Your WIP Notebook

Writing projects generate notes. A sci-fi or fantasy project may generate pages and pages of world building or backstory notes. A small town mystery, just lists of character names and names of significant places. I used to be unorganized with my notes, and lost some that I wanted later. So now I have 3 ring binders dedicated to a project or group of them, with alphabetical dividers to make things findable.

I used to print out these things— I wrote them down in the Scrivener project in files under ‘research.’ But because of current computer/printer woes, I now write things by hand.You may wonder why I want hard copies at all. It’s because when I am actively writing a scene, I may need info that isn’t in that particular Scrivener file. I may need to consult my master list of words in the Konju alien language to give a Konju person or place a name. It’s easier to find in an organized notebook than by searching through multiple Scrivener files. If you might use the same setting for multiple projects, don’t file it all under the names of individual projects. I’d never find my Konju stuff if I had to remember the original name of the project for which I created the Konju!

Character lists might be under the project name, or be under ‘character list’ with the project name or number as a subcategory. The reason for your notebook is to make your writing work easier. You don’t want to have to skim through one hundred or one thousand pages to recover the name of a person or place you mentioned in passing. With a good notebook, you can have all that stuff to hand. Some writers plan everything out in advance, in detailed outlines. Others don’t. All kinds of writers should take notes as they go, for filing later. You may invent a minor character or an event or place that wasn’t in your outline. Make it easy on yourself- jot down notes, and file them.

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World-Building: Enforcing Laws

In the process of world-building for fantasy/sci-fi writing, we not only need to make up laws for our worlds, we  need to think about how the laws are enforced. Without any enforcing of laws, chaos arises. Why shouldn’t someone steal all your stuff if there were no consequences? Why shouldn’t they stab you to death to get a chance at your wife/husband? Or do it just for the hell of it?

Most people don’t look forward to going to jail for long sentences, being hanged or beheaded, being put in the stocks, or whatever other punishments your world has. Many early societies didn’t have actual police forces to catch the criminals— families often had to catch their kin’s murder themselves. Among the ancient Norse, when some one killed your brother, you were free to kill any member of the murderer’s family in vengeance. 

More civilized societies as in most sci-fi worlds have a system more similar to ours. Criminals need to be caught. Perhaps technology will give better ways to find the criminals— we see that already in places with CC-TV cameras everywhere, and the use of DNA identification. 

In our world some charming people have decided ‘defund the police’ is a cool slogan, but they get dismayed by a resulting crime wave that affects them. Being a person tasked with law enforcement will always be a tough job. You have to gain control of possible criminals who are high on drugs, or drunk, and who may be belligerent and think there is nothing wrong with what they have done— even if it’s murder. And if a law enforcer makes a mistake— catching an innocent person, who dies in police custody— they can get called murderers, even if they had no way of preventing the death.

Some people think that looting and shoplifting from a business is OK because the business owner is insured and rich enough to afford insurance rate hikes. But people who own a business, large or small, aren’t in business just for the fun of it. The business needs to make enough money to cover the costs, both of the wholesale cost of anything sold and the cost of paying employees’ wages. As a bonus, the business owner usually expects a little money for his labor— if he’s not getting it, he might as well go home and do things he likes.

High shoplifting rates, or an incident of mass looting, makes businesses go away. That’s why so many urban ‘bad neighborhoods’ don’t have any of the chain discount stores in the area. They have individual stores with higher prices, because of the shoplifting rates. 

My father, who worked as manager in a discount store most of his working life, dealt with shoplifters all the time. He liked to say they had never caught anyone stealing a loaf of bread. I think what he meant was that people didn’t steal basic food items, but things they didn’t need to survive.

Out-of-touch people think looting is OK because it means people— including non-employed Leftist professional protesters— get fed. Real-world poor people tend to get food it more legit ways. If there are no wages to buy basic foods, they panhandle, or apply for charity/Food Stamps, or go to a food bank or soup kitchen. I’ve never panhandled, but I’ve done some of the other things— food banks are frustrating when  you have to be on a low-carb eating plan and most of what they have is Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles. 

