Here is another excellent contribution from Professor Matt Giddings!
So, let’s talk about luxury space communism!
OR
“How would I find meaning in life if I didn’t have to work – HEY LOOK AT THAT ALIEN!”
One of the fundamental aspects of our modern world is that is that you must work in order to get the necessities of life. It’s just the way things are – you need a job. Or two.
But what if you didn’t? What if we had all the resources we needed at our fingertips? There’d be no money (what would you need it for?). You wouldn’t need a bank account, no taxes, you might have a job, but maybe only if it was a vitally important one that needed doing, and you could probably do whatever you wanted to do with your life, right?
DON’T THREATEN ME WITH A GOOD TIME!
This concept is called ‘scarcity’ by economists. Well, technically, we’re talking about ‘post-scarcity.’ Scarcity is what we have now – there’s not enough resources to go around, so those resources have a lot of value (because people who need them buy them so that they have them and people who can’t afford them have to go without). But, what if technology created an environment that made all of that obsolete? What would life be like? That’s ‘post-scarcity’ – a world in which everyone’s basic needs can be met automatically, and people live in a society in which material wealth is so commonplace that thinking about it makes no sense.
Well, good news! Science fiction authors have been thinking about this for a while, and I’d like to share a couple of them and their ideas with you here in this blog post!
Now, this isn’t necessarily new – Star Trek was the first major piece of media to play around with this idea. It’s not a main theme in a lot of the shows, since most of the characters are hard at work as scientists and crewmembers on Federation vessels, but it occasionally pops up.
But what about written sci fi? Well, two of my favorite authors have written extensive sci-fi series that deal with just this issue!
Iain M Banks and The Culture
The late Scottish author Iain M Banks (sometimes Ian in his other works) got his start with literary fiction – weird literary fiction (go check out The Wasp Factory.) But, when he wasn’t writing literary fiction, he wrote a series of books set in a future called “The Culture.” It’s the name of the setting, and it’s the name of the series. The whole list of culture works is as follows:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
The State of the Art (1991)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)
Surface Detail (2010)
The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)
The Culture, as described by Banks is a utopia – people basically live forever, poverty and want are pretty much unknown, and Minds (AIs) run everything as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
So, what do you do in the Culture? Whatever you want! Art, music, partying, you do whatever. But, some people…they want meaning in life, the kind of meaning that people in our society might get from running a business or government service. What do they do? Well, in the Culture, the government (such as it is) has an organization called “Special Circumstances” that deals with, well, special circumstances. It ends up being the place where people who can’t just live a life of idleness (or don’t want to) end up. Sometimes, as in The Player of Games, they recruit someone who has a very particular skill to help them.
What Banks seems to be getting at here is that space communism run by AIs would be pretty good. Your average person in the Culture lives one heck of a good life. But, sometimes that’s not enough. And, as you read further in the series, Banks describes other civilizations who reach the point of the Culture and step back, away from the endless utopia, or having reached it, step forward into a transcendent post-physical existence (the series calls this Subliming). It’s one of those ideas that seems great but does have some downsides. Banks is clearly pretty optimistic about society in such a culture, but he does understand that people do derive meaning in life from the things they do – people want to do more than just exist.
Banks has a lot else to talk about – Consider Phlebas is a rollicking adventure beyond the edges of The Culture, and Excession, though famously hard to read, mainly involves a group of AIs (The Interesting Times Gang) as they try to solve a problem maybe even they aren’t up to the task of handling. The descriptions of Mind to Mind communication in this novel have long made it one of the Internet’s favorites.
Neal Asher and The Polity
Another author who has dealt with the same themes in his own way is the British author Neal Asher. The majority of his writing in this regard is part of a series called “The Polity” – like The Culture, the name of the series and the setting. Currently, the series clocks in at 26 novels or short story collections, ranging from stand alone’s to trilogies – but here, I’ll focus on the most accessible introduction to the series, the first published book in it, called Gridlinked (2001). Asher’s setting is similar – space, spaceships, AIs, aliens, and so forth. But he’s a lot more sanguine about it all – the AIs in this setting took over from the humans after a brief war (The Quiet War) and now they run everything better, faster and more efficiently. But, as one character or another occasionally wonders throughout the series, if the AIs run everything, are the humans in the series basically pets? You take care of your pets, and you love your pets, but your pets aren’t people. They’re pets.
And that’s one of the dilemmas that Asher brings out that doesn’t seem to bother Banks – in a world like that, you swap control for comfort, and for most people that’s fine, but for the ones that aren’t ok with it, what do they do? In The Culture, you join Special Circumstances and go on adventures. In the Polity, you become a separatist and try and blow-up stuff. In Gridlinked, the main character, Ian Cormac, is a police officer who hunts Separatists down. They are usually portrayed as foolish, quixotic individuals who don’t know a good thing when it drops immortality and a life of leisure in their laps. But there’s an undercurrent in Asher’s work that sympathizes with them – after all, they seem to have realized that life lived in AI provided comfort lacks meaning – even if it has everything else. I don’t want to spoil too much, but some giant crab aliens (The Prador) show up and put that idea on the backburner for a bit, but not forever.
And of course, what if the AIs weren’t all good? What if, like you do in our world, you get a pet owner who is abusive or neglectful? And of course, the AIs say they wouldn’t do that, but then again, they could be lying. I mean, we lie.
Asher’s work has a lot else going on- weird aliens, body horror, cyborgs, interplanetary wars, insane robots – but one of the though-lines is this ambivalence to the core feature of the setting – the seeming utopia provided by AIs.
So, is a world of seeming luxury a good or a bad thing? Well, a lot of the problems people have now – disease, homelessness, aging – probably wouldn’t exist. So that’s a net positive. But, per Banks, we’d need to think about what life really means and how to derive meaning from it as a society. That’s a fundamental human trait that wouldn’t change much, he thinks. And per Asher, maybe a society like that isn’t so good. Or maybe, it’s not one that we as humans can make for ourselves.
Either way, both of these authors have given me a lot to think about! I’d recommend their work to any science fiction fans! I’d love to hear your comments, and if you’re on the St. Augustine or Palatka campuses, come find me and chat! I like history, science fiction and fantasy!
Dr. Brittnee Fisher
