Anarcho-Science Fiction

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 2:08 am -0500 11/24/96, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
>[ I freely admit this is noise ]

Yeah. What he said.

>C'mon, both of you... 'First Contact' falls _way_ short of Doc Smithean
>proportions.  Although Data's charade did kinda remind me of the fourth
>Skylark book, in terms of plot-device rescue of a failing direction.
>(IMHO, Doc Smith is the master of the over-the-top school of sci-fi
>plotting)

Unfortunately, I've had trouble sticking my tounge in my cheek far enough
for people to see it lately. My apologies.

>> Even Babylon 5, AKA "Science Fiction He Wrote", has a bigger clue.
>
>B5 is my current favorite TV sci-fi, when I even turn the damned thing
>on.

Ditto. Again, I was trying so hard to be facile that I wasn't clear enough.
:-). For all the constraints of televised science fiction, I *really* like
JMS and B5. Especially compared to the pseudoscientific sugar-coated
totalitarian happy horseshit that passes for Star "Treck" these days. Much
less such scienceless silliness as the X-Files, or Lois and Clark.

However, at the risk of being forced into the trap of science fiction which
tells more about when it was written than the future, I find the
presentation in science fiction of faster-than-light travel, "alien" visits
or travel to "alien" cultures, time travel, prophecy, telepathy, (or any
other pseudomystical claptrap) to be extremely annoying. Almost as annoying
as "fantasy", which doesn't even belong near the science fiction bookrack
(how about the "romance novels" section? ;-)). Much less, a science fiction
bookstore. For instance, I think the concepts of faster-than-light travel
and anything beyond rudimentary interstellar radio reception of other
civilizations belongs in the era of the Lensman's "inertialess" drive. An
almost pretelegraphic, age-of-sail world view, developd when sea power was
still the dominant form of "projecting" force.

However, I do look forward to science fiction with cryptoanarchic
economies, and, interestingly enough, a solarcentric universe. People just
don't understand that we have a monsterous amount of undeveloped physical
resources in this solar system. I expect that when we actually look down
with any accuracy on the moon's poles, for instance, we'll find water
buried there ("where the sun don't shine" as a friend put it a few days
ago), just like it is on Murcury. The belt alone is big enough for us to
spread out into into it for the next, say, 7000 years. That's at the human
species' historic argicultural and industrial growth rates, the very same
"frighteningly asymtotic" growth rates that had the Club of Rome gibbering
hysterically in the early 70's. Before, of course, we came to our senses
and remembered that Malthus is still quite dead.

A central fact of human existance is that progress is always more
"geometric" than population growth. Every time we discover a way to extend
human life expectancy, the population grows until everyone goes through a
demographic transition and figures out they don't have to breed so much to
get the same rewards out of life anymore.

We're humans. We build stuff. We always find new resources, and we always
use them to our own advantage. So, what else is new? The extinction rates
that happen and the habitat modifications that humans *always* make when
they take over a new ecosystem have been with us ever since we had the
ability to kill at a distance and use fire. A very long time. Modern humans
grew up living on savannahs, so they cut or burn down forests so they can
hunt game or grow food. (Or suburban lawns, for that matter.) The
aborigines burned their habitat for 40,000 years. The American prairies
have evolved to burn, a process immesurably accellerated by the active
burning by 14,000 years of humans.

Fortunately, we're about to be confronted with our toughest resource
challenge yet. An "ecosystem", or more properly, a set of ecosystems, that
we're going to have to build ourselves, from scratch, outside the earth's
atmosphere, either free-floating in space, or on the surface of an
inhospitable planet. I used to think that that will mean that we would then
use the opportunity to "save" the rest of the species of this planet from
certain extinction. Earth as biopark. Now I see that kind of thinking is
pure romantic hogwash. We are not anti-nature. We *are* nature. We will do
what it takes for us to survive, like any other species. Earth will not be
"saved", it will continue to be modified to our own needs. Because, like
the metaphorical dog, we can. <ewww!!!> :-).  We may not make the same
disaster of it that we made of the Tigris-Euphrates valleys or the
Southeastern Mediterranean, but the "conserving" nature is an oxymoron. Or
maybe even a tautology.