Some people think training the young people with the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule would help reduce law-breaking. It might— a lot of crimes that are common now were less common when most kids were taught these things in home, religious education and school. But this training gets overcome when there are loads of people promoting ‘situational ethics’ or the idea that there are no absolute rules without exceptions.

Not murdering and stealing are good rules. In a major crisis, we all agree that one may use deadly force in self-defense or the defense of others, and in an apocalyptic situation one can break into a sporting goods store to get a crossbow or ball bat to kill zombies with. But if your mind is filled with the exceptions more than the rules, you are always finding good reasons to break laws. You speed through the school zone because you’re running late. You steal ‘protein bars’ from the mini-mart because you’re hungry and you left your wallet in your other pants. You kill Joe because he flirted with your wife, or he cussed you out, or you want his stuff…. I have read about a lady serial killer who was a devout church-going Christian on the surface. But she kept feeding people ant poison when they caught her stealing to get drug money. I’m sure she knew the ‘Thou shalt not murder’ rule. She just got in a habit of not applying it to herself.

In fantasy and sci-fi stories, the shared moral rules may be similar to those of the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, or quite different. Maybe one rule is that you don’t say the Fearless Leader or Dark Lord’s name, or he will get you, through magic or technology. Maybe your hero will obey his society’s rules, or be looking for a better way. In either case there will be some sort of law enforcers to keep him on track.

Fiat Currency of the Apocalypse

I’m currently reading ‘The Sheriff’ by M. R. Forbes, and in this post-apocalyptic novel, folks are using a paper currency which is a government stamp on paper for trade. Even paper notes made by the hero who happens to own a stamp. Which is incredibly unrealistic.

A paper currency is  sometimes called ‘fiat currency,’ which means it’s money because some government said it’s money. American dollars these days— on paper or in electronic form— are fiat currency backed by the government. We accept it for practical reasons— that paper or electronic signal may not have intrinsic worth, but we can trade it easily for the stuff we need.

US dollars didn’t used to be fiat currency— at one time it was backed by gold, and you could just take your paper dollars in to a bank and trade them for US gold coins. That didn’t last and FDR actually forbade Americans to own gold. Gold was good because many people accepted that gold was an item of value and would trade for it. And governments can’t print more gold to fake paying their bills.

Fiat currency in the US keeps working because the government that backs it continues to exist in a way that gives people confidence that the dollar has worth. But what would happen in an apocalyptic situation where the government is helpless or disappears altogether? Would people actually trade stuff with survival value for the former government’s approved printed paper?

Here is, in my opinion, the transition of fiat currency in an apocalyptic situation:

Stage 1: People are pretending things are normal in spite of the crisis. They only get worried if they can no longer cash their paychecks or get money out of their bank. The more the government insists that it can bring things back to normal, and doesn’t deliver, the less people trust in government-backed paper money.

Stage 2: The crisis is well upon us. Stores are closed, perhaps forever, some people loot to get needed supplies. Trade, where it exists, is mostly barter, and mostly food or survival items such as guns, milk goats or hand-crank grain grinders. People trade stuff they have a surplus of, for things they need.

Stage 3: Things are getting more stable as some survivors learn to adapt to the new conditions. Since some survivalists have stockpiled gold and silver coins for just such a crisis, some people may take the risk of accepting it in trade, at first perhaps only for non-essential items because there is a risk. People won’t trade food or a gun for mere gold unless they become convinced that they can trade that gold for something useful someday. 

Stage 4: The difficulty of barter is that you may have an item for barter and no one has anything you need or want to trade for it. So things like valued coins or other things used as mediums of exchange will grow in use. These things may be of different types. In some areas the medium of exchange may be bags of rice, or boxes of bullets. Gold and silver coins may be used in some areas and not others. 

Stage 5: This is the part where the survivors have settled in to the task of producing/finding their own food and protecting their own families. They may produce surpluses of things which need to be sold or bartered to obtain other things. Perhaps a stable medium of exchange — precious metal coins, bullets— has been established locally. Fiat currency still won’t be respected, even if government manages to re-emerge. Governments might have to mint their own precious metal coins for a time to pay their soldiers and buy supplies until a more normal life can be established— if it can be.

