Category Archives: The View From L2 (Science Fiction and the Law)

Lagrangian points are positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects. L2 is the Lagrangian point on the far side of the moon. The View From L2 is the category that all of LL2’s science fiction-related posts get shoved into.

Saturday Evening Rap Break: Pimp My Satellite

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Yo Russia it’s me, your arch-nemesis,
We the G’s over seas with Micky-D’s stains on our T’s,
with luxuries like you wouldn’t believe,
we’ve got more ringtones on our iPhones than China’s got Chinese,
We’re America biyatch, the land of the free
We gave you Michael Bolton and Jurassic Park 3
Our soccer teams suck and our beers taste like pee pee
but our rhymes are so phat they get type II diabetes

But enough about us, how come you ain’t been callin me?
I guess you’re trying to stabilize your volatile economy,
preoccupied nationwide with new domestic policies,
psych, ya right, I know you tryin to follow me
You’ve been
Disgraced in the space race, trying to save face after comin in second place,
Just enough to taste victory, chase history, ace Kennedy, but ya lost pace with your enemy,
and now you’re layin low, plottin’ for as long as we’ve known ya,
You hold you’re head up like Neil Armstrong didn’t pwn ya,
that secret space ride that you’re tryin to hide isn’t something I would publicize with any pride, I’ll tell ya why…

-Susan

“Readers who find Figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary.”

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I spent a fair chunk of yesterday sitting out on the patio reading Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger. It should surprise no one that I absolutely adored it. A scifi adventure novel premised upon the profit to be gained from interstellar trade, you say? Why yes that does in fact sound like something I’d quite enjoy reading. (And, like many of Moon’s books, it features a strong female protagonist in a universe where gender is irrelevant to your qualifications for any job. I think I’m in love!)

The bad news about the future is that there are still tariffs. Looks like we’re going to develop an FTL drive before we actually achieve free trade. (Sadly, I would consider this to be a rather realistic proposition.) But the book manages to create one of the few scifi universes I’ve encountered where the idea of backwater worlds still using horse-and-plows for agriculture actually made sense. In Serenity, I was never quite able to accept the whole Wild Wild West theme– it was based on planetary cultures deliberately choosing to embrace a cowboy lifestyle rather than the cowboy lifestyle making sense given the resources available. But Trading in Danger depicts an economic and political system for the galaxy where encountering a mix of archaic farming techniques and space-age technology makes perfect sense.

In addition to that, other notable features of the book include: 1) A galactic corporation with a monopoly on the instantaneous communication market — and its relentless rent-seeking behaviors in order to maintain that monopoly serve as the backdrop for the events of the series; 2) A constant evaluation of opportunity costs, struggles of where to allocate cash on hand and when to take on a loan given the prevailing interest rates, and arguments over how credit ratings apply to sub-entities of corporate structures. The characters are traders, after all, and thus their internal struggles over where the best trading opportunities are to be found are prominently featured; and, 3) Constant wrangling over contract law, such as how breach and damages are to be determined when a system civil war breaks, or what indemnity clauses are to be included in the final text of an agreement.

And last, but not least, there is ample quoting from the IUCC. That’s right — the Interstellar Uniform Commercial Code. It made me so nostalgic for Martha Ertman’s Contracts course; I can totally imagine Prof. Ertman chilling out on a starship somewhere waxing rhapsodic about the default contract terms provided for under IUCC Art. 347.2.

So of course the whole time I was reading the book I had Krugman’s essay “A Theory of Interstellar Trade” in mind. (It’s worth reading simply for its groan-inducing jokes and references to science fiction, physics, and academia. Such as setting up his graphs so that his line is named ET.)

“If trading space vessels move at high velocities, we can no longer have an unambiguous measure of the time taken in transit. The time taken by the spacecraft to make a round trip will appear less to an observer on the craft than to one remaining on Earth. Since an interstellar voyage is an investment project which must have a positive present value, there is obviously a problem in deciding which transit time to use in the present value calculation.”

The essay’s not directly applicable to Elizabeth Moon’s universe, as Krugman assumes (slightly more realistically) that FTL travel is not possible, and thus deals with the relativistic effects that approaching-light-speed travel causes. With time distortion + lack of instantaneous communication, can interstellar arbitrage result in equalized interplanetary interest rates? Yes, actually — well, assuming we can stay within the bounds of special relativity. Krugman makes no representations as to how his theory might apply to non-inertial reference frames.

