Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/22/15-47-worldbuilding-science-fiction-with-cory-doctorow/

Key points: Extrapolating to make futuristic parables? Think of a throat swab, one factor to focus on. Take one technology or phenomenon and build a world around it. Enduring issues are that we only know how to make one kind of computer, and that encryption works, so computers are colonizing everything. Or consider organ transplants from something like pigs. Take a single point and follow logical causal chains and branches to see where it goes. What about worldbuilding for stories set in the present? For example, romance writers need to think through their setting, even a small town. Worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict and to add depth to characters. Don't forget economics! What do people do, what are their jobs?
 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 47.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we're talking about worldbuilding and science fiction. Most of the time, when we talk about worldbuilding, it's very fantasy oriented. But worldbuilding is actually something that you need to do, regardless of what kind of fiction you're writing. Since Cory writes science fiction and is… often near future, just around the corner science fiction, the worldbuilding that he does has to tie pretty tightly to what's going on in the real world. So how do you get there, how do you extrapolate?

[Cory] Yeah. So extrapolating is a good word for it, because I like to be really clear that it's never predicting. Right? There's nothing more fatalistic than the idea that we can predict the future, because one thing I believe, and that kind of animates me, is that we can change the future based on the choices that we make. So I like to feel like futuristic parables are a good way to understand the present, but they only work as parables if they feel plausibly futuristic. There are some good cheap tricks for that. I often analogize near future SF to going to the doctor to get your throat swabbed. Right? The doctor goes… The doctor takes a swab of your throat, she puts it in a petri dish, she gives it 72 hours. What she's got then is not an accurate model of your body. She has this, like, usefully inaccurate model of your body. Where she's taken one fact of your body she wants to use to understand a factor that is otherwise drowned out by the noise of the thousand other processes going on in your body. She's reified it so it's the one fact in this little world in a bottle. As science fiction writers, we can reach into the world and we can take a technology or a phenomenon and we can build a world around it in which that is… Has a centrality that isn't… It isn't predictive, because there would be all the confounding factors that would go into it. But by elevating it to this like… To the center of a narrative, we can equip the readers to understand the subtle effects of that technology as we're living in it now. Which gives them a benchmark to understand it in the future. It becomes a kind of emotional architect's fly through of a 3D model of what it would be like if… As this technology becomes more significant, more important.

[Howard] Worldbuilding strep.

[Cory] Yeah. Well, exactly. So, drones are never going to be the only important thing in our world, but drones are going to have a big important effect on our world. You could write a drone story where drones had a centrality that would let you think through some of those issues and let… Give readers a vocabulary for comparing the world that they're in to it, in the same way that we can say that mass surveillance is Orwellian. You might be able to say that it's Robinette-Kowalian, or Doctorow-vian, or whatever. For Drake-ian. If you found the right narrative and hooked it up the right way. So that diagnostic tool, that kind of predicting the present for me is a really useful way to think about science fiction and its role in the world.

[Howard] I bought some solar powered sidewalk lamps at Walmart for like five bucks. Opened them up and realized they had AA rechargeable batteries in them. What I had was a six dollar solar powered AA battery charger.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] It forced me to rethink every post-apocalyptic thing I had ever read, because, now, boy, the lights aren't going off until I run out of rechargeable batteries.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] Because… And I'm not likely to run out of those soon, if it's like a zombie post-apocalypse. This kind of extrapolation is so much fun, because we are living through some fun tipping points. The tipping point of solar and renewable, tipping points of surveillance sue-valence drone technology. Extrapolating these things just 20 years forward is fun.

 