Fiat currencies, useful as they are right now, are highly unlikely to be respected in an apocalyptic situation. People trying to survive won’t think of bundles of paper money as something they would trade food or useful supplies for. And if a great number of people died in the apocalyptic situation, there may be great bundles of paper money floating around to be scavenged. But would you trade away a can of tuna fish to get a wad of paper money? Probably not, unless you knew for a fact that you could use that paper money somewhere, somehow to get other food. 

Fiat Currency in SciFi Worldbuilding

One problem many authors have in building a logical science fiction (or fantasy) world is that they don’t know *stuff about economics. And so they come up with worlds that readers cannot believe in— like a fantasy-world I once read, in which a nation existed that had absolutely no agriculture and got their food by trade alone. (Why would their trading partners send them food when they could starve them out and just take stuff?)

A core item to think about in building a fictional economic/trade system is that of money/currency. In the Star Trek universe we have ‘credits’ in the Federation which we are to suppose are just like dollars, but more futuristic. But what is the dollar, anyway?

The US dollar is an example of fiat currency. That is, it’s money because the government says it’s money. Right now, the dollar works as money. Our government is fairly stable and does not print vast amounts of paper money to get itself out of debt. So the dollar is a solid currency at the moment. In the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War One, the socialist government went wild printing money— to the point there was massive inflation, people had to bring wheelbarrows of paper money to buy a loaf of bread, and in fact some of the German inflation money my grandparents brought over actual were lower-amount bills that had ‘One Million Marks’ overprinted on it.

Now, imagine space travel into that. A Terran space ship goes to planet Arleroshi and wants to buy some goods, and brings out a sheaf of US dollar bills. Will the Arleroshi people accept that? Will they know the difference between the US dollar and Weimar Republic inflation money? The US government, stuck on Terra, can’t exactly arrest people on other planets for not accepting dollars the way they would arrest a US grocery for refusing US dollars and making customers pay in yen or euros or gold or silver coins. 

The US dollar will only become useful off-world if off-world people can trade it for goods they want. If there is a regular interplanetary currency exchange so that the Arleroshi people can trade the US dollars they receive in trade for Arleroshi money or some other currency they can use, they will accept US dollars. If the US dollars mainly remain pretty pieces of paper to them, they won’t want them.

I think all trade, both in primitive or advanced societies, comes down to barter. One person has fine cows and wants a metal plowshare, another one has several metal plowshares but needs a good milch cow. A swap is arranged. 

The original money was coins stamped out of silver or gold, and it ‘worked’ because silver and gold were popular and valued commodities than many people wanted. The cow-seller, would swap cows for gold and silver coins even if he didn’t particularly want silver or gold, because he knew he could swap the silver and gold for stuff he did want. 

A futuristic society may trade on multiple worlds and trade in robots and starship parts, but the basic principle is the same— a currency, whether a fiat currency or a gold-backed one, only works if you can use it to get the stuff you want.  A complex modern economic kind of hides the ‘barter’ aspect of our economic life from us. We don’t think that we go to work to swap our labor for the US fiat currency, which we then swap at the grocer’s for grass-fed beef, cauliflower, cacao nibs, coffee and Kerrygold butter. We get hung up on ‘money’ and don’t think of it as a barter-assistance device to keep us from having to find a Kerrygold butter seller that wants our labor in accounting or flower-arranging.

In our worldbuilding work, we need to keep that barter factor in mind. If we have a fiat currency in our worlds, people have to have confidence in its buying power, and not suddenly suspect that the currency is no more useful than German inflation money. (A sudden loss of faith in a fiat currency, tragic as it is for people when it happens in real-world countries, is a nifty plot device for dystopian or apocalyptic fiction.)

May your trades be in non-inflated currency,

Nissa Annakindt

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Are You Doing Too Much World-Building?

World-building is a topic of great interest to the science fiction and fantasy author. Rebekah Loper’s book, The A-Zs of Worldbuilding, is a workbook on the many things you might consider during your worldbuilding process. There are also other world-building books out there.