Although Krugman rejects FTL and instantaneous communication, he does assume that even if our technology will not have discovered how to break the light speed barrier, our economic systems will have discovered the near-equivalent: perfect forecasts on the price of goods over indefinite periods of time. In Trading for Danger, nothing close to this exists — which is a good thing, as it’s that very uncertainty over prices that provides a fair share of the drama and obstacles faced by the characters. The traders must make months-long trips between star systems based upon speculation on where the most profitable transactions are to be had, and if you guess wrong, you’re down a whole lot of time and credits. (Yes, they do have FTL — but given acceleration and deceleration times, it’s no quick jaunt to go between stars.)

So I’m going to add a Third Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade to Krugman’s article: for good science fiction, you need to screw around with the laws of physics as the plot demands, but hold your laws of economics constant. Imagining FTL is more fun than imagining perfect futures markets.

-Susan

How Economics Can Be A Plot Point in Fantasy Novels

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In King’s Shield — book three of the Inda Series and an entertaining but otherwise unremarkable sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel by Sherwood Smith — I was very pleased to see that the existence of economics was not merely recognized, but used to advance the plot. Too often in fantasy novels, money is assumed to conveniently exist. Kings can declare wars, and they absent mindedly cover the costs “out of the treasury.” And everything is paid for in ubiquitous gold coins. Need to stay at an inn? Here, have a gold coin. Need to raise an army? Here, have some more gold coins.

But in King’s Shield, the king goes broke fighting a war and is facing the possibility of his kingdom turning to anarchy if he can’t pay for anything. That alone earns the series some points — far too many books simply gloss over the fact that wars are, well, expensive. So the King’s busy fretting over his empty treasury, and in typical fantasy fashion, the main character — who has spent most his life as a pirate — announces he has a solution to the problem. To paraphrase, “Not to worry! There’s a big old treasure trove full of pirate gold out on an island I know of, let’s just go and fetch that.”

Then the king’s cousin informs him, “That won’t work.”
“Why not?” The pirate asks, dumbfounded.
“Because treasury isn’t treasure.”
“Treasury isn’t treasure?! What the heck is it then?”

The king’s cousin launches into an explanation of how finances work in the land. The pirate is appropriately baffled when he is informed that the “letters of credit” they often use are not actually referring to piles of gold, but are themselves used as money — there’s no gold standard in Iasca Leror. “So you’re telling me,” the pirate says, “we’re just trading letters all over the place? Just pieces of paper with writing on them?” Welcome to fiat currency, Lord Inda.

In fact, the character’s dialogue sort of suggests that in this world, the monetary system operates under Chartalism. The king accepts payment of taxes from each nobleman in the form of established rates of men, horses, supplies, etc., and these taxes of soldiers and supplies can also be measured and paid in ‘kind’ — fantasy-speak for trade between two different goods of equal value.

And in Iasca Leror — where King’s Shield takes place — it turns out that a pirate’s treasure trove has very little value in kind. Because of the years of wars that they’ve been through, interkingdom trade has grinded to a halt. And gold and jewels are useless to Iasca Leror– you can’t eat them, live in them, or ride them, after all.

And thus economics becomes a plot point in high fantasy. As a result of the conversation, the king’s cousin jaunts off on his next adventure — a quest to re-establish interkingdom trade in the world, so that they might export their gold and jewels and turn them into new ships and letters of credit.

Maybe he’ll accomplish this by gathering all the other kingdoms’ representatives together in a place called the Brettonska Woodlands.

-Susan

The Economic Agendas of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors, Vol. 2 — Terry Goodkind

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conanlibertarianTerry Goodkind

I realized that there is one author, at least, who I am totally competent to critique even without the benefits of having his books before me: Terry Goodkind. That’s because you don’t actually need to read The Sword of Truth series to understand what they’re about, you can just go type “libertarian porn” into google and you will probably get the same experience.

