
The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction - Hooke
https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/how-science-fiction-helps-us-understand-our-economic-system.html
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cpeterso
Manu Saadia's _Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek_ is kinda the reverse:
it's an examination of Star Trek's post-scarcity economy, how matter
replicators change everything, and what people do with their free time when
they don't have to work.

There's a big hole in Star Trek canon of how Earth transitioned from ST:TOS to
the post-scarcity economy of ST:TNG. I would love to see Star Trek delve
explore that era instead of rebooting and rehashing so many prequals.

Here is a transcript from an NPR interview with Paul Krugman about Saadia's
book:

[https://www.marketplace.org/2016/09/07/world/economist-
paul-...](https://www.marketplace.org/2016/09/07/world/economist-paul-krugman-
ponders-sci-fi-economics-star-trek)

~~~
Semiapies
The problem of telling the story of that transition is that it's like trying
to go into detail about the physics in Cochrane's ship in _First Contact_ —the
writer would be trying to explain a completely made-up thing (warp drive or
the TNG socio-economic system) that itself is nothing more than a handwave to
allow stories to be told.

~~~
lostcolony
Not really. It would be trying to describe the human element of the
technology. We'd not be trying to explain the post-scarcity utopia, but -how
humans first reacted to it-.

Look at how humans act now. We have more than enough resources for everyone on
earth to have sufficient food. And yet some starve. Why? Because of
distribution problems, of corruption, etc. We expect people to work if they
want to eat. Why? Because we culturally view it a moral failing if someone
doesn't work without good reason (and even then we view those who have reason
with suspicion). Look at the discussion around automation + UBI. Even if we
assume automation can handle all the work that has to be done, people take the
stance that it won't/shouldn't work, that it will only destabilize the
economy, rather than improving everyone's lives. A replicator is just another
form of automation in that regard, and there would be plenty of people who
could object to it.

Just because we have the technology doesn't mean it's initially available to
everyone. And even when there's enough availability of the tech, some humans
will try and regulate it, to protect the existing interests, and other selfish
reasons, with various rationales. That would be -interesting-. Moreover, it
would, like all good scifi, reflect our current society, by showing the same
attitudes and concerns currently at play, but in a different, futuristic
context (one that ideally challenges people's perceptions, but without the
baggage that causes them to instinctively get defensive).

I think it could make damned good television. Though, I think, it would be a
far cry from what we expect from 'Star Trek'.

~~~
ehvatum
Incentives shape behavior, and we grow weak and unsatisfied without working
against resistance. Without exertion, there is no strength. Consider the rapid
deterioration of the human body when deprived of gravity.

In the Federation of Planets, what happens to adults who don't feel like
making their own challenges or doing much of anything aside from having as
many children as possible? Are they allowed to reproduce? This creates rather
massive selection pressure. Somebody somewhere is going to have a gene
encoding wanting to make maximum possible babies, and it's going to swamp your
population in a few rapidly paced generations. The inevitability of this
circumstance is total.

Television exploring the overcoming of this, the human condition, could be a
profound thing. Perhaps STNG neglects to show us the teeming planets of
"welfare dropouts", where reproduction is limited by space, and Federation
ships stop by to recruit the few ambitious worthies who yearn for a challenge
other than sleeping in the same room as 300 family members?

As a kid, I wondered about this, and my parents explained that the lazy Star
Fleet kids go into a transporter beam and never come out, and their parents so
happy to be done with backtalk that they aren't even sorry about it. This
would be a feasible selection pressure, except for the case of double mutants
possessing both fecundity and nurturing instincts, a possibility of which my
parents were clearly unaware. (Just kidding. This would be hilarious, though.)

Alternatively, perhaps Starfleet regularly purges the population of lazy
bastards? Like, when the population of San Francisco gets too high, if you are
more than two generations removed from a successful Star Fleet veteran, you
get vaporized? This would explain how Star Fleet Academy is located there
without having to pay staff more than Google or even anything at all.

I would be totally binge watch a Trek exploring friction between Google and
Star Fleet in the San Fran real estate market. Couldn't possibly be worse than
Voyager........

~~~
pjc50
> what happens to adults who don't feel like making their own challenges or
> doing much of anything aside from having as many children as possible?

This is contradicted by the real world experience that when you give people
education and contraceptives they really don't do this. There are not that
many people who really enjoy the process that much - it's called "labour" for
a reason.

Star Trek is likely to be the sort of utopia where boys and girls get
reversibly vaccinated against pregnancy in childhood, and having unconsidered
or large numbers of children is socially frowned upon.

Now, in Iain M Banks' _Culture_ , it's spelled out. There is no space pressure
and there are trillions of humans, but it's also sufficiently post-human that
characters can get pregnant, abort a pregnancy, change gender, or get high
simply by sitting down and willing it to happen, telling the nanobots in their
bloodstream to do their thing.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
You're exactly right. The unexplained question in Star Trek isn't why they
don't have uncontrollable population growth, it's how do they get enough
people to have babies to maintain a stable population on Earth and still have
some people leftover to start colonies.

