstein in The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein.

See also "Hidden Histories" and "Alternative Histories" and Secret Feminist Cabal