Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  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 salar
ied 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.)

  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 reason
ably 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.