It must be September...

It must be September. The geese are flocking up in the cow pasture and beginning to work out their migration formations. The cranes and egrets have already left. The vegetables in the garden are ripe and ready for harvest, some of the more highly stressed trees are already beginning to turn colors and shed leaves, and the first of this semester’s new crop of “Dear Mr. Bethke” messages have already begun to show up in my email inbox. 

There is a certain charmingly naïve sameness to them. “Dear Mr. Bethke,” they all begin, “I am a [academic major] student at [insert school name here] and I am writing a paper on…”

Don’t tell me! Let me guess!

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Okay, “the time has come,” the Walrus said—or was it “Goo Goo G’joob?” I must confess now to not having paid nearly as much attention to walrus vocalizations over the years as I perhaps should have—

The time has come, to finish this damned book.

I’ve been puttering with this one for years. Never finishing it, because I’m not as interested in my own history as other people seem to be, but it’s time to admit that if I don’t finish it now, I probably never will. This book was always intended to be the definitive text of the original short story, as first published in Amazing in 1983; the complete text of the Baen-damaged novel that grew from the original short story and its cycle of sequels, some published and some not; and then a rather longish coda that explains how the story came to be in the first place, what went wrong with the novel, and then attempts to make some sense of what it’s meant to me personally to have spent the past forty years—forty! Holy Crap, where did the time go?—being known all over the world as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’.”

The problem with this book has always been that the coda keeps growing beyond control, much like that anise hyssop patch in the northeast corner of my backyard. 

Ergo, the time has come. Let’s put a stake in it. Let’s finish this thing. This is your big chance: if you’ve ever had a question you wanted to ask me about the c-word, ask it now. Ask me anything. No question is off-limits, although I can’t promise I’ll answer. Ask me a really good question that provokes an interesting response and I’ll give you a shout-out in the Acknowledgements section.

Oh yeah, and you probably want to know how to contact me. You can either post your questions in the comments here, tag me on either the Bruce.Bethke or StupefyingStories facebook pages, or by email to brb [at] rampantloonmedia [dot] com. I suppose you could also post them on the Stupefying Stories Twitter thingie, but I can’t guarantee I’ll see it there. I continue to have a loathe/hate relationship with Twitter. 

So, ready? Then let’s get this thing wrapped up.

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke

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Today's Free Story Idea: a entirely new dystopian scenario

Today’s Free Story Idea is, as they say, ripped from the headlines. The original article by Andreas Kluth appeared in Bloomberg Opinion a few days ago, but since then it’s been infiltrating out via syndication to all the other newspapers too cheap or lazy to hire their own staff and write their own content. I saw it in this morning’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, but since both of these sites are behind paywalls, if the above links don’t work for you, this search query should turn up a site where you can read it for free.

The thrust of it is in the headline: “We need cap-and-trade for individuals as well as companies.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

For the Greater Good and to save Mother Earth, our betters are proposing a global, individual, carbon tax and credit system. But not that overtly, of course.

Some selected highlights:

“In systems for individuals, by contrast, hassle is a deal breaker. Around 2008, the U.K. looked into person carbon allowances. [...] But the details would still have been fiddly, requiring new types of carbon “accounts” with plastic cards and such. People wouldn’t have accepted the system. The idea was discreetly dropped. [...]”

But not forgotten...

“For another thing, the pandemic and other trends have changed our relationship to technology. We’ve grown accustomed to using our smartphones as one tool to fight the virus, as ever more people in ever more places use apps to trace contacts or prove vaccinations. They’re also tracking their health, nutrition and exercise, shopping and ordering food, transacting and trading. Carbon allowances would be just one more app.

“If designed well, an individualized system could therefore reach consumers in a way that’s not only simple but even fun. [...] Managing our carbon budgets [...] would become socially cool.

[...]

“The bigger challenge will be social and political. In principle, personal allowances should help reduce inequality because poor people tend to emit less than the rich, so that folks with lower incomes can make money out of the jet set, in effect taxing the fat cats. Still, people in rural areas, who drive more, might need extra permits to keep the peace.

“Even then, not every country will be culturally ready. [...]”

Oh really, ya think?

Never mind that any such system would be run with the same corruption-free integrity and efficiency we’ve come to expect from any large governmental or international program. Let that last paragraph I quoted percolate in your writer’s brain for a minute. Then imagine a world…

• where some people exist solely to be “harvested” for their carbon tax credits

• where signing over your carbon tax credits is a condition of employment

• where extra carbon credits are an important executive perk

• where signing over your carbon tax credits is a prerequisite for getting public housing (and where all housing is de facto public housing; that’s about ten years out, but a topic for another column) 

• where even the choices you make when you buy food at the grocery store count against your carbon budget

In other words, imagine a world of utter, absolute, and remorselessly enforced serfdom, where most people are dependent on the corporate/government structure for the fundamental necessities of life—food, water, shelter, and warmth—but they embrace that serfdom, because they’re being constantly reminded that it’s for the Greater Good! And besides, it’s fun!

Now as a fiction writer, here’s your challenge: either defend that system, or find a way to throw some sand and junk in the gears.

__________

I’m filing this one under “Books I’ll Never Finish” because in a way, it is. Back in the 1990s I began researching and writing what was to be my big, serious, non-fiction futurism thesis. I called the project TechnoFeudalism, because that was the gist of it: that this coming wave of awesome computing power and communication technology was only briefly going to appear to be liberating. In the long run the resulting social changes would lead to an effectively feudal society, run by oligarchs for the benefit of oligarchs, who felt even less sense of obligation to or responsibility for their serfs than the average Medieval lord felt to his.