But there is such a thing as too much world-building. It can delay you, sometimes for years, in getting your novel or short story written. It can even substitute for actually writing your WIP! And stories can get bogged down by too much world-building, as in my current WIP where I have to keep stopping myself from explaining about the Important Continent, the Five Elements (geographical divisions of the IC) and the misdeeds of evil King Henricus when these are not part of the current story.

Many rich fantasy and science fiction worlds are not the result of sitting down and doing world-building in advance. They grew over time, as the authors wrote stories set in the world. The world of Darkover by ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ started off as a single novel trying to reclaim some of the author’s juvenilia, and the success of that story cause ‘SWMNBN’s publisher to ask for another Darkover story, and then another. The ‘Free Amazons’ in early Darkover became the ‘Renunciates’ of later Darkover stories.

So when you are world-building for your next WIP, don’t get bogged down in creating the ancient and medieval history of your world and lists of ancient kings. What do you actually need to get that WIP done? Don’t write a 20-page account of your world’s Weavers’ Guild if no one in your story is a weaver! That just wastes your time.

What do you nned to tell your story? If your main character lives in a small town and stays there, you don’t need to flesh out the kingdom next door, or even the capital city of your character’s kingdom. You just need names for the kingdom and the capital city. If there is ‘magic’ in your world, but none of your characters actually can do magic, you don’t need to work out the details of ‘magical’ lore for your world. If there are spaceships or dragons or portals to other places in your story, you will need to work out the details of that.

You need to create just the right amount of world-building for the story before you start the first draft, or maybe you will create things as you need them. You must remember that the WIP you are obsessing about right now may not be your whole writing career. For your next book, you might have an entirely different world. So don’t get too bogged down in this one.

Exercise: If you have a copy of Rebekah Loper’s book, read it or skim-read it with a notebook at hand. Write down the topics that you will need the most in world-building for your next WIP. After you finish, try to narrow down your list to 3 topics. And then decide what aspects of those three topics are the most needed for your story. Work on those. (How do you work on those? Some writers will write little essays on their world-building topics, others will write these things into their scenes. Do whatever works for the kind of writer you are turning out to be.)

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I have received a complaint from the country of Pakistan that my blog post ‘Was Mohammed a False Prophet?’ is blasphemy and ‘hate speech.’ I personally don’t think that asking questions about either Christianity or Islam is ‘hateful’ and that a believer’s faith can actually be strengthened by thinking about these things and seeking answers. I do not intend to take that post or my entire blog down as a result of this complaint. I hope WordPress will respect that.

Doing Research for Fantasy Worldbuilding

Don’t be deceived. Every sort of novel needs worldbuilding. Even in a contemporary novel you have to decide what parts of the contemporary world will be included— and what the interpretation of these parts will be. But it is the writer of fantasy and science fiction that has to do really hardcore worldbuilding— creating a fictional world from the ground up.

Worldbuilding requires research. You can’t get a book that tells you about life on planet Nescianto, because you’ve only just made that planet up. But you can get books that will help you build up that world, by showing you how things have been done in the real world.

The best books to consult are what are sometimes called ‘social histories.’ These books often have the phrase ‘everyday life’ in the title. In my own collection, I have books called: ‘Everyday Life in Ancient Rome,’ ‘China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty,’ and ‘Everyday Life in the Viking Age.’ Look in your local library for such books, and don’t forget to check the children’s section. And it is well to buy a book or two of this nature for your personal writing library.

Which books to consult? If your fantasy world is related to a specific real-world culture, such as medieval England, ancient Egypt or the Viking world, it’s good to study the culture in question closely. Your readers will include people who are keen on that culture— unless you make dumb mistakes because of lack of knowledge. But since you are writing fiction and not a historical essay, it’s also good to read up on a very different culture or two. You may want to have a purist Viking culture in your world— but it helps to think about how other cultures would have done things differently, and you can always use the contrasting culture if you have to create cultures for elves or orcs.

