Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2016–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Norstrilia I absultely second. Actually, all of Cordwainer Smith is worth a read, but stories set in The Instrumentality of Mankind certainly are.
The culture novels by Iain M. Banks are also amazing, ship names in particular, but also themes.
And then there is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or is this too recent) another fine example of exploring the absurdity of mankind.
I often find that older works deal more with ideas and philosophy than the modern works, which tend to be more formulaic with some notable exceptions, like K. J. Parker and Adrian Tchaikovsky - there are less niche works - or so I feel.
- I really like Cordwainer Smith. Those books are quite strange though. I wouldn't even call them ahead of their time, I would call them sui generis. Completely idiosyncratic. One brilliant weirdo's brain. I keep spare copies of The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Best of Cordwainer Smith around, and a couple months ago somebody asked me about them. I hesitated before lending them to him, because it's impossible to guess whether a given person will like them or not.
- Yes indeed. I can't find this information online but I remember an anecdote according to which Cordwainer Smith had explained the entire timeline of the Instrumentality of Mankind in terms of current goings-on on the international stage. Of (some of) which he had a certain privileged vantage point, of course.
I mainly read his works translated in my native Greek at a time when he was not that well-known among English-speaking SF readers anymore. I consider that lucky, for me, and sad, for everyone else. I think of him as one of the greats, one of the authors of SF whose imagination was not bound by cliché and trope, perhaps thanks to his having a day job, unlike most SF authors. I suspect he never really reached his full potential either, again because that was not his day job. His life experience certainly shaped his writing in any case.
- Your viewpoint was not uncommon in older SF, like the Eternals in Zardoz, the Spacers of Asimov, or under the Instrumentality of Mankind of Cordwainer Smith.
You might start by considering how Banks, Niven, Stross, and others have managed to write novels about a post-scarcity future.
I have two observations. First, few novels are written about "typically Joe"s doing typical things in typical situations. The Culture novels have minor characters whose lives concern social standing, who is sleeping with whom, and parties. The main characters are usually special, sometime literally as members of 'Special Circumstances'.
Second, post-scarcity doesn't mean everything will be plentiful. Each human will not be able to be Dictator of the Universe, for example. Plenty of things will be rare for the foreseeable future, like travel to Mars. Plus, humans have a way of valuing "realness". Some people are willing to pay much more for a piece of clothing that famous person X owned than an otherwise identical piece of clothing.
As I mentioned with Banks, social standing is not easily purchased - post-scarcity doesn't mean you have 10,000 admirers, or get invited to all the good parties, or even that people recognize you and wave hello when you walk down the street. Emotional conflicts are still conflicts.
There will still be strong conflicts about aesthetics, law, religion, art, sports, and science, and more. In a post-scarcity world, is abortion legal or illegal? What about suicide, murder, or rape? Taking a crap on the street corners? SWAT-ting?
There will still be religious schisms. There will be fierce rap battles and poetry slams. There will be travel and extreme adventures. Or will no one care about Manchester United's game against Real Madrid, and no one will play the sports? If so, will everyone watch re-runs or will all new content be synthetically generated?
Science is driven in part by prestige. You need only look at the recent CRISPR stories to learn that. Being the first to do X, or think of Y, will always be scarce.
You need only to look at rich people to see that plenty of people who have the money and don't need to work, still work. This includes the children of the rich, derisively termed "trust fund babies", who have no need to work but still do so.
If people are happy and the economics are self-sustaining, then I see no problem with 20% of the population spending their lives on social welfare. Nor does being on social welfare mean everyone is in bed watching TV, or gossiping on the internet. There may also be a flowering of artistic expression, or a boom in amateur athletics, or a repopulation of the rural areas, or any number of other enjoyable, socially acceptable, but non-remunerative and non-GDP-influencing practices.
If you had a guaranteed yearly income of 100000 EUR, would you veg in front of the TV all day? I wouldn't.
