Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (63 page)

Elizabeth Bear:
One of my major interests in writing the Eternal Sky novels was to explore the trade and economic situation of a vast pre-modern empire. I think that modern people make two mistakes in thinking about travel in a medieval or Enlightenment-era society. We make it both too hard and too easy. The fact of the matter is that even in our own perfectly non-fantastic world, people did travel—and they mostly did it by walking, and they sometimes did it over vast distances. There were trade routes that stretched from Beijing to Stockholm, and Genghis Khan used Pony-Express-like tactics to get riders from one end of his empire to the other in under six weeks. There was trade, and cross-pollination, and exchange of ideas and goods along routes thousands of miles long. China’s famous porcelain was influenced by Indian and Arabic elements, and silk made its way west to the Atlantic. I’ve tried to reflect this sort of sprawling cultural exchange in the books in
Range of Ghosts
and its sequels. Nothing drives me crazier than worlds with no economies, where the technology and social structures never change. So I guess the question is, what’s
not
exchanged?

Brian Francis Slattery:
In my second and third books (
Liberation
and
Lost Everything
), there was much more messing around with the economic system. In
Liberation,
the United States has suffered a very severe economic collapse. In
Lost Everything,
the ravages of war and climate change have made the U.S. economy as we know it pretty much moribund. But in depicting the effects of these things on people, and thinking about how people react, I turned to real examples in the present day—just in other parts of the world. In
Liberation,
the economic situation is based more or less on my understanding and experiences of life for the rural poor in Guatemala circa 2002, where things were very hard, but all around, I saw people constantly finding ingenious ways to get what they needed on the little they had. (Tragically, things there now are worse, and I am afraid for the people that I knew there.)

Dani Kollin:
In the Unincorporated series what is exchanged are shares of people. The people work for credits. The more people earn the more the shareholders get. Everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so¾a ruthlessly efficient incentive. In short, it’s a world where charity is profitable, materially profitable. If one were to take the Marxist doctrine of the labor exchange of value and put it on a transporter pad with Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and then have a horrible accident in which the two were inadvertently mixed, you’d end up with the world of
The Unincorporated Man.

N. K. Jemisin:
In [the desert city-state of] Gujaareh (in the forthcoming Dreamblood duology), the economy is modeled on that of ancient Egypt, which gained much of its wealth from being the crossroads of trade for the ancient world. But within Gujaareh, prosperity rests on a few pillars: the first being the land, which is abundantly fertile thanks to the annual flooding of the river, and the second being free healthcare and universal education, which makes for a healthy, highly-skilled population that doesn’t lose much productivity to disease or short life-spans.

The healthcare and education are provided by the priesthood of Hananja, the goddess of dreams, in exchange for a moderate tithe from each citizen—including tithes of dreams (and sometimes lives), which are the source of magic in this world. But more magic is taken from the populace than is needed to keep it healthy. That leaves a surplus—and people being people, someone in Gujaareh is going to find a way to make money off this surplus, even though it’s essentially people’s souls. And just as the commoditization of faith has repeatedly torn apart the Catholic Church (and other religious institutions), it creates a huge problem in Gujaareh as well.

Brian Francis Slattery:
Lost Everything
is based more or less on my understanding of the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the Second Congo War (1998-2003). I didn’t experience any of it firsthand, which is why the word “understanding” is probably a vast exaggeration to describe what I think I’ve grasped about the DRC—but I learned as much as I could about it, through books and documentaries. Perhaps most harrowing was a movie called
Kisangani Diary
by Hubert Sauper (who also made
Darwin’s Nightmare
), about Rwandan refugees in the DRC during that time; it stands in my mind as a particularly unblinking account of human suffering that probably happens much more than those of us in the privileged world would like to think.

Charlie Stross:
One novel I’m working on at present is a space opera, set in a universe with no faster than light travel. The one thing valuable enough to be worth trade across interstellar distances is the uploaded minds of people with specialized skills; and they have an entire currency system fine-tuned to handle incredibly slow interstellar exchanges, a form of digicash where transactions have to be digitally signed by banks separated by interstellar distances. Because, of course, if you’re selling goods that won’t arrive for decades, the last thing you want in return is a currency that is prone to bubbles and market crashes.

John C. Wright:
Of my books, only
The Golden Age,
which was meant to depict a libertarian near-utopia (for libertarians, utopia is not an option) addressed any economic issues, and this because economics is at the core of libertarian thinking. Indeed, one is tempted to describe libertarianism as the attempt to apply free market principles to personal and political and other relationships outside the market.

The postulate of the Golden Oecumene was that all exchanges and interactions were voluntary, including the uses of technology that could rewrite a man’s own memory, personality, habits, and change his body and soul to suit himself. This was combined with a strict moral imperative of absolute personal sovereignty. No one could lay a finger on another man’s property, not one brain cell in his head, not one mote of his person or property, without his consent, no, not even to rescue him from self-destruction. This was your humble author’s attempt to carry a libertarian political principle to its logical extreme.

The society was also depicted as being immensely, unimaginably wealthy, as far above us in wealth as we Moderns of the Industrialized world are above even the wealthiest cattle owner of the Bronze Age. No matter how many tents and wives and head of cattle he had, the ancient shepherd-king could not afford an aspirin when his royal head ached.

In my book, the depiction was of a society that could accomplish nearly anything that was possible: ignite Jupiter to a second sun; put a greenhouse over Antarctica; take a vacation once every thousand years for a year, when all the world’s business stopped; tame the solar wind by building a structure of artificial energy-matter inside the photosphere of the sun. But since I wanted some realism in my unrealistic utopia, I enforced certain rules of economics which are built into the nature of reality, and which no social order, howsoever different from our own or enlightened above ours, can ever change: there will always be sacristy of resources. No matter how wealthy your society, there will always be tasks the imagination of man can conceive which has not the current resources to achieve.