One thing to beware while doing your reading is author opinion. I have a book on everyday life in the American West, and the authoress presumes that all of the women in the West— from whores to respectable women— longed for effective contraceptives as much as if they had been brought up with our modern birth-control mentality. This isn’t true, and when the first church body allowed for the use of ‘birth control’ in some circumstances in 1930, it was very controversial and many people didn’t accept it. There are people today who still don’t accept it! So don’t take author opinions as Gospel truth.

How do you turn the mass of facts in a social history book into the worldbuilding material you need for your world? It helps to go from topic to topic. Rebekah Loper has a workbook out on worldbuilding, ‘The A-Zs of Worldbuilding.’ Use it to get some ideas of what worldbuilding topics you may need to consider. Rebekah Loper’s blog: https://rebekahloper.com/

The important thing about doing research in this way is that it will help prevent you from creating a #MeToo fantasy world that’s just like everybody else’s fantasy world. It will help you create something with its own character that may attract loyal readers.

Could Alien Invaders Exterminate Rural Humans without Ruining Earth?

I was bored yesterday, and so I watched Independence Day. Again. And at one point a character said that within 36 hours the aliens would destroy every major city. Which meant the human race would be exterminated.

Hello! What about the rural people? For the rural people getting rid of the cities would be an improvement. We give them the farm goods that keep them alive, and they give us drug dealers, taxes and laws that limit our ability to make a living. In other words, they give us liberals.

Well, I guess the aliens could use their visually cool explosions to kill the rural people like they killed the city folk. But rural folk are more spread out. They would have to explode us house by house, and each explosion would damage more of the Earth.

The aliens want the Earth for something. That’s a big, expensive space fleet they have. Why expend it— risk it— if they didn’t care whether they conquered Earth or not?

The aliens are somewhat like humans, so they need food to live. Where will they get it if they blow up all the farms? They would be better off enslaving all the farmers and taking their produce, or else driving the farmers off their farms and replacing them with alien farmers.

Each alien explosion drives up more stuff into the atmosphere. Their explosions aren’t nuclear, but they could cause a nuclear winter all the same— after all, a massive volcanic explosion once caused a ‘year without a summer,’ and may have caused US westward migration and affected the history of the Mormon church.

Would the aliens really want a world that is all ashes and suffering unseasonable coldness? Which would be made worse if solar cycle theory of Global Warming is true— the theory says we are at the end of a warm cycle and the start of a cool cycle. See ‘Dark Winter’ by John L. Casey. 

I would say that enslavement is a far more likely fate for rural humans than extermination, when the aliens arrive. After all, the aliens have a motivation. They are not just conquering Earth for the hell of it. They want to use the Earth, not ruin it, and why wouldn’t they use the surviving humans if they had to avoid killing them to keep the planet useful? Human beings are concentrated in cities. Without the city folk or military bases, the rural population would be easy to control.

The writer’s lesson is this: if you are going to have an external force destroy or threaten the Earth, think about the external force’s motivation. What do they want? How will they preserve the things they want about Earth while conquering it? You can’t just say that since they are aliens we can’t understand their motivations. In a real world alien invasion, humans may never know all the details of what the aliens want, unless they tell us helpful hints like how they want humans to die. But we can surmise from what they do. If they destroy mineral mines, they may not care about exploiting our mineral wealth. If they destroy our atmosphere, they aren’t planning to breathe here. If they spare certain things— farms, exotic African animals, meek-and-obedient humans— we can guess that they want these things for some purpose.

Murder over mushrooms — plants in Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding? Thinking about plants? Sometimes a plant can play an important role in a science fiction or fantasy novel. Remember the nightlock plant in The Hunger Games.

A feminist-fantasy stereotype is an herb that works exactly the way feminists wish birth control pills would work. To signal even more feminist virtue, it may be accompanied by an herbal version of the morning-after pill or RU-486— something that will do in an unborn child once its life has begun. There are of course no side effects, not even the normal depression that can come with the ending of a pregnancy in even the best circumstances.

Plants are a major food source, even for carnivores like me. And of course to get the eggs, cream and meat I need for my healthy low-carb diet, I have to feed chickens and sheep lots of good plants, such as stinging nettle. Stinging nettle may sting you when fresh, but if you cook stinging nettle plants they are like spinach. Only better tasting.