I’ll never finish this book now for one very simple reason. It ain’t futurism anymore. 

—Bruce Bethke

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Karl and Abe's Excellent Adventure

 

One of the problems with being an old science fiction writer is that the world is just overflowing with ideas for great SF stories that I will never have the time to write. Rather than let these ideas accumulate in notebooks my heirs will someday throw in the trash, I’ve decided to start tossing ideas out there for public consumption, in hopes that someone might be able to use one or two of them.

For example, today’s free story idea is this: did you know that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx were contemporaries, and that Lincoln was familiar with Marx’s ideas and expressed some sympathy and admiration for them?

First, a bit of background reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/27/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln/  

There’s a rabbit hole we could go down at this point. Apparently this article in the Washington Post provoked a lot of controversy, which seems to boil down to people screaming “Oh no he wasn’t!” and “Oh yes he was!” past each other. I don’t care about that now. What I’m interested in is the classic science fiction writer’s game of What if…?

What if Abraham Lincoln was strongly influenced by Karl Marx and all those other German Socialists, my great-great-grandfather included, who came to America after failing to overthrow the Kaiser in 1848? What if he had survived the war, and after 1865 had set about transforming the reunited United States into the sort of socialist workers’ paradise of which generations of non-working-class European intellectuals had dreamed? Where’s the science fiction story in this idea?

Well, obviously then, John Wilkes Booth was a time traveler, sent back from some dystopian future timeline to prevent that future from ever happening…

There’s your idea. Pete Wood, I expect something silly from you. Marcas McClellan, if you can’t get a novella out of this, you’re not trying. Roxana Arama, provided you don’t get bogged down in the historical research, I think you could get an award-winning novel out of this one. The rest of you: the idea is out there. Now run with it!

Have fun,
~brb

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OP-ED: “A Generation Ship The Size of a Small Planet,” by Bruce Bethke

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Nota Bene: You can blame Guy Stewart for this. A few days ago he sent me off on a quest into the RLP archives to find some things relating to his short story, “Oath,” and along the way I found this one again. I had a vague recollection of having written it, and had always meant to revisit the core idea for a new feature to be called either Tropisms or Books I’ll Never Finish, but after re-reading it now—and especially after seeing the conclusions I reached then—I present it to you now much as it first appeared in 2008, save for some typographical corrections and added illustrations. All attendant ironies remain intact.

~brb

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The Multi-Generational Con (Part I)

In the course of a discussion of Social Security, a reader named Athor Pel asked a few of my favorite questions.

I’ve been pondering some questions lately.

Why are we willing to pay taxes?

1) that we didn’t vote into existence

2) to a government that we didn’t have any say in creating originally

It was all in place before we were born.

Why should we play the game? 

These are some of my favorite questions, and not because I’m advocating a tax revolt—although I do believe that if we did not have automatic income tax withholding, and if all gainfully employed Americans therefore had to write a check to the government every three months just as we gainfully self-employed people do, then we would have one very angry tax revolt in very hot progress in very short order—

No, these questions fascinate me because of one of the hoary old mainstays of hard science fiction: the generation ship.

The idea, if you’re not familiar with it, goes like this. Since we know that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is not just the law, it’s the absolute limit, and we know that hyperdrive, warp drive, jump drive, and all the other variously named ways of getting beyond c are merely convenient fictional gimmicks with no basis in reality, the other obvious way for humans to cross vast interstellar distances is by building ships so big they’re self-contained ecologies, and then launching them out with the assumption that the crew will breed, and it will be their many-generations-removed descendants who will actually arrive at wherever it is the ship is going.

Heinlein got a lot of mileage out of this idea. I grew up on his Starship Magellan juveniles and loved ‘em. The problem came when I, as an adult writer, started looking at the idea afresh with the intention of using it in a novel, and I started running into the same sorts of questions that Athor Pel posed.

What exactly is a generation ship? Pared down to its nub, it’s a closed, utopian society, on a mission to some goal that was defined long before the current occupants were born. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that in all my readings of history, I have been unable to find a single example of a closed, utopian society that lasted more than five generations—and that’s using a very lax definition of “utopian.” The Soviet Union, for example, was supposed to be a utopian society, and yet even the Soviet Union, with all its formidable power, did not last five generations.

Five generations seems to be the outside limit. Three generations is when things start to fall apart. The first-generation founders of the utopia usually manage okay, if they’re not complete blithering idiots (see “The Great Hippie Commune Disaster,” 1968), and the founders can usually do a decent job of indoctrinating most of their children and controlling the few nonconformists. But by the time the grandchildren of the founders come along, a lot more people are asking Athor’s questions, and by the time the great-grandchildren reach adulthood, the pressure to either radically change the terms of the mission or else to just tear the whole damned thing down and start over become nearly irresistible.

This does not bode well for the prospects of a successful generation ship on its way to Proximi Centauri.

Which leads to a different line of thought: if you have a ship so large it’s a self-contained ecology, why bother leaving Sol system at all? It’s not as if there’s a shortage of room here. Why not just park the thing, say, three months ahead or behind of Earth’s position in solar orbit, and con the poor buggers on-board into thinking they’re on a centuries-long multi-generational voyage to Farfnargle IV? Or, if you want to get really tricky, just shoot it into a long orbit out to the Kuiper Belt and back, so that the “colonists” think they’re arriving on Epison Whachamacallit when all they’re really doing is finally returning to Earth?

So that’s the root idea. Now where’s the story in this?

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