[Cory] Yeah. I also want to say that if you want to give your work an enduring legacy, if you want to make it continue to feel realistic in the future or at least salient in the future, one really good way to do that is to understand that computer science theory is actually pretty static. Computer engineering is a very fast moving field, but the theory on which it's built is pretty static. Like, since the war years, we've known how to build really one kind of computer. It's the Turing complete computer, that can run every program that we can conceive of. Now, this has been a huge boon, because it means that if you can make computers faster and smaller, then any program you can think of can run on them. It means that computers colonize everything. The device that you're listening to this on is a computer. The house that you're in maybe a computer at this point, in the sense that if you took the computers out, the house might become uninhabitable. If you have a pacemaker, you have a computer in your body. Your car is definitely a computer if it was made in the last 10 years, and you trust your body to it. It whisks you down the road at 80 miles an hour. 5 miles an hour if you live in Los Angeles.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] That computer design, the one computer that can run every program, also has this major downside, which is we don't know how to not make it run undesirable programs. Right? We don't know how to not make it run programs that pirate copyrighted works, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are malicious, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are… We don't want criminals to have access to like encryption technology. There's this move now to restrict access to encryption technology, so that criminals can't have conversations in secret, and it's somewhat of a moot question, because you might say, "In this country, we don't let you run that program." But how do you stop people from downloading that program and running it on their computer? We don't know how to make a computer that can't run the program period. We don't know how to make an iPhone that can't run software that's not blessed by Apple. So this is a really interesting point, because our closest approximation is the Apple solution, which is a program that has spyware running on it that checks to see whether you're doing something that the manufacturer disapproves of. If you try to do it, it says, "I can't let you do that, Dave." So that fact, that's a really important fact that like plays out in our policy all the time. Then a related fact that I alluded to is that we know how to make encryption that works and we know how to make encryption that doesn't work. What we don't know how to make is encryption that works only when we need it to stop working.

[Gasp]

[Cory] Right? Like, when criminals use it. Like, we keep trying. It is a catastrophic failure, because encryption is how we make sure that the firmware update in your pacemaker doesn't kill you in your boots. If we say, well, we're going to ban working encryption, then what we really say is that we're going to make it so that we can't validate the payloads that we send to your pacemaker to make sure that it's getting new firmware.

[Howard] We can keep criminals from conspiring, we can't keep them from killing you with the thing in your chest.

[Cory] Right. Indeed, they will continue to conspire.

[Howard] Right.

[Cory] So, both of these facts, and then the third fact about technology is that governments are really struggling to come to grips with both of these two other facts, that encryption works and that we only know how to make one kind of computer. They will not cease to struggle with it because computers are colonizing every category of device, which means that they're central to every policy problem we have. Which means that they'll keep making this mistake. If you make any one of or all three of those facts central to your fiction, it will continue to be a parable about all the bad things going on in our world, unfortunately, for the entire foreseeable future. That means that you can have a book like Little Brother, the novel of mine that I'm really best known for, that I wrote in 2006, that continues to be cited as an incredibly, like, gripping futuristic salient tale that has something to tell us about our present day only because it has this techno-realistic element to it.

 

[Piper] You can also take a look at science from another aspect as well. That's from medicine, which you touched on with pacemakers. But you think about what we can do with DNA at this stage. For a while there, we wouldn't… The main basis for why the FDA wouldn't allow organ transplants and organs to be grown in something like porcine, like pigs, was because pigs had a retrovirus that could potentially be transferable to humans, which was… Would be terrible, considering the timeframe and what it could do. But now we have the ability, now, in today's day and age, to adjust their genetic makeup and composition to eradicate that virus in that string of pigs. Therefore, making it safe. We do now… There's a company that does it, that grows kidneys in pigs and have gotten to successful transplants in primates, and has proposed to potentially go to successful transplants for humans. Which could change the lives of people who are on the list waiting for kidneys. Now that doesn't take that much more in terms of steps forward to imagining what that kind of science, that kind of medicine, can do to change the near future. Or, if we play with the zombie apocalypse, because at least one of my series has done that, we look at vaccines, like, BSE is a major thing that I do in my day job, or not do. But that's related to what I look at in terms of data in my day job keep it safe. It's bovine spongiform encephalitis. It is nontransferable to humans. But. What if it became transferable? What if that virus became transferable? You have zombies now. You have people with brains that look like Swiss cheese when you take a cut of it. So…

[Howard] Delicious, delicious Swiss cheese.

[Cory] I mean, we have [garbled cases of it?] already, right? That's the human form of it, but it's thankfully, very, very rare.

[Piper] Very rare. But still, it's not that far in the future, when you can see the zombie apocalypse coming out of that.

 

[Mary Robinette] What you're basically talking about here is taking a single point and following logical causal chain to see where it goes and the branching effects as you move forward. In many ways, what you're talking about is treating technology like a magic system.