Dried stinging nettle plants are a good fodder for sheep, goats and other critters that eat grass and hay. My goats and some of my sheep are willing to eat any fresh stinging nettle I pick for them, but they ignore the stinging nettle plants growing in their pens unless I pluck it for them.

My chickens also eat fresh stinging nettle. Right now a big group of my chickens is in a non-movable pen with no access to fresh greens, so they get very excited when I bring them a fresh bunch of stinging nettle.

In my WIP Tiberius Base, plants are a major influence for the people in starships and star bases. Scientific studies show that people who have regular access to plant-rich environments are happier. And so it is customary to provide these plant rich environments.

A human-constructed forest is at the heart of all Terran-flagged starships. Ships’ crews brag about the size and intricacy of their ship’s forest. Star bases have even larger forests, and an actual space city usually has more than one.

Tiberius Base has a larger forest than any other constructed by Terrans so far. It contains a wide variety of trees and plants from both European and Asian environments. Mushrooms spores are well represented in the mix. And this leads to a problem.

Mushrooming is an amazingly popular activity among Terrans in space. The formal food-growing facilities on Terran ships and bases don’t traditionally grow mushrooms and so it is a highly sought-after food. Canned mushrooms are a staple in trading and many worlds without much interplanetary trade have a small facility in which to can mushrooms.

A forester is placed in charge of an artificial forest in a starship or base, but people hiking through the forest for recreation often come upon newly sprouted mushrooms before the forester is aware of them. People often have certain mushroom-rich areas of a forest that they look upon as their personal mushroom-hunting space. The problem arises when more than one person claims the same space.

Usually there are a few rules. Residents of a base or starship have a higher claim to a bit of the local forest than do transients or guests. Well-off people who have a garden area incorporated into their quarters must give way to the lower-income workers. But when 2 people of the same status claim the same mushroom ground, it can get difficult.

There was a famous case of murder over morel mushrooms on one of the older starbases. Since this base was owned by the Menders, an alien race, and Terrans were only using the base with permission, it was quite the scandal. It has since been established that murder over mushrooms, even morel mushrooms, is in no way considered justifiable homicide. It is also customary to grow some morel mushrooms in the cultivation rooms to render them less rare-and-hard-to-come-by.

Another way plants are important to star bases and starships is the provision of Schreber gardens. A Schreber garden is a custom which started in Germany. There are small garden plots provided to those who live in apartments or small houses with no gardening space.

In the spacegoing world, Schreber gardens are provided to anyone living on a space base who do not have a garden area as part of their living quarters. Gardening together with your Schreber garden neighbors is a popular pastime. Even in starships sometimes Schreber garden plots are provided to interested crew men, especially men who are drafted into the service.

Certain drug plants are forbidden crops on any space station or ship, as drug plants may be taboo in our world. Use of drugs for other than medical necessity is considered a sign of weakness, and drug users are likely to be identified and deprived of employment opportunities. However, the usual punishment for a convicted drug user is time spent in a locked-door rehab facility, so at least the convicted have a chance to shake their addictions.

Some plants may be mild spices for one species and deadly drugs for another. This creates conflict when the spice is a beloved one and the users of it don’t want to give it up to help aliens remain drug-free. Sesame seeds are a plant item of this class, but roasting the seeds denatures the drug effect.

WW: A Sci-Fi military must know that it’s the military

Our Worldbuilding Wednesday topic is: Military. More information on the Worldbuilding Wednesday blog hop below.

The one thing your fictional Sci-fi military must do is know that it is the military. None of this crap they put out in the recent Star Trek movies ‘I thought we were explorers.’ What did you think the Enterprise’s phasers and photon torpedoes were there for? What about those military ranks? And the fact that disobeying an order can result in a courtmartial, not just getting fired as in the civilian world?

Star Trek is stupid on these points because it’s a brilliant idea ruled over by whiny Leftists. You can’t expect better from them. That’s why I didn’t bother to watch more than a few minutes of ‘Star Trek Discovery.’ I knew it would suck and it did. So I spend my time seeing if Ice-T could solve the murders of Tupac and Biggie. (I think he needed help from Mariska Hargitay.)

