Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (62 page)

All this galactic back-and-forth probably gets a little tiring, and once a civilization has trekked around the cosmos, it’s probably going to want to take a rest and heat up from the warming fire of its destination star. This hasn’t escaped the attention of many SF writers. A whole cornucopia of Dyson spheres, bubbles, swarms, and shells have cloaked many a sun across the galaxy. In John Scalzi’s
Old Man’s War,
an alien civilization use a sphere to power a planetary shield, while in Charles Stross’
Accelerando
a swarm “of computronium forms a massive matrioshka brain around the sun, providing virtual space for trillions of uploaded human minds and corporate AI.”

The Stars Not Our Destination

Environmental destruction, the specter of peak oil, the increasing wealth gap, and a tarnishing of the dream to colonize space have led many of the latest crop of SF writers to abandon a vision of humankind’s expansion into the cosmos. Instead, they’ve been focusing on terrestrial concerns of resource scarcity, ecological collapse, and sustainability. Addressing these issues has led to energy sources playing a more prominent role in both the setting and the plot of many contemporary works.

In Paolo Bacigalupi’s post-oil-age novel
The Windup Girl,
megodonts— huge, gene-hacked animals seemingly related to the Indian Elephant—“tread slow circles around power spindles,” winding highly engineered kink-springs that can hold gigajoules of stored energy. Whether this makes energetic sense given energy wastage between the foodstuff to animal, and animal to spring steps, requires further analysis. But the presence of an energy storage device based on elastic potential is a rarity in literature.

An energy source not often given much stage-time—but which could become a critical component of the portfolio of renewables through the 21st century—featured in the recent
Doctor Who
episode “The Fires of Pompeii”. Geothermal energy, powered by the decay of radioactive materials in the heart of the planet, has its most spectacular manifestation in volcanic eruptions that spew lava far and wide, and in “The Fires of Pompeii” it’s aliens tapping Vesuvius for this energy that precipitates the Doctor’s involvement.

[Did Doctor Who cause the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius?]

In Nancy Kress’
Beggars in Spain,
energy is plentiful as society is powered by Y-energy, a form of cold fusion named after its pioneer, Kenzo Yagai, while in Lauren Beukes’ kinetic, urban dystopia
Moxyland,
one of the less narcissistic characters does up her home with “solar panels on the ceiling, a wind farm in the garden,” which suggests a world where energy generation is becoming an increasingly personal affair. Even more literary writers are getting in on the act. For example, the recent novel
Solar
by Ian McEwan is a black comedy about a morally bankrupt physicist who attempts to create artificial photosynthesis in an effort to stave off climate change.

Even when our best writers confront the very worst futures, envisaging dystopian societies borne of virus outbreaks, robot uprisings, solar catastrophes, or meddling with the fabric of space-time, the matter of fuelling up is never completely out of sight. Jeff Carlson begins
Plague Year
with the appetizing “They ate Jorgensen first,” while in
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse,
Victor Gischler has indentured servants generating electricity by pedaling exercise bikes.

My personal favorite for vacuuming up the ergs at the end of the world, though, has to come from the pages of Frederik Pohl’s
Gateway.
In it, humanity subsists on vast vats of yeast grown underground from vile-smelling kerogen shales: “And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it . . . and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast.” And remember, kids, if you’re ever caught up in an apocalypse, ants are a great source of protein!

About the Author

Stephen Gaskell is an author, games designer, and champion of science. In his recent novella, Strata, co-written with Bradley P. Beaulieu, he envisions Earth’s voracious appetite for energy being sated by vast solar-mining platforms circling the sun’s chromosphere. He runs the “science-behind-the-story” website Creepy Treehouse, and is currently finishing the first draft of a weird, ecological apocalypse thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. He lives on England’s south coast with his partner, Eloise.

Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction

Jeremy L. C. Jones

I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.

This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina’s Wofford College.

There was a math professor, an English professor, a few historians, and a mix of others from a mysterious world I think of as “The Sciences.”

I babbled on, trying to figure out how to bridge the “lingo” gap and get everyone to understand. (I mean, where do you begin to explain the notion to someone who doesn’t think about this stuff every day, all day?)

Of course, I didn’t really need to bridge anything. These people were smart, very smart, and they grasped the concept fast.

Then an Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance named Dr. Philip Swicegood spoke up.

“You should have a class on economics at Shared Worlds,” he said.

My first thought, I am ashamed to say, was,
Eew!
But I nodded, smiled, and waited.

“Economics!” Swicegood said. It was the way I might say, “Star Wars marathon!”

My expression, I’m sure, was somewhere between blank and horrified.

“Really,” he assured me, “economics. For instance, what does your character want, and what is he willing to do to get it?”

