I meant to ask this in the Eyes of Amber entry

[james_davis_nicoll]

Why is so much SF concerned with resource extraction?

Comments

[catbear.livejournal.com]

That's the essence of all living things.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Because nothing is more exciting than mining.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

So that sequels may be about inventory management.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I would kill for a good story about inventory management. In fact, the bits I liked most about Sandra McDonald's debut novel was the quartermaster corps stuff.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Way back in 2002, I met Sandra at a workshop. She showed us her first chapter (different than what was ultimately published) and I remarked back then, "Wow, this is one inventory-obsessed society you have here!"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The history of inventory is the history of civilization!

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Nothing can be more gripping than the fundamental conflict between FIFO and LIFO!

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Did you have to bring porn into the discussion?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

The history of inventory is the history of civilization!

Was it Linear A that was eventually interpreted thanks to what turned out to be laundry lists?

-- Steve's wondering if there might be a story in aliens finally cracking English thanks to all the bills of lading they unearth. (Probably not as good a one as "Omnilingual", though.)

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Linear B, IIRC, and it was merchant inventories.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I think every MMORPG has had a significant inventory management mini-game built and in ever case, not as an advertised feature.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

errr.... should read "mini-game built in".

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

David's Sling has an amazing production scene which details how all the automated maufacturing and supply chain stuff switches on a dime to produce the save-the-day widget.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a novel from the 1980s or 1970s which begins with a detailed description of all the unlikely events leading up to a catastrophic accident. Unfortunately the rest of the book was not as interesting. I wonder what the book was?

All I recall is that FTL only worked in a giant loop, so you could go A>B but not B>A. I think.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Then conquest and eventually you build a spaceship and fly to Alpha Centauri?

As a guess...

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

Money is one of the traditional drivers of plot. And resource extraction as a source of wealth creation is more interesting than selling groceries.

Re: As a guess...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But the fraction of the economy that resource extraction represents is generally a small one, except in special cases. Also, many resource extraction-focused economies are, how to put this nicely? Oppressive shitholes (and again, exceptions do exist).

Re: As a guess...

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

And traditional SF resource-extraction settings aren't?

Re: As a guess...

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

Oppressive shit-holes can be very good for drama.

Re: As a guess...

[yorksranter.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Orbital call centres. Regimented, oppressive, surveillant, exploitative. Perhaps staffed by those old duffers some of the glibertarian space cadets want to send up there for medical reasons, but who can't pay the bills. Another 30 years of life expectancy - so get back to work! After all, up here we don't need no stinkin' laws.

It's a pity satellite bandwidth is only really cheap if you're broadcasting on the downlink, in which case it's the cheapest way of moving lots of bits. Sun-synchronous, though, so they can work three shifts.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

It's consistent with historical reasons for exploration, and provides a reason for conflict (or at least interaction with others). "NO KILL I"

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

'Cause resource intrusion is just so painful?

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Too much Warcraft.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

or EVE, in which mining asteroids is one of the primary means for money.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

EVE is the MMO with corporations, right?

[rbos.livejournal.com]

yep. It's fantastically complex to play.

For instance, my corporation is an industrial corporation working out of Empire space; last week we landed a contract from a PVP corporation working out of null-security space (waaaay out on the edge of the star cluster) to manufacture some 20 million rounds of ammunition. It's taken a few weekends of intensive mining in 5-man teams to extract enough ore to fill the contract.

Our client is going to make the pickup in a few days; a convoy has to be arranged with *significant* muscle to survive the trip from out nullsec, through lowsec, to Empire space.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

Pardon; last month we landed the contract.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Opportunities for large-scale heavy industry and cool technology, a ready-made excuse for war or social conflict, and the influence of the "minerals! helium-3!" justifications for space colonisation.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Even if we place refineries in Uranus' atmosphere to extract 3He, is there any reason to think they won't be automated?

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

So much? How much of SF is about mining?

In any case, I have two related guesses:

1) The average author has no conception the abundance of elements in the universe or their economic value, as you've said about Universal Water Scarcity™.

2) Sketching out a collection of worlds which are inhabited solely because there are valuble rocks there is more plausiable than sketching out a collection of worlds which are inhabited because they are conveniently Earth-like (or worse, Edenic).

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Just because it's abundant doesn't mean it's not work to extract it.

[bricklovinfreak.livejournal.com]

...which is kind of the point. If it's abundant, why are we going there to do that work, when we could be doing it here, and saving ourselves the shipping costs?

One answer I haven't seen a lot of is that your friendly local labor may be organized and have legitimate health concerns that tank-grown slave workers will cheerfully ignore.

If the margins are such that only really fantastically awful worker abuse makes this hypothetical resource extraction profitable (unlikely), then maybe, but it's going to look a lot more like the Belgian Congo than Teh Westz0rz(tm).

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Abundant doesn't mean easily extractable. Take iron and aluminum for just two examples.

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed it was due to the eternal mutant strains of goldbugism and libertoonianism that have plagued SF for a few generations -- only Real Stuff is actually valuable (not that yucky paper money), and only Real Men are worth reading about.

I may be focusing too much on "those plucky miners in the belt" stories, though.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

Frontier economies? Resource competition as plot driver? Humans responding more viscerally to tales of scarcity than tales of abundance?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was thinking "because there are gold prospectors in Westerns". But I guess logically there ought to be some equivalent of cowboys who appear more often, and I'm not sure what the equivalent of cows would be (not that the cowboys in popular cowboy stories particularly need cows).

[benveniste.livejournal.com]

Because economics is boring.

At the basis of all economics and politics is the concept of scarcity. Scarcity refers to the tension between our limited resources and our unlimited wants and needs.

It's possible to build a fine short story around the often brutal decisions required to rationally allocate limited resources. There have even been a few fine novels. But those have mainly focused around the politicians rather than the actual economics and politics.

But it's far easier to use the shortage, present or future, real or perceived as the MacGuffin to drive the plot than to keep people's interest in what would effectively be a 300-page writeup of budget hearings.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is necessarily the case(that economics is boring.) The latest Merchant Princes book is out and it is near the top of my 'to read' list precisely because it is anything but boring.

My take on the resource extraction meme is that it is generally assumed that Making Stuff can be done nearly anywhere. Not really a lot of drama if our intrepid explorers are scouting out a new location for an Addidas factory, or if they're looking to expand McDonalds into the Sirius Sector. Unobtanium, otoh, is almost by definition Not Found Here. Go back a little further in SF history when expectations were a little more naive and you have all sorts of stories about the questing traders of Solar Spice and Liquors or their equivalent. That sort of stuff we now more or less collectively realize is Not Found Anywhere.

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

Resource extraction often occurs in areas far from large centers of population, where the intensity of law enforcement is correspondingly low. This allows for appealing liberties and brutal oppression that in more built-up areas would end thirty minutes later when the police showed up in force.

Remember, when the Imperial Marines arrive, the Party Is Over.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Because if people aren't hungry somehow, there's a lot less movement in any direction.

[summers-place.livejournal.com]

James,

Apropos of absolutely nothing (and certainly not this particular entry of yours), but you really ought to check out this entry on brown_betty's journal. Just because.

Geting there is less than half the fun

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Because focusing on extraction lets you handwave as solved the challenges of getting to the resource and bringing it home? As several of us noted in an earlier thread on Frank Herbert's melange etc, if you've mastered the level of raw energy involved in interstellar travel (and chemistry, bioengineering etc. have progressed concomitantly) it's hard to imagine a material resource that couldn't be synthesized atom-by-atom more cheaply.