[Cory] Sure. And not trying to… Yes, it's good to have lots of texture in their other technologies, but not trying to play Nostradamus.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Cory] Instead, trying to make a little parable.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and pause here for the book of the week.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of yours.

[Cory] Yeah. I wrote… The most worldbuilding-ish novel I wrote, I think, is called Walkaway. It's the one with the fewest of what Karl Schroeder calls the Backless Maiden, from the Arthurian legend of the knight who meets the beautiful maiden, but she never shows her back to him, and then she steps in front of the fireplace and the fire flickers through her eyes and he realizes she has no back. That's really so much of our fiction doesn't have a back to it. Walkaway I really thought a lot about what was going on behind the scenes. It's an optimistic disaster novel. A utopian disaster novel. It's about people being good to each other in times of crisis and working to rebuild. It's not a world in which there are good people and bad people. It's a world in which there are people who think the world is made up of good people and bad people and people who think that the world is made up of people who think that there are good people and bad people and people like themselves who know that most people are just a mixed bag of goodness and badness, and that incentives and structures and exigencies determine whether we're good or bad at any given moment, and who are trying to make a world that brings out the good in everyone. It's full of people doing things like using drones to find our bridge in blighted climate wracked badlands and then using software to figure out what kind of fully automated luxury communist resorts they can build out of garbage and then moving into them and then reveling in how cool it is until weird oligarchs come along and say, "Hey, that's my garbage." Then they walk away and find some more garbage in another blighted brownfield site to build on. This is kind of their journey. It goes well until they have a shot at practical immortality, which they acquire from scientists from the oligarch classes who decide that they're not going to be complicit in speciating the human race into infinitely prolonged plutocrats and mayflies disappearing in the rearview mirror, which is the rest of us. They steal the fire from the gods, bring it to us so that we can be immortal too, and when rich people realize that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with us, they cease to see these walkaway communities as like cute bohemias that they can steal fashion and art from, and instead, bring out the hellfire missiles. That's when it kind of all gets interesting and kicks off.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's a simple novel?

[Cory] Yeah. It's got a lot of moving parts, that book, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] It's a really fantastic audiobook, I have to say.

[Cory] That's very kind of you.

[Mary Robinette] It's very good. I'm very picky about my audiobooks.

[Cory] I produced the audiobook myself. The readers are spectacular. The bulk of it is carried by Amber Benson from Buffy. But also we have Wil Wheaton on it and Mirron Willis and Gabrielle de Cuir and a guest appearance by Amanda Palmer. It's really a terrific audiobook.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk about worldbuilding for stories that are set in the present, because this is a thing that I think a lot of people overlook. They forget that you have to establish a world for people in the real world. Especially if you're tweaking things a little bit. Whether that's adding a single technological element to your present day or just even establishing a world within a closed ecosystem, like a high school or a corporate structure that doesn't actually exist. So what are some of the ways that you think about worldbuilding when you're used to… Doing something in the present day?

[Piper] I will say, and this is kind of a dangerous thing, but I will say that romance writers get a lot that we don't have to do worldbuilding. Because…

[Mary Robinette] That's not true.

[Piper] Exactly. Particularly contemporary or romantic suspense romance writers, because of the fact that it is set in the modern-day or contemporary times. But we do. One of the best worldbuilding that I can think of right off the top of my head is the Lucky Harbor series by Jill Shalvis because it is a small town. It is a made-up small town in the Pacific Northwest. It feels so real that you think the town is there. The people are real, the bed-and-breakfast is real, you go into town, the diner is real, and buildings feel real. You almost have a mental map in your head of where everything is. That's because the worldbuilding is done so very well by that author. Because the author took the time to think about where this was going to be, what the weather was going to be, even what the highway would be like driving up to it, and how long it would take to walk down to the bed-and-breakfast. That is one of the key points. And what the actual focal points around the town were that built up over the course of all the books in the series. The series itself is successful, but it's going to like, I could be wrong, but I think it's around 9 to 12 books. That's pretty amazing for a contemporary romance to have the kind of worldbuilding where people… You think you know where, like, the Ferris wheel is, you think you know where the pier is, you think you know where the boat is docked that they hanky-panky'ed in, in this book, and then the tree that they fell out of that the person broke their leg in.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that this kind of worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict, it gives you opportunities to add depth to the characters, it's not actually just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. It definitely makes things feel more real and gives the reader some… A way to ground… I read a novel for professional reasons that I can't recommend and so I'm not going to name, in which all of the love interests were retired baseball players. Like…

[Cory] That narrows it down.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. In a small town. I'm like, the economics of being retired baseball players in small towns, and they were all people who had been forcibly retired. So… But none of them had other jobs. It was like, how does that…

[Howard] This sounds paranormal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It does, and it was not.

