Compass Reach was not the first novel I ever wrote. It is the first one to see print. (I feel the need to explain, though it may be unnecessary. My first published novel is Mirage: an Asimov’s Robot Mystery. I wrote it but it is not “mine” in the sense that it was a franchise and I was playing in someone else’s sandbox. When I say Compass Reach and the other Secantis novels are mine, I mean entirely of my creation, start to finish.) It took several years to complete and went through a number of drafts. I wasn’t finished tweaking it until just before it went to press.
The ideas in it…well, I used to tell people that it’s about economics. Good way to dull the senses and lose an audience, really. Economics is, as a study, one of the best sleep aides I ever found. But it is fascinating. We underappreciate economics, to our disadvantage. It is one of the principle elements of civilization. We’re presently going through a period in which that tradition of negligence is causing all manner of damage. But anyway, economics in the far future.
One of the questions much science fiction begs in its long history is “how do we pay for all this cool stuff?” I mean, consider a starship. We can look up how much an aircraft carrier costs to build and operate. To think that a starship would be about the same is to shortchange the problem. And operating costs? And all the ancillary support infrastructure, spread across the vast reaches of interstellar space?
For the most part, this has been ignored. It’s a tricky and, frankly, unaddressable problem. There is so much we just don’t know. But acknowledging that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a factor in our fictive imaginings. One of the cool things about science fiction is the challenge of making the future plausible.
I could recommend a few books here to give something of a primer. I’ll list some at the end.
Watching Star Trek growing up, it does become a nagging question. It was even addressed, albeit lightly, in a couple of episodes. I think because in general people feel that money is “real”—that a dollar is actually some thing as opposed to just an idea—it becomes a handy device in fiction to posit something that seems to have value. Credits, alien currency, “gold pressed latinum” all serve as symbolic stand-ins for the cash in your wallet. But given the variations in exchange rate just between countries, how could anything represent consistent value across stars?
Once you realize that “money” is a convenient accounting device (as opposed to intrinsically valuable), depicting an economy that might serve in an interstellar context becomes easier. When you really think about the statement on our currency, that it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States, it becomes possible to imagine any number of economic systems that will serve.
Not, I hasten to add, that will “work.” But the plausibility factor can be maintained.
But given that, you immediately realize that humans are intrinsically hierarchical and our economic systems reflect that, so…there will be those one can describe as “rich” and necessarily those who are “poor.”
Hence, my Freeriders. The disenfranchised. Those whose identity has been stripped from them, denying them access to the credit systems the vast majority of people take for granted. The creation of Fargo and Lis and network of Freeriders across what I came to call the Pan Humana flowed logically. Their very existence stood in for a great deal of the “economics” I wanted to deal with.
I divided my hierarchy into three broad categories. The Vested, the Invested, and the Disinvested. The Vested were those at the top who “owned” their wealth. The Invested were the vast majority of people who merely used the wealth that permeated civilization. Credit, basically, but we live that way now, using the symbol of money to pretend we actually have wealth rather than simply make use of it. The Disinvested would then be those barred from access.
There are other players, which brings me to the concerns of Compass Reach. One of the chief problems creating the cultural tensions in the novel is the sudden realization that the Pan Humana’s system must find some way to interface with all the nonhuman systems humanity now abutts. Different systems, some of which have no logical equivalents to ours. The Vested descend into panic. How, they ask, can we maintain control in such a volatile and unpredictable situation? Their solution, of course, is to seal the borders and isolate.
Which is politically dubious.
And there was my plot. Because such situations are never truly resolvable and solutions never work as intended. Using Fargo and Lis, members of the Disinvested, as my observers allowed me to examine all this in the course of an adventure drawing on all the factions involved.
How much of the economics ended up in the book? Well, it’s there is you care to think about it, but like any research into the how-to of things, you do not allow it to slow the action or upstage the interactions between characters. Those many drafts I mentioned were largely about excising infodumps and remanding the dry details to dark corners. One of the hard things about science fiction is to always keep in mind that your characters must be inextricably part of their world, not ours. They would not ordinarily find such things unique enough to comment on in the course of a day. It would just be life. Honing the parts where descriptions and interpretations pop up so that they feel organic is work.
So I think I did roughly 13 or 14 drafts of the novel before it was ready.
I remember doing one major rewrite before heading off to Clarion in 1988. When I came back, head buzzing with all that I had absorbed, I looked at it and thought “oh no, this will not do.” A few more drafts followed.
Over the course of the next two novels—Metal of Night and Peace & Memory—a bit more economics crept in, especially in the latter book. But by then it had become clear how it was essential to the plot as well as the background.
Of such sordid details art is made. I hope I haven’t put anyone off from picking the book up. Believe me, I wrote an adventure.
So, as promised, a few titles concerning economics you might find worth your time.
Capital by Thomas Pickety (and perhaps more trenchantly his Capitol and Ideology)
Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber
The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter
The Economists’ Hour by Binyamin Appelbaum
All of these are quite readable as history as well. If you find yourself further intrigued, they all hav excellent reference sections.