Anyway, this also means taking other species with us when we move off the
earth, and changing those species, and ourselves, to meet the physical
conditions of survival in a new paradigm of extraterrestrial resources. By
way of my own politically correct "reclaiming" of language, I mean
"extraterrestrial resources" literally, of course. Not "extraterrestrial"
as in ETs or BEM's, or LGM's or UFO's, or any other such "alien" bunk. I'm
carving my own crop circles into the landscape of pseudoscience, if you
will, ;-), and using "extraterrestrial" to mean just what it says: off the
earth.


Speaking of other "species", I now also see the technology of cryptofinance
to be integral to this next stage of human expansion. Centralized
industrial control regimes aren't suited to extremely decentralized
automated decisions, like the kind that could happen in a micromarket. I
think that eventually, the idea of micromoney as processor food will create
the economic efficiencies necessary to coordinate the very large
macroengineering projects that extraterrestrial existance will require. If
you can use cryptofinancial controls to organize a swarm of
habitat-building bots, then your structure appears to an observer like it's
building itself. The bots work because they're paid to. They "evolve" into
more efficient builders of stuff because they make more money when they do,
and they compete with each other to do it. By the same token, the money is
not raised by some kind of central financial "action-figure" like McNamara,
or William Sword, or J. Pierpont Morgan, (and especially not a World Bank
McNamara-mandarin) but by a swarm of millions (or billions) of finance-bots
of various kinds living throughout a geodesic economy looking for places to
park their excess cash.

Central project planning considers such competition wasteful, and the
paradox is that the Misian calculation argument holds for a manager of a
macroenterprise the same way it did for any Soviet Commisar. Sooner or
later, you can't figure it all out in enough detail to execute it, and
that's where the project stops. I think we'll step through this dilemma
into a world where everything is, as Kevin Kelly says, "Out of Control",
where stuff happens not because someone planned it down to the last detail,
but because, like the above dog, it can <ewwww!>.


So, what does that mean in terms of science fiction? Well, certainly
Stevenson understands all this, only he's not as much of a space-opera
hound as I am.

Sterling's "Schismatrix" handles extraterrestrial society fairly well, but
it certainly is pre-cryptoanarchy. I didn't like "Islands in the Net" even
though it had the same theme of taking someone out of their mileu and
stopping time around them while the world passed them by. In IitN, the
heroine was being captured by guerillas, in Schmatrix, it was kidnapping
and putting people in suspended animation for a decade or two, just for
kicks.

Frankly, protocrypto or no, Vinge strikes me as more than a little silly at
times, with stasis fields, and physical constants varying with your
distance from the galactic core, and talking dogs and all that other stuff.

Cherryh writes almost perfect space opera, among other things, and I see
her as a perfect decendant of Smith and Heinlein. People I think I now lump
in with Forrester's classic "Hornblower" novels.

I really like Ian Banks, but even his ideas and certainly his politics (and
not his story telling, of course) now pales in comparison to the stuff you
get from imagining the consequences of a geodesic economy.

Gibson now seems positively industrial, and even the Difference Engine
makes perfect sense when seen in this light...


One of the reasons I don't like science fiction anymore is that, like a lot
of people here have said about themselves, and for the first time in my
life, I'm out in front of the science fiction writers on something which is
so fundemental that, frankly, their stuff now makes me laugh. This from
someone who not too long ago read science fiction by the yard. I suppose
this will eventually make me want to evangelize stuff like cryptoanarchy,
financial cryptography, and micromoney mitochondria to science fiction
authors.

Or, maybe, just by shooting our mouths off here and by being archived doing
so, all of us already have done our evangelizing.

On the other hand, some day this stuff will be old hat, and I can go back
to buying science fiction by the yard to learn about new stuff.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/