Okay, they’re not quite that bad. After all, I did read all of them, and at ~800 pages a pop times 11 novels, that’s 8,800 pages I bothered to get through. Admittedly, that was over the course of 12 years, beginning in seventh grade when I first picked them up because I got bored waiting for Robert Jordan to crank out his next book, and finally ending this past summer when I was studying for the bar, and therefore procrastinating with a Terry Goodkind novel was marginally less frustrating than the BarBri books I was actually supposed to be reading.

But in between the decent chunks of sword-and-sorcery fantasy in The Sword of Truth, Terry Goodkind seizes every possible opportunity to turn his characters into hoarse mouthpieces for the Libertarian War Against Communism. It’s kind of funny, the first dozen times it happens. And then it starts getting annoying, when you find yourself wondering if the speeches were simply copied and pasted from a speech that same character gave two books ago. And then finally by about book 6 or so, every time you see a character launch into a major speech, you just skip ahead six or seven pages until you find where the quote marks stop and everyone goes back to stabbing bad guys.

A rough synopsis of the series [SPOILER ALERT] is that Hank Roark Richard Cypher, a simple woods guide, is actually the leader of the D’Haran Empire, and the beautiful Dagn- Domini- Kahlan has been sent to fetch him. After securing his title as Supreme Commander of the Old World, he then must fight the rampaging horde of liberal democrats in the New World that wish to destroy individualism and promote the idea of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Anyway, they all live in a world where it is possible to conquer the forces of evil simply by demonstrating to them your noble, liberty-loving spirit and your adamant refusal to live your life for another.

Read More: In Libertarian Land, you can always tell which women love freedom the most. It’s the hot ones »

The Economic Agendas of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors, Vol. 1 — Jack London

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Note: I wanted to write a series of posts about the economic and political beliefs found in the science fiction and fantasy novels of China Meiville, Isaac Asimov, Terry Goodkind, Robert Heinlein, and a few others, but I found I was having a hard time doing it purely from memory. Unfortunately, most my books are back home in Atlanta, and Jack London was the only author outside of copyright protection and thus the only one whose works I could find online. So Jack London is first. For the rest, I’ll either settle for writing posts from memory, or wait until I’m back home for Thanksgiving to pick up the books. (Actually, Cory Doctorow will probably be next — thanks to the fact he’s happy to give up on restrictive copyright protections, his work is out there for free too.)

Jack London:

Although most famous for his Alaskan wilderness fiction, Jack London also wrote a fair collection of science fiction short stories and four scifi novels. I grew up on Call of the Wild and White Fang, and obsessed over his  short stories (it’s a good thing I didn’t end up naming my first dog Bâtard!), but it wasn’t until much later that I started paying attention to his non-wolfdog-based fiction.

And so I never realized as a kid that Jack London was very much a socialist. And not the fluffy kind, either. In his resignation from the socialist party, he wrote:

I am resigning from the Socialist Party, because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis upon the class struggle. I was originally a member of the old revolutionary up-on-its-hind legs, a fighting, Socialist Labor Party. Trained in the class struggle, as taught and practised by the Socialist Labor Party, my own highest judgment concurring, I believed that the working class, by fighting, by fusing, by never making terms with the enemy, could emancipate itself.

Since the whole trend of Socialism in the United States during recent years has been one of peaceableness and compromise, I find that my mind refuses further sanction of my remaining a party member. Hence, my resignation.

These views very much influenced his fiction. And although London is beyond a doubt one of my favorite authors of all time, my love for his stories is often tempered with uneasiness with the themes they are promoting.

Far less forgivable than his socialist views is his embracing of Social Darwinism and Rudyard Kipling-style racial paternalism.  (I’m being charitable here; at times, his racism was much more severe than that, and he was not opposed to eugenics.) His opinion of women was little better, and in London’s fiction, females are often very much fungible goods. If you lose one, just find another — or better yet, steal it. The number of instances of wife-stealing in his stories is staggering.  His tepid support for women’s rights was not based upon any belief in their equivalency to men, but rather as a way to bring about an end to alcohol. In John Barleycorn, the memoir opens with London announcing that he voted for women’s suffrage — not because he agrees particularly with the idea that women should vote,  but rather because “[w]hen the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition[.]”

But because discussing economics is more fun than detailing the moral failings of a historical figure I still have respect for, I’m going to ignore his social views and instead focus instead on two of his speculative fiction short stories with communist themes: Goliah and Strength of the Strong.

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