[Cory] It's the "how do the friends afford that apartment in New York" problem.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly that problem. Which is why the worldbuilding… It's like… The only one who had a job was a barrista, as far as we can… I mean, technically, the others had jobs, but it was…

[Howard] The… I talked about it in other contexts, the CBS Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show, is set in present-day New York, but the worldbuilding… There's the massive criminal organization run by Moriarity. There's the massive business organization run by Morland Holmes. These elements, there are callbacks to these things throughout it. The precinct, the officers, the judges, the brownstone that Holmes lives in, all of these details have been overlaid on a New York that feels very real to me, who doesn't live in New York. But the series gets good reviews from people who do live in New York. They've managed to blend location research with some fun worldbuilding and some fun callbacks to the Conan Doyle Holmes from…

[Cory] My favorite example of contemporary science fiction worldbuilding is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition trilogy. These are science fiction novel that were set about two years before they came out. So a science fiction novel set in 2000…

[Howard] Oh, wow.

[Cory] 2003 that came out in 2005, that sort of thing. They are science fiction novels about people, particularly New Yorkers, after 9/11, living true the rise of the surveillance state. A lot of the characters are spooks, and a lot of the characters are sort of spook adjacent or in the crosshairs of spooks. It's about people living through a moment of absolute technological upheaval. What he does is he approaches it, this thing that had happened in our recent past, he approaches it as though it were a great technological upheaval that people were living through, which we had. But it had been just long enough that we'd become adapted to it. The shock of them was just spectacular. It reminds me of my favorite Brian Eno aphorism. Brian Eno has this thing called the deck of oblique strategies that he used when he was recording Roxy Music and a bunch of other bands, which were these like gnomic aphorisms that you would draw out of a deck of cards and he would make everyone try and do it. My favorite one is be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. There's so many times where this comes up, when I'm thinking about how you might try something new. Gibson wrote futuristic science fiction about the recent past. He was the first person not to set futuristic science fiction in the future. It was great.

[Piper] Every one of us has our mouths dropped open right now. Yeah, the faces that we have in the room.

[Cory] Brian Eno was a smart guy.

[Piper] Yeah.

[Cory] Came up with the Windows 95 chime.

[Mary Robinette] Really?

[Cory] Yeah. He made the start of music for Windows 95.

[Mary Robinette] I had no idea.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, on that note, [hum...] let's go ahead…

[Cory] I think you mean [huuh...]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Let's go ahead and give our fair listeners a homework assignment. Cory?

[Cory] Sure. One of the things that's often missing from worldbuilding is economics. I think it was Steven Bruce that observed that you can always tell if a Marxist has written your fantasy novel because the ratio of vassals to lords is right. I wrote a novel about gift economics. Gift economics are economies in which things are not given on a reciprocal basis, that's barter. Things are given with no expectation of return. We've just lived through a kind of forty-year social experiment in making everything transactional. Where there is no such thing as society and greed is good and selfishness produces pretty near optimal outcomes. It's hard not to reciprocate. But if you think through the things in your life that are nonreciprocal, you'll find that some of the most important things in your life are nonreciprocal, right? Like, you came out and said to your partner, "Look, the only reason I'm married to you is that I expect that when the day comes and I can't wait my own ass, that you're going to do it for me in thanks for all the times I brought you a cup of coffee," that you would be a kind of human monster. Right? Make a list of 10 things in your life that are purely nonreciprocal, that you do only for the pleasure of giving something to someone else, the intrinsic pleasure of giving something to someone else.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great homework assignment. With that, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/10/14-45-economics/

 