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autarch
Charles Stross incorporates economics into a _lot_ of his writing. His two
related novels Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood are all about the
economics of a post-human society. The latter of the two has a really
interesting take on crypto-currency.

His Merchant Princes series is all about how a dimensional travelers exploit
lack of economic knowledge in parallel worlds with less developed economies.

And Halting State and Rule 34, two near future novels, both touch on economics
and related themes quite a bit.

~~~
Jedd
I really enjoy reading Charlie's work, especially the speculation around
transition societies. You can add _Accelerando_ to the list of his works that
include some serious consideration of economics (in a way that whilst reading
you don't think, 'eww - economics' :)

Actually, _Singularity Sky_ also has a lot of good - and stealthy - economics
material.

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walrus01
I don't even know how an article managed to mention dystopias and blade
runner, in 2018, without even a mention of "Altered Carbon". That, and it
ignores that "The Expanse" was a series of novels (I think there's like...
eight books now?) a long time before it was a TV series. The novels go into a
great deal more detail on the lives of the Belters and how the political
situation depicted came about.

~~~
posterboy
The expanse has a little bit of what might count as hard sci-fi and the rest
is just milking it for adventure storytelling in an admittedly capturing
manner.

~~~
Apocryphon
The Expanse takes pains to treat space travel, combat, and so on in a hard
sci-fi way to the point of making it seem rather mundane. But you're right-
the point of the series is about the human element, which is actually relevant
to the OP-

>> Okay, so what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science
fiction. The answer is an emphatic no. I have nothing but respect for well
written hard science fiction, and I wanted everything in the book to be
plausible enough that it doesn’t get in the way. But the rigorous how-to with
the math shown? It’s not that story. This is working man’s science fiction.
It’s like in Alien, we meet the crew of the Nostromo doing their jobs in this
very blue collar environment. They’re truckers, right? Why is there a room in
the Nostromo where water leaks down off of chains suspended from the ceiling?
Because it looks cool and makes the world feel a little messy. It gives you
the feel of the world. Ridley Scott doesn’t explain why that room exists, and
when most people watch the film, it never even occurs to them to ask. What
kind of drive does the Nostromo use? I bet no one walked out of the film
asking that question. I wanted to tell a story about humans living and working
in a well populated solar system. I wanted to convey a feeling for what that
would be like, and then tell a story about the people who live there.

[https://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/james-s-a-
corey-2/](https://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/james-s-a-corey-2/)

------
pjc50
_Blade Runner_ the film has remarkably little economics in it, it's more of a
post-colonial treatment: some runaway slaves from the colonies have escaped
back to the motherland, where they are subjected to pseudo-scientific tests to
deem them subhuman so they can be executed.

The original PKD novel is much stranger and explicitly mentions a World War
Three which has made a large number of animal species extinct. It's much more
focused on the questions of mechanical substitutes for emotional relationships
and the affect on the self.

------
beefman
The film Tomorrowland (by Brad Bird) is a wonderful take on this. Like Iron
Giant, it bombed in theaters. And somewhat ironically, got some of the worst
reviews of any good movie I can think of.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I love Tomorrowland and I recommend it to all my friends. I'm sad it bombed; I
only discovered it accidentally on Netflix last year. Now I rewatch it from
time to time to get a boost of motivation and positive energy.

I love this movie because it's _positive_ about humans and future - which is
unlike pretty much anything made in the last two decades. (Hell, it even goes
meta on that point.)

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mirimir
As I started reading this, I had to recheck the date. Because this is such an
old topic. I mean, haven't Stephenson and crew beaten it to death? And then he
went and wrote _D.O.D.O._ , which lacks even the thin edge of hope in
_Seveneves_. Both of which I love, by the way.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
SF is the only literary form to focus consistently on politics and economics.
This goes back past Heinlein to the pulps of the 30s and 40s.

~~~
mirimir
And further back, if you consider Swift's _Gulliver 's Travels_ (1726) to be
SF. There is a flying island, after all.

SF and fantasy give authors much greater leeway to challenge cherished
beliefs. Because it's all so preposterous.

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mpreda
But no mention of PKD (Philip K. Dick) and his novel "Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?", on which the movie "Blade Runner" is based.. ?

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girvo
To add to the recommendations, I’d like to mention Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New
York 2140” which is heavily focused on the economic structures that he posits
will arrive after future catastrophes driven by climate change. And the rather
smug interludes are witty and amusing and somewhat depressing all at the same
time.

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_coveredInBees
I think this article could have used a few more Amazon affiliate links. I
always enjoy a well-researched article with lots of irrelevant cross-
references.

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lykahb
The examples in the articles used the economic ideas only as a building block,
not as the primary motivation for writing the novels.

I don't believe that Blade Runner is about recession more than the AI and
humanity. Where good fiction uses ideas to supplement world-building, bad one
would build the world to illustrate an idea.

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locopati
John Brunner, Ursula Leguin and Alfred Bester (to name just a few) were
covering this ground back in 60s and 70s.

~~~
whyenot
not to mention Philip K. Dick

