 Fantasy: August 03, 2016 Issue [#7781] |
  Fantasy
This week: Money Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
-Agatha Christie
All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
-Spike Milligan
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
-Mark Twain |
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Money.
Those who have it want more of it. Those who don't have it want it. Those who don't want it should give it to me.
But money, at least as we understand it, is a recent invention. Like many other things we take for granted, fiat currency - money that's not tied to a particular commodity such as gold - was first introduced in China, around 1000 C.E. But it took until just the last century for it to really replace commodity money. The US didn't completely divest its economy from gold until the early 1970s. Thanks, Nixon!
So what does this mean for fantasy (and science fiction) writing? Glad you asked.
The primary use of money is to facilitate exchange of goods and services. Before money, if you had a donkey and wanted a cow, you'd have to find someone with a cow to trade for the donkey. Then you'd have to argue about whether a cow was more valuable than a donkey or not; if so, you'd have to throw in a few bushels of wheat... but what if the cow owner didn't need wheat, but wanted carrots? Then you'd have to find someone with carrots, argue with them about how many bushels of wheat were equivalent in value to how many bushels of carrots, cart the carrots to the guy with the cow (and hope the donkey doesn't eat too many of them on the journey), and then (hopefully) make the trade - if the cow owner hasn't died of leprosy while you were bickering with the carrot guy.
Money made this simpler because you could then find someone who wanted a donkey, have them give you coins for it, and then use some of those coins (and maybe others you found under the sofa) to buy the cow. Simpler.
The classic fantasy setting, medieval times, was a period where we really started to have this "money" thing worked out, but it was still a period of bartering and commodity exchange, and the feudal system was an excellent way for the lords to siphon off a lot of the cash, leaving peasants poor (as they should be; they're peasants).
It wasn't until the rise of the merchant class that things started to even out a bit, creating a middle class and paving the way for equality, capitalism, and guillotines for royals who imposed excessive taxes. But that's another story.
This story's about money.
Not all fantasy is set in medieval or pseudo-feudal (pseudal?) times, and at a guess, 99% of science fiction isn't, either. If you're writing historically, it'll take some effort to research how trades and deals were made at the time of your writing. If not, you have the much less envious task of coming up with a market system. And with all due respect to D&D players (I'm one), sometimes gold pieces just won't cut it. I mean, really, the amount of gold a D&D character can find would throw the entire economy out of balance, just like finding an asteroid made of diamond would put DeBeer's out of business today.
But putting a fiat currency into that milieu might come across as anachronistic. Even more maddening is when you're trying to write something set in the future, and you have to think of what a post-capitalistic economy might look like. Star Trek did this, and still ended up falling back on a medium of exchange outside the Federation utopia. When you think about it, in a galaxy where most things can be fabricated easily at "replicators" or copied via transporter-beam tricks, and nearly unlimited free energy is available from warp drive engines, who needs money for anything? Peasants, I guess.
The point is, the money you're used to as a denizen of the early 21st century is probably an historic anomaly. Different systems have come and gone in the past, and will likely do so in the future. Gold is generally regarded as valuable now and historically, and while it certainly has applications outside of currency and decoration, it's really only worth what we can agree that it's worth. (People hoarding gold against the coming apocalypse might be in for a real shock when they find that the other survivors are more interested in coffee, chocolate and cigarettes.)
I'm a big fan of the Fallout series of video games, and find it highly amusing that in the post-nuclear-apocalypse future of those games, people use bottlecaps for money. At one point, I had a character carrying over 100,000 caps who was nevertheless able to run around shooting Super Mutants. Of course, that's a game, not really played for realism - but when writing serious fiction, you need to take the portability of any medium of exchange into account.
Now, the point of this newsletter isn't to tell you what your setting's economy should be like, but I hope that it at least gives you some things to think about. My two cents, as it were. |
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Last time, in "Fantasy vs. Science Fiction" , I talked about one way to look at the differences between the two genres.
Jube  : I would disagree. There is much to say that what is in the "past" can be futuristic. Take Damascus steel--the original. Making