Key points: Economics in worldbuilding? The science of human behavior between ends and scarce means with alternate uses. Not just money! Time, trade... Incentives and motivation. Remember, everyone doesn't have all the information! Don't spend too much time on value, worry about what people do for a living and why. Fantastic scarce resources make good fantasy books! As writers, ask what makes an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some way. Don't just think of currency. Most of the economics of science fiction and fantasy don't work if you look too close. So... handwave, and give the reader a chance to suspend their disbelief. You get one bye, one freebie, and you can earn more by explaining something in detail, by showing you are trustworthy. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 45.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Economics.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] This is a really hard one to not be that smart on…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because there are a lot of very smart economists out there. We have touched on economics a lot in various podcasts in the past. We want to talk about how, as a writer, you consider economics in your worldbuilding, specifically. So, can we… Let's get a kind of a foundation here. What do we mean by this, what do we mean by economics? The more I study economics, the more I realize that economists see everything as economies, which is basically how every discipline is when you really drill into it. I was talking to a friend who studies math. He's like, "Oh, math is really philosophy, which is really the existence of everything, so math is everything." Well, economics is everything.

[Dan] When all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like economics.

[Mahtab] I have a really good definition.

[Brandon] Okay, go.

[Mahtab] By Lionel Charles Robbins, who is a British economist, and this was in the 1930s. But he said… He defined economics as the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.

[Brandon] That's really good.

[Mahtab] I found that was really good, because if you have alternate uses, that's where the economics comes in.

[Howard] I like that, because when you talk about economy, most people think money. When you say the word money, somebody in the room is going to remember that time is money. Well, time is a scarce resource. The economy of I am going to spend time on a thing so you don't have to spend time on a thing, so you're going to spend time on a thing so I don't have to spend time on it. Then the two of us are going to trade things. Now somehow, we've each gotten more than if we tried to spend all of our time on one thing. That is the whole market of buying things with real money that only exist in video games. Somebody spent 20 hours playing for it, and now they sell it to you. Now you have it without having spent the time.

[Brandon] Because you spent your time doing something at which you are really good, and therefore got paid for that, and spent a fraction of that on someone else's time doing something at which they are very good.

[Dan] I love in your definition, it talks about…

[Mahtab] Not mine, but it's the good one.

[Dan] Whoever. I remember your name and not his. I love that it talks about different resources with alternate uses. Because wood, for example, if the only thing we used wood for was to build a house, then it wouldn't be wood, it would just be house points. You have to accrue enough house points, and then you have a house. But wood can also be used for weapons. Wood can also be lit on fire, make fires and things. So…

[Howard] You burn your house points! What?

[Brandon] It can also be a beautiful thing as a tree that we enjoy.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled] preserve the forest. So when you start thinking about not just that I need to accrue enough points to make this thing, but how am I going to spend these points because there's so many different things to spend them on.

[Brandon] I really like, in economics, the study of incentives. Specifically, how human beings are motivated by different things. These points, how different points motivate people in different ways and how we can be motivated by different levels of points in different areas. That is all really interesting to me. I think it plays into storytelling really well, because the economics of how a character value something versus how someone else in the team or an antagonist values that thing is great, ripe for storytelling opportunities.

[Howard] The place where I think worldbuilding falls flat on economics is if you try and make it all logical in ways that all of the players are acting as if they have all of the information. Fundamentally… A great example is the Pentagon paying $1200 for a hammer. Where does a $1200 hammer come from? Well, in part, it can come from the guy who's building the spreadsheet, and he's told, "Look, we're charging $1 million for this thing. Add up all the stuff." He gets to the end, and he's like, "Ugh. I'm $1200 short. But they require everything to be line item. I'm just going to raise the price of a hammer." Okay? It's not a $1200 hammer. It's $1200 of the guy building the spreadsheet not caring and knowing that nobody's going to read this until it's too late. Then they'll be making fun of the Pentagon, instead of the subcontractor.

 

[Brandon] So, as you're building a fantasy or science fiction culture, do you spend time on the economics? Like, the raw economics, the monetary system? How do you decide how much things are worth in your cultures that you are worldbuilding?

[Dan] I don't spend a ton of time on value, so much as figuring out what people do and why. So, like, what do you do for a living? Is it important that this is a community of farmers or of ranchers or of fishermen or of whatever it's going to be. Because then that tells me something economically about the society and about their standard of living and so on. It doesn't matter to me as much how much a meal costs as knowing where their money comes from.

