Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (64 page)

Brian Francis Slattery:
As I see it, for each character, the economy is a bit like the weather. It shapes the world they live in: Good weather presents opportunities to do things that are impossible in bad weather, and when really big storms come, initially the only thing to do is to try to survive it. After the storm passes, the characters’ individual worlds are changed, perhaps subtly, perhaps broadly—maybe, through some weird quirk, as much for the better as for the worse—and they must figure out how to do the best they can with what they have. So far, I’ve tended to write about what happens when things go bad generally—and this is revealing my own biases when I write novels—but at least in my case, I’ve tried to focus on people who survive, resist, and perhaps even overcome the hardships they face, because they’re hardy, clever, resourceful, or maybe just lucky.

Part of the pleasure in writing characters for me is in discovering how each individual reacts to the situation they face. I learn so much more about the characters, the kind of story I’m trying to tell, and the way the characters (as they often do) derail my original intentions. That said, I could very easily imagine a book about characters who can’t overcome the difficulties they face, and I can see how such a book could be really compelling. And I’m really interested in writing stories in which the economic environment changes a lot over time—where things are pretty volatile—to see what kinds of stories might emerge from that.

John C. Wright:
In the utopian commonwealth of the far future depicted in
The Golden Age,
everything was for sale except for justice, honor, and personal integrity. It is the cost of not selling one’s personal integrity, however, which forms the point of the drama of the book. My hero was willing to give up everything, including his own memory, to keep it.

What is the value of the money in your world(s), and what can it be used to buy, etc.?

John C. Wright:
In general, there is almost no relationship, unless you write a tale where the main point of the drama is an economic disaster like a depression or a strike. See
Atlas Shrugged
for a good example of how this can be done artfully and dramatically. Whether one agrees with the author’s theories or not, what Ayn Rand did in that book is instructive for any writer: She tied the moral code and hence the drama of the main characters into the economics of the events going on around her. In this way, the events were not about positive or negative cash flow (which is boring) but about good and evil (which is the most dramatic thing in the world, nay, the only dramatic thing).

Charlie Stross:
It depends on the world in question. Sometimes it’ll buy you a better brain or a nicer lifestyle, or the chance to try and dig an entire nation out of a development trap. And sometimes all it buys you is a nicer seat on the train to the extermination camp, or a silk rope for the gallows. Money can only buy what’s for sale.

This raises the fun topic of the diminishing marginal utility of money; if I give you a $100 bill, it means less to you than it would were I to donate it to a homeless guy trying to live rough in a blizzard, and both of you would value it more than, say, Warren Buffett. Similarly, despite being a billionaire, Steve Jobs couldn’t buy a cure for his cancer at any price: It just didn’t exist. (He
could
afford to register for a liver transplant in three states, then keep an executive jet on 60-minute readiness for three months while waiting for a histocompatible organ to come up—but that pretty much exhausts the limits of what money can buy you by way of extra medical treatment, short of dropping a few tens of billions on cancer research ten years
before
you need it.)

Elizabeth Bear:
The world of the Eternal Sky is not using fiat currency yet—it’s all hard currency and trade goods. And the control of the trade routes is a major driving force in the narrative. Trade is money, and money is armies, and armies are power—not to mention that trade is the ability to feed your people, and build aqueducts, and gain or maintain temporal power.

N. K. Jemisin:
In the world of
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
—a society whose guiding principle is order—money buys impunity from orderly rules and structures, up to a point. The movers and shakers in this world are exempt from all laws; in
The Broken Kingdoms
one character explains that the right to kill without consequence is the ultimate power claimed by those at the top of society.

Dani Kollin:
Ours is a post-singularity world, so money can buy you trips around the solar system, perfect health for centuries, (rather cheaply too as everyone has a vested interest in keeping you working for centuries so they can milk you for earnings), huge houses with a robotized cleaning staff to keep it sparkling. Surprisingly enough the curse of rising standards still applies. Money can’t get you laid on a Friday night unless you are naturally good at that sort of thing, or can afford to pay for it. But remember, sex is a constant because it is a human need and remains a relatively consistent one. Money can’t buy you love (The Beatles were right in this regard). It can’t buy you friends, though it can buy you companions. Remember that money is both a lubricant of technological progress and the means to access the technology already produced, and does both at the exact same time.

N. K. Jemisin:
Money [In
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
] also buys magic, which is technically restricted to those with the training to use it, though of course obtaining this training, or hiring those who possess it, is beyond the means of most people. But because magic has been commoditized, a thriving black market in illicit magic exists as well. The magic that poor people can buy is minor stuff—spells to heal chronic medical problems, occasional favors from local gods who are willing to sell their services, temporary conferrals of power sold by those gods as a magical narcotic. The wealthy can buy the sorts of “miracles” seen in our own technological world: the ability to travel across the planet swiftly, deadly long-distance firepower, instantaneous communication.

But the greatest power in this world—the greatest impunity—is priceless. This is possessed by the gods, who are exempt even from the laws of physics and nature. Since the Arameri have ownership of some gods’ slave labor at the beginning of the trilogy, they effectively control godlike power. This isn’t something that can be purchased; one must have the right combination of ethnicity, lineage, and luck.

Brian Francis Slattery:
In the three books I’ve written, the best way to describe the value of money is variable or even volatile. Ever since I grasped the concept, the idea that money is a sort of convenient social fiction has never been too far from my mind—you know, because the paper notes are inherently worthless, and the value is really only in our minds—and I’ve gravitated toward stories where the characters are acutely aware of that fiction and thus only half buy into it.