There will always be conflict. In one scene, my protagonist Phaethon wants to re-engineer Saturn and abolish his distinctive rings. Since there is only one Saturn, certain machines who had filled up the interior volume of the core of that gas giant objected to the proposal, as did those for whom the glory of the ring system had a value beyond any economic value.

There will always be rich and poor. Even if the poor are unimaginably richer in utopia than the richest man of the modern day, equality of income is neither practical nor possible, since the nature of economic exchange presupposes an inequality of skills and goods, hence an inequality of the value your neighbors and customer will put on those skills and goods.

Whether the neighbor’s valuation is arbitrary or not is beside the point: I assume nearly anyone reading these words would be more eager to see a sequel of a new Star Wars movie than a movie made by an unknown? Even if the unknown movie was better, the brand name means something to most fans, because of the good will built up over decades, therefore the market, that is, the aggregate decisions of all the participants in their decisions to buy or refrain from buying, would value a new Star Wars sequel more highly than an unknown movie. Likewise, there will always be a need for market exchanges.

Again, even if all the members in a utopia are a rich as Croesus and King Midas combined, the less skilled of worker will find it to his advantage to do the work he does best and to specialize in it, even if, paradoxically, he lives alongside superhuman machines and artificial persons more skilled in all endeavors than he. A handyman who cleans a surgeons tools in two hours, which the surgeon, more skilled at tool-cleaning could clean in one hour, if the surgeon’s skill is worth $100 an hour, it will be worth it for him to hire any handyman who charges less than $50 an hour, not because he cannot clean the tools twice as well as the handyman, but because it is not worth the loss of his time that could be better spent doing what he is really good at.

In an extended society, this very inequality that promotes market exchanges creates an incentive for men to associate with each other beyond the range of their immediate emotional orbit of family and clan and friends. A civilization is possible. Without this, what you have is not civilization. No matter how technologically advanced you are, if you have no social relations, you are barbarians.

This is rather openly dramatized in the book by the portrayal of the Lords of the Silent Oecumene, whose society consists of a population of hermits who live surrounded by the super-intelligent machines which create for them their illusions of reality. At the core of their system is a black hole from which they can derive, in apparent contradiction of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, free energy in infinite amounts. But this situation eroded their need, and soon robbed them of the desire, to maintain civic social relations. Each man was a Lord, a lonely sovereign, almost a god—and, like the pagan gods of old, answerable to no one, needing nothing, and having no law or civilized customs. To answer, at long last, the question you asked: what did the utopian post-humans in the Golden Oecumene use for money?

Money in the real world is relatively stable in supply, keeps its value over time, is identifiable, hard to counterfeit or dilute, is always in demand, is fungible, and is divisible. Of all things in history, so far, gold and silver have best track record of satisfying these criteria. The artificial credit of nation-states has proved less successful, since it is vulnerable to inflation for political purposes. In the make believe world of the far future, I tried to pick a good that the happy folk of that day would always want and need, and could always identify. I said that they had three competing currencies: one was energy, measured by ergs; one was computer time, measured by seconds; and the last was gold. I mean, hey, they live in the far future, but it is allegedly our future they live in, so something of our customs and institutions would survive.

In sum, the economy there worked according to the same rules as the economy here. Economics is a science, after all, and a science fiction book, even if it is allowed to play fast and loose with speculation, is not supposed to violate any known laws of science. The laws of economics do not change any more than the laws of physics do. The same incentives were in place then as now.

What is the relationship between character and economy in fiction?

Dani Kollin:
Tenuous at best. Think of Star Trek. The only economic characters that were dealt with in any detail were the Ferengi, portrayed mainly as the gnomes of Zurich. They were the slapstick race of the galaxy; good for a laugh but when things got serious you brought in the Klingons or the Borg. That’s because for most people economics is boring. This holds true in all fiction, not just the science variety. We all love to see the hero discover the mountain of gold. It’s fun and a great story. Has anyone ever written a compelling fictional narrative on what happened to the world economy when that found mountain of gold was introduced into international markets? Nope, and for good reason¾it would be pretty boring. You can explain an economic system as a backdrop and use it as a catalyst to move your story forward (as we did in
The Unincorporated Man
), but you’d better have a story to move forward or no matter how ingenious your economy, your audience will go home.

Elizabeth Bear:
We have to work to eat, don’t we? And work is what gives our lives purpose—a calling, as it were. I think we get so divorced from the means of production in our modern society that we forget that for a half million years, creatures we would recognize as human have gotten by from day to day by growing things, hunting things, making things, harvesting things, gleaning things, trading things. Everything comes from somewhere: dinner does not materialize neatly in a plastic package under fluorescent lights at the supermarket.

Charlie Stross:
I tend to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a guide: We have basic needs that must be fulfilled in order to stay alive, and secondary needs in order to feel comfortable. So economic activities are always a necessary background detail of characterization. In roughly contemporary fiction, that usually means the protagonist has a salaried job (or equivalent), which puts constraints on their freedom of agency; used correctly it can be a very effective contrast medium for highlighting their personality.

Two signs of a somewhat lazy author: a protagonist who is independently wealthy, or one who is down-and-out and hasn’t got two cents to rub together. The former has freedom of agency, while the latter has no commitments and nothing to lose. Both of which are headaches the author now doesn’t have to worry about—neither the billionaire nor the tramp spend any time worrying about the boss phoning up at 9 p.m. on a Sunday to ask them to hold down a shift for a no-show on the Monday when they’re supposed to be having adventures! (See also the Bruce Wayne problem.)