[Brandon] I really like fantastical resources in fantasy books. We're going to do an entire podcast on that in a couple of weeks. I like tying my economics to something that is scarce in a fantasy world that we just don't even have in our world. Because then it lets me start asking these questions about well, how would they value this thing? How would we value this thing if we had it? If someone could actually cast a spell and make something materialize, what does that do to the value of the thing, or the value of the person who can make that thing? Those things, in fantasy, are part of what draws me to fantasy, is that we can ask these questions that can't really be asked in the real world because it's just impossible.

[Howard] A classic example is the Dungeons & Dragons spell, Continual Light, which I think had a thousand gold piece material cost. But… Guys… It's continual light. For a thousand gold pieces, you could make a light that will never go out. We're going to find enough thousand gold pieces that in five or six generations, nobody needs candles. So, by the time we've gotten to this point, yeah, your economy… Your economy is not centering around how do we find light. There may be other things that are scarce, but light isn't one of them.

 

[Brandon] It's easy to kind of make fun of games, sometimes. Because they're building their system to play a game. But you are writers, listeners. So, you… Your job is not to ask what makes a good game. Your job is to ask what's going to make an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some interesting way.

[Dan] I was working on a fantasy setting several years ago in which I wanted to have magic essentially just be energy. Like, wizards could channel energy. I realized, as I got deeper and deeper into it, that there was no use for a wizard that outweighed the value of just plugging them into a power station somewhere. Which is a cool story idea on its own, and if that's the direction you want to go, that's awesome. But taking the time to think about these things helps you get a sense of what… Like Howard was saying, what the scarcity really is, what the economy really looks like with this thing you've invented.

[Brandon] There's a famous SMBC [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal], the web comic, that postulates that the greatest good Superman could do if he really exists would be just to run really fast on a treadmill or push a thing to generate boundless electricity for the world. It takes that to ridiculous lengths. But it does make you think. "Huh. You know, rather than saving people, if Superman were pushing a turbine, it actually would do greater good for the world."

[Howard] I think it was Terry Pratchett who… There was a dwarven artifact which is a pair of rectangular blocks which one of them rotates in relation to the other and you cannot stop them from doing that. So what you do is you fix one end of the block into the mountain and then start building gear step-down systems attached to the other end of the block because you haven't… It's not turning very fast, but nothing can stop it. So all of the dwarven industry around this artifact was centered around how can we build enough gears so that everything is driven by this one miraculous thing. I loved the economy of that. It's… You only have one Superman. Well, how do we build the turbine the most efficiently so one Superman can do enough running?

 

[Brandon] Speaking of Pratchett, you have our book?

[Howard] The book of the week. Making Money by Terry Pratchett. This is the second Moist von Lipshwitz [Lipwig] book. In Going Postal, Lord Vetinari takes our hero, Moist, and puts him in charge of the postal system. Moist manages to turn stamps into a currency. In Making Money, Lord Vetinari approaches Moist and says, "Good job creating a currency. Now I need you to create a currency." And puts him in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint. It really is a delightful… Pratchett writes social satire. It is not just a satirization of banks and commerce and economy. But it's a satirization of humanity. It's Pratchett at his…

[Brandon] It's brilliant.

[Howard] Pratchett at his best.

[Brandon] My favorite books in the entirety of Discworld are Making Money and Going Postal, so… Can't recommend it enough. They are wonderful.

 

[Brandon] Mahtab, you had something you wanted to add.

[Mahtab] Economics, most people don't… Even in science fiction and fantasy, they don't concentrate too much on it. One, because it's… The jargon that is used for it can be a little bit boring and sometimes intimidating. So most people tend not to. One is because of the fact that it is… in the fantasy genre, people are willing to suspend their disbelief, rather than if it was a nonfiction where you have to get all your rules right. But I found this really interesting essay or article on Medium.com which was between Jo Lindsay Walton, who's the editor of the Economic Science Fiction and Fantasy Database. He had... He's mentioned that as far as economics go, sometimes we only think of hard currency or something that's monetary. But there can be so many other economies that are based on a non-currency medium. So, that's something to think about. And that's a really interesting essay. If anyone wants to read about it and just get some more ideas, it's on Medium.com, The Economics of Science Fiction.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mahtab] Very interesting article.