I’ve once again taken my cues from my experiences in poorer countries, where, with multiple currencies and unstable exchange rates at play, the fiction about money’s worth is pretty shaky, and makes the value of everything much more negotiable than it is in a place like the United States. It can lead to some pretty horrific transactions: people willing to sell themselves, or even worse, being involuntarily sold, for what someone in the United States would pay for an air conditioner.

But the other side of that logic has people going about their day-to-day lives with, in some ways, more humor in it. If every transaction turns into haggling, the idea isn’t so much about parting fools from their cash as it is about arriving at an exchange that everyone’s reasonably happy with, which could mean a lot more social interaction at, say, the supermarket, than we in the United States are accustomed to. As someone who thinks more social interaction is generally a good thing, that particular aspect of haggling, of bargaining with mirth and with the intention of reaching agreement, is something I’ve really enjoyed whenever I’ve had a chance to do it, and I’ve tried to put as much of that into my books as I can.

N. K. Jemisin:
In Gujaareh, money buys dreams and nightmares. But I can’t talk more about that ’til the duology comes out!

John C. Wright:
Where economics might play a role is as backdrop. In a movie like
Cindarella Man,
the Great Depression shows the backdrop of the hero and lends drama to his prizefighting career, because he is boxing not for prize money but for milk money. When his child steals a salami from the butcher, it becomes a poignant, even triumphant, moment for the father to teach the child that hardship does not excuse wrongdoing—and a scene like that would lack drama had the child not been poor and hungry, and the father hungrier than the child. But, for all this, the Great Depression was a backdrop: the causes or cure of the Depression was never mentioned in the film, nor should it have been.
Cindarella Man
was melodrama, not SF, but the same rules of how to cobble a good story still apply.

Charlie Stross:
In a science-fictional context, it’s the job of the designer of the secondary world to work out what items are available for sale, or unavailable at any price. Which in turn may have a big impact on your characters’ motivations.

Any parting words of encouragement, advice, or mischief for writers struggling with economics in their secondary worlds?

Brian Francis Slattery:
Avoid ideology, which is not the same thing as avoiding politics.

Elizabeth Bear:
Just remember that economics isn’t just some esoteric, high-level thing. It’s every lemonade stand and every ferryman and every wandering bard.

Charlie Stross:
Don’t assume that capitalism is the only way to mediate exchanges of value. Even in the world today, by some estimates only around 25 percent of exchanges are mediated via the formal cash-based economy. The commonest economic unit around the world today is that bastion of Marxist communism, the family unit—within which everyone pools their assets and allocation is on the basis of need. It doesn’t scale up well, but between parents and children/siblings it generally works well. Again, there have been many gift-based societies, and others where status is determined by one’s ability to conspicuously destroy luxuries. Indeed, there’s a body of theory based on historical studies and sociology that suggests money was originally invented as internal tokens for accounting within Neolithic temple complexes, and predates barter (while the classical economic theory is that barter came first, and money was a formalization to permit exchanges of value between people with dissimilar goods to trade).

The way we do things in the developed western economies today is very weird by historical standards. So when writing fiction, work out what people value first — and what their role is in their society. The economics then emerge from the inter-personal relations, and enrich the background and characterization.

John C. Wright:
One thing writers should avoid is this: writing about economics if you are an ignoramus. I read a book by an author whose name I won’t mention, and in an early chapter, as part of his future history, he depicts an economic catastrophe and the events leading to it. Because I was interested in economics, I was curious as to how this author would handle the economics involved. Because the author was a famous hard science fiction writer, known for doing his homework and getting his technical facts straight, I was not just curious, but eager to see him handle a science known to me.

The author proposed that a worldwide economic depression could be caused, not by government interference in the credit cycle, but by investors all over the world trading online turning their computers off at night so that one hemisphere was engaged in speculation while the other was not, creating a speculator’s bubble, which lead to a panic and a run on the banks. (This was written before the days of the Internet, you young whippersnappers, so the idea of a worldwide Wall Street connected electronically was shiny new SF speculation of the first water.) I can hardly suppress my groan of disappointment. A schoolboy with one semester of freshman economics could have set this author straight: Speculators do not cause a general depression of the prize of wages and goods. Only meddling with the money supply can do that, and speculators have no such power.

This hard SF writer, so well known for doing his homework, had the dog eat hit homework this time. The portrait of how economic concatenation works was about at the level of Karl Marx, which is to say, cargo-cult economics. Imagine reading a book where a rocketship is described as zooming up through the upper atmosphere to space and then finding itself helplessly adrift due to the fact that in space there is no air for the rockets to push against. The error of this writer was of that magnitude. If you are going to write economics into your SF, make it dramatic, and do your homework.

N. K. Jemisin:
“Follow the money” is a political adage that I’ve found useful in world-building, because it helps me consider a society as a supply chain. I have to think about who’s on the receiving end of that supply chain; how and what systems work to transport wealth, concentrate it, and resist its loss to those who “aren’t supposed to” have it; and who/what is being exploited to provide it. Just thinking that through sets up most of your societal world-building right there. And one of the most useful things I did in coming up with the Dreamblood world was to study the economics of ancient societies. But it’s not the
big
stuff that reveals the economics, like monuments; what you really want to look at are the hair ornaments.

No, don’t look at me like that. Consider: Every human culture does stuff with its hair. So who makes the brushes? How does an ordinary person buy or make a comb, or a clip, or beads, or hair dye? How do they buy it, and how much does it cost—not just in resources but in time and labor? How can they afford the free time to do elaborate things with their hair, if they do? (Yeah, okay, so you might have a fantasy world full of bald people; I’m speaking figuratively, here. But if they’re bald, how do they get their scalp-polish?)