Still cannot xpost to Dreamwidth

[james_davis_nicoll]

I think every writer has a genre or subgenre that they admire, but find baffling. Like a snake charmer watching a trapeze artist. Yeah, yeah, the snakes are poisonous, but you've been handling them for years. But that flip? Those heights? That drop? That's scary.

Well, for me, one of those genres is post-scarcity SF. To my mind it's one of the most difficult to pull off. Scarcity has been a fact of the human condition for more or less ever, and once you remove it you have to figure out what it means to be human aside from that endless parade of want. Before you start chapter one. On top of that, it's damnably hard to fashion a sympathetic protagonist out of someone who has never struggled in the way we struggle in our own lives, to present someone who does not come off as a monster of privilege. My hat is off to those who can manage it, to me it seems a miraculous mid-air twist without a net.

Comments

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Rent is going to be a challenging question. We can see on the horizon ways to make most durable goods very cheap - we don't expect to be short of shirts or pens or even high-speed internet connections. Food subsidies are already available in most first-world countries. But a place to live is still expensive, and there's little or no motivation for the apartment building owner to make it cheaper.

Housing is also tricky because it is more expensive in densely populated areas where providing the other services is cheaper per capita.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was an idea for a while (Seventies and Eighties, the golden age of sprawl) that better telecommunications and transport would eliminate the need to concentrate people, and maybe there wouldn't be such competition for valuable real estate. Everyone would just be spread out over the countryside. An environmental disaster, of course, but it would seem nice and green.

But the trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction right now. Exurban and suburban real estate crashed and employers are moving back into the center cities. You can really feel it around Boston/Cambridge.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Partly because when you have concentrated peopleness? a) you don't have to travel as far to go to the gatherings of people you DO want to physically go to - opera, chorus rehearsal, church, fine dining, local RPG group, gym, etc. - and b) there's rather more chance that things that you do want to participate in physically are near you and easier to actually _find_. The Solarian ideal of isolation and viewscreens misses some things.

--Dave

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

What dgdatvic said, plus all the accumulated infrastructure. We don't need a billion individual self-sufficient houses; we've already got whole cities set up with electricity, plumbing, and so on. And sooner or later some gadget is going to go wonky and you have to call the repair guy; home service is easier when that expert is physically nearby.

Telecommuting happens today - one of my friends is in the process of teaching his employers he can work perfectly well from Nevada, and another used to work in Oregon for an engineering company in Japan - but most people don't want to be alone in the middle of nowhere.

As an example, right this moment I'm on the internet and have on tap more science fiction fan activity than most fans could imagine before 1990. But I still go to cons because I want to actually see people, talk to them, and hang out in person. I can dress in funny clothes and stay up all night at home, but it's not the same.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

But there's the larger question of why the sprawl happened in the first place, and why it's undoing itself now.

Presumably some combination of cheap gasoline, white flight/rich flight during the late 20th century urban crisis, and the general postwar white-picket-fence dream fueled the original expansion.

And then during the 2000s there was a real-estate bubble while real wages were flat, and people and companies were driven out into the hinterlands by sheer price pressure, only to get caught holding the bag when the market collapsed.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Good point. Aside from the folks who just like living in the country, we have either getting away from [fill in the blank - crime, crowding, smell, the wrong neighbors] or going to [cheap land, an apartment bigger than a closet - what other draws to small towns?]. There are more obvious attractors bringing people towards the cities.

The scale of all of this will be roughly proportional to speed and ease of movement, obviously. Give us teleportation booths and it's a new ball game.

[benrosenbaum.livejournal.com]

Just as a clarification: Cory I weren't arguing that our society today WAS a post-scarcity society. Indeed: hollow, bitter laughter. Rather, the point was that if you *described* the details of an average American existence today to a 14th century peasant, they would THINK -- wrongly -- that it was a post scarcity society, because the details would be so amazing. Like: "and if you lose your job you are forced to live in a small apartment with only cold water, heating that works intermittently, and you have to stand in line for hours to fill out paperwork in order to be able to buy a meager amount of groceries -- pasta, cans of tomato sauce, pop-tarts -- which you heat at home on the range because the oven is broken, not answering your cell phone in case it's your ex-wife demanding alimony, watching the most stupid reality shows on a flickering black-and-white TV and drinking crap beer in order to dull the pain caused by being treated by society as a pariah; you can't afford to fly by plane but once a year you scrounge enough money by recycling old cans to afford a Greyhound bus to see your sister..." ; "wait, WHAT? I can READ? Writing on papers causes people to give me food for NOTHING? Food comes out of magic metal boxes that last forever? I have a device in my home that can heat it at a touch of a button? I have another device that can let me speak as if by magic to people all over the WORLD? And another that shows me bards performing all day and night? People pay me money for things thrown away, which lets me travel many leagues in a day in a magic carriage? Even if I don't farm a year's quota for the lord of the manor, no one will beat or imprison me?"

The point is not that we live in a post-scarcity society. We live in a world of enormous inequity and misery. We do however actually live in a world where if we DID share all the things we produce fairly, everyone would have enough to eat; and that in itself would be a staggeringly utopian vision for a 14th century peasant.

The point was precisely that instant matter fabricators or whatever other hand-wavy technological macguffin you want to introduce don't produce "post-scarcity". We create scarcity ourselves, by what we do to each other and how our desires and imaginations outstrip our resources... and since the almost unimaginable increase in technological sophistication and production capacity of the last millenium hasn't changed that, there's no reason to think that future technological advances will either. Indeed, Cory and I later wrote a far-future story in which the characters can convert entire planets to pure computronium, live forever, create arbitrary virtual environments, etc., and (the point is) there's STILL scarcity, and it's in some sense even worse (being able to make a quadrillion instant copies of yourself when there's only room to run a trillion in the available process space means brutal competition for resources).

"That door does not lead out" is the point we were making.