 

[Brandon] That kind of segues into the next question I wanted to ask, which is, sometimes the economics of science fiction and fantasy just don't make any sense. They really just don't. The one that Howard and I were chatting about before the podcast is the economics of space invasions. A lot of times, if you look at the cost-to-benefit ratio for moving the ships through the galaxy, which is a really big place, the amount of energy expended that it doesn't make any sense. A lot of shipping, intergalactic shipping, just wouldn't make any sense. Most science fiction books and movies just wouldn't work. Fantasy is even worse at this, right? We like to have great vast enormous battles that are very awesome and epic. Yet, the economic system that would have to be in place to feed these forces and make this actually work just… Everything collapses if you start asking the hard questions. So my question for you is how do you approach this in your stories? Where do you handwave, where do you not handwave? How do you do this right so it won't kick people out? How do you maybe do it wrong that you've seen?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So in my cyberpunk series, Mirador series, I was trying to create the story that I wanted to tell. That had the certain elements that I wanted to tell. That included the conceit that everybody has a computer installed in their head, and that there are drones that can do essentially everything for us. That, economically, falls apart so fast. Especially because I wanted to make sure that this world also included poverty. So how can all of these poor people have this incredible technology unless it is incredibly cheap, at which point then why is anyone poor? Like, there's a lot of things that start to fall apart. I kind of had to do the handwaving, and get to the point where I was able to come up with a couple of excuses. For example, well, people are poor because drones do all the thing, so nobody has jobs anymore, but, on the other hand, energy is essentially free because we have all this incredible solar technology and… Constructing as much of a house of cards as I could. Then saying, "What's that over there? Don't look any closer, because this will fall apart." But I needed to be this way in order to tell the story that is exciting to me to tell.

[Brandon] By its nature, science fiction and fantasy is going to fall apart. Almost all of it. Because we are doing things that can't be done. By definition, that is what leads us to sci-fi fantasy. Barring some of the really intense hard science fictions where they are postulating a few years into the future, things that they think we will do, and then we do. Every fantasy book breaks the laws of thermodynamics, just tosses them out the window. As a writer, my job is to make it so that you don't feel like you have to toss everything out the window when you read the book, that I give you that opportunity to suspend your disbelief. But that also varies very much on genre. A lot of the middle grade books that I'll read… They don't care about that and they don't need to. They shouldn't have to, because the story is not about that.

[Mahtab] The thing is if you got really bogged down with making the economics work, the story would not work. For us as storytellers, the main thing is I have to make the story work. But I have to make sure that the reader believes what I'm saying. Which basically means making sure that they have confidence in me and my writing. So I would do that with some other techniques, and then rely on making sure that they trust me enough to kind of skim past if my economics is not solid. Because…

[Howard] Previously this season, we've talked about the concept of you get one bye. You get one freebie that the audience is just going to let you have. Boy, economics is a great place to spend that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One of the tricks for me is the concept of scarcity, which was mentioned in the quote that you gave us earlier, Mahtab. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, it really would be regarded by most people as a post-scarcity economy. Yet, even in post-scarcity, there are things that are scarce. Time is scarce. Locations can only exist once. A unique location is, by definition, scarce. There's only one of it. So in your fantasy setting, in your science fiction setting, no matter what you have being provided for people, if time and real estate are things that still function the way they function for us, you can have poverty, you can have wealth you can have economics. Because those things are going to trade… Change hands in some way.

[Dan] Now, to extend that metaphor a little further of you get one bye, you can earn yourself more byes. By doing what Mahtab was talking about last month, of I'm going to explain this one thing in detail, and then you're going to trust me. Then, that's going to allow me to fudge two or three extra things that I wouldn't have been able to get away with otherwise.

[Brandon] Good writing can earn you a ton of byes. I would agree with that.

[Dan] So there is an economy of economies.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and end this here. Mahtab, you were going to give us a writing prompt?

[Mahtab] Yes. So, just kind of going further on what I mentioned earlier, develop a moneyless economy, where something is paid for without hard currency. It could be gift-based, honor-based, barter-based, but describe how that economy would work and what are the advantages and disadvantages of that economy would be.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.