Swicegood would later explain, “Economics is about exchange and incentives.”

“Economic exchange and response to incentives can create a great angle for revealing motivation and clarifying values,” he said.

And later: “Realistic economic exchange implies that both parties think they are better off after the transaction.”

This went on for a while. I took notes.

Below, I speak with six speculative fiction writers about economics and speculative fiction. We discuss “sprawling cultural exchange,” markets, and other mechanisms of “arbitrating resource flows.” We talk about free will, personal sovereignty, and competing currencies. We talk about freedom of agency, personal integrity, and justice. We talk about
Star Trek
’s acutely capitalist Ferengi and “the diminishing marginal utility of money.”

And all of it comes back to fiction—character motivations, setting, and story.

Each of the six participants—Elizabeth Bear, N. K. Jemisin, Dani Kollin, Brian Francis Slattery, Charlie Stross, and John C. Wright—has a compelling interest in economics and does something interesting with the economies in his or her secondary world(s).

Elizabeth Bear is the author of The Jenny Casey Trilogy, The Promethean Age series, the Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy, The Edda of Burdens trilogy, The Iskryne series (co-written with Sarah Monette), and the New Amsterdam series. Her current series, which began with the novella
Bone and Jewel Creatures
and continued with the novel
Range of Ghosts,
“explore[s] the trade and economic situation of a vast, pre-modern empire.”

N. K. Jeminsin is the author of The Inheritance Trilogy and the forthcoming The Dreamblood duology. In the former, she’s created a Renaissance-level global economy; the latter takes place in a world where prosperity depends on fertile land, as well as “free healthcare and universal education.”

Along with his brother Eytan Kollin, Dani Kollin is the author
The Unincorporated Man, The Unincorporated War, The Unincorporated Woman,
and the forthcoming
The Unincorporated Future,
which is due August of 2012. With the Unincorporated series, the Kollins have created a world in “everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so.”

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of
Spaceman Blues, Liberation,
and the recent
Lost Everything.
Slattery draws inspiration from the economies of poorer nations to create fictional, post-collapse worlds that resemble our own but that have been skewed sideways.

Charlie Stross has authored the Singularity Sky series, the Laundry Files, the Merchant Princes, and the Halting State series, as well as various collections and many standalone novels. “When writing fiction,” Stross says below, “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 is the author of
The Golden Age,
in which he has created “a libertarian near-utopia.” He is also the author of the Everness series, the Chronicles of Chaos,
Null-A Continuum,
and the recent
Count to a Trillion.

How does the economy of your secondary world(s) work? What’s exchanged? What are the incentives?

Charlie Stross:
Most of my fiction is set in worlds not greatly dissimilar from our own, at least economically. The media of exchange and the incentives are more or less identical to our own. In those that are more distantly related, I generally look at the underpinnings of economics from two angles: what’s in scarce supply, and what people want or need. Where you have supply and demand you either have a market, or some other mechanism for arbitrating resource flows. Even in those societies where material scarcity may be taken care of and everyone has enough food, housing, clothing, and starships to go round, there’s a scarcity angle to play: Human psychology tends to value being at the centre of attention, and so attention economies come into play.

Brian Francis Slattery:
Rather than creating an entirely new world, I tend to take the world as I think I understand it and move it sideways. So the economic logic, I think, is pretty recognizable as our own, with much the same exchange systems and incentive structures. You know, money’s exchanged for goods and services, and when money fails, there’s barter. In my first book (
Spaceman Blues
), I didn’t even move the world all that far sideways: I didn’t want to play with New York City’s informal economy so much as find a working metaphor to depict it in an entertaining and hopefully also slightly informative way. Granted, I ran with that idea pretty far into the ludicrous, But I still think that one of the weirdest things about that book is how much of it is true.

N. K. Jemisin:
In
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
(The Inheritance Trilogy), the economy is global despite the world being at only Renaissance-level development or so. This is largely because magic is used to facilitate communication and travel, at least for certain goods or those with a certain amount of wealth and influence. The world is on a single currency, the
meri
—although this was done to make the economy easier for a single family (the Arameri) to control, not out of any particular economic interest.

Although the system is largely capitalistic, with the same incentives as any capitalist system—accumulation of wealth and power, avoidance of poverty—it’s by no means a free market. In fact it’s heavily regulated, in keeping with the world’s philosophical dedication to order; they believe an unregulated system invites chaos. And where conventional, legislative regulation fails, the Arameri are perfectly willing to use magic to manipulate the system. When wages fall too low, for example, the Arameri unleash a plague or two to reduce the population of workers. They also achieved all this by taking advantage of the apocalypse to reboot society to their liking, and periodically using magic to wipe out nations that disagreed with their economic policies.