A military uses force for the common good of society. Yes, they kill people. And that’s sad. But when you have an enemy army pouring over your nation’s borders, you need to kill some people to stop it. Probably most of the people you kill will be nice people who are only doing what their government tells them to. But if you don’t want your nation ruled by a Stalin or a Hitler, you will need to get your hands dirty.

A police force also uses force for the common good. Sometimes good police officers shoot and kill a dangerous looking person that turns out to be young, or unarmed. But the problem is that you can’t always tell if that dangerous or defiant guy is young or reaching for a stick of gum instead of a gun. What would happen if officers failed to stop a dangerous-looking guy who went on to kill 10 school kids?

In my WIP Tiberius Base, there is a Fleet which was once answered to the Terran Council. Only the Terran Council disbanded years ago. The Fleet goes on, protecting Terran worlds and doing a little trading on the side to fund themselves. Because they now no longer receive funding from the taxpayers as they once did.

The space city Tiberius Base is owned by Fortunate Dragon Company, which is a part of the Interplanetary People’s Republic. The IPR has a political/economic policy called Alliterism, which has a bad reputation on many worlds. So Fortunate Dragon hires the Fleet to provide people to operate the Base’s weapons, and some to function as a local police force. This requires them to create laws that are a sort of hybrid of what the IPR wants and what the Fleet will stand for.

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This has been a post in the Worldbuilding Wednesday blog hop, sponsored by Rebekah Loper. Visit her blog at: https://rebekahloper.com/

Valdemar: Fantasy Fic with Big Govt Programs

I’ve been reading Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series for years, but some things about the series rub me the wrong way. Valdemar is a fantasy series set in a medievalish kingdom with magic horses called Companions. As a medievalish society it should be…. not progressive, socialist, or other modern things. And yet, it is.

In the novel Take A Thief, which tells the early history of the character Skif, it is told that the Crown has decreed that the school kids in the capital Haven get a free meal at government expense. It isn’t mentioned that the free meal is limited to the poor by any test of means. But it is mentioned that children who get through the mandated elementary education have to leave school and thus miss the free meal.

Another question is the education itself. In various Valdemar books it claims that Valdemar mandates elementary education for children though it seems that since the education is carried out by the various religions that perhaps Valdemar is requiring the religions to fund the schools rather than spending its own taxpayer funds on it.

The question arises: how does a medievalish fantasy world even come up with the idea of such big government programs? In the real world they didn’t come along until later. In part because medieval central governments were weak and the local lords had more power over the everyday life of their people.

The free meal program might have been a part of the normal charity programs of a medieval society, but only if it was confined to the poor. They hadn’t invented the concept of handouts for all classes of people yet. Even in our country the idea of a free summertime school lunch for all income levels (yes, that is a government program) is controversial.

And then there is the idea of education for all. In the medieval societies, most occupations didn’t require education or literacy. It seems a silly burden to impose on children who will grow up to be farmhands or carpenter’s assistants or street sweepers. Now, if Valdemar had a state religion, there might be a call for universal religious training, which might, like the first Sunday Schools, include reading and arithmetic training. But Valdemar decrees ‘No One True Way’ and that seems to mean that its religious picture is one of dozens of varieties of polytheistic paganism.

Now, the reason medieval societies didn’t have the full list of big government programs is that they cost the central government more money than it could raise by taxation. Medieval people, like people today, didn’t like high taxes. Why risk a tax revolt to fund social programs when the Crown had more immediate needs like funding an army for when wars happened? Or for when subordinate provinces rebelled and needed to be reconquered— perhaps because of a revolt against high taxes?

Of course the real reason fantasy worlds like Valdemar have anacronistic Big Government programs is that there are fantasy readers and writers who are Progressives/Socialists/Leftists who love these programs so much (because they never had to live on them) that they put them in to their fantasies whether they make sense or not. And that’s OK. But I’d like a fantasy world with less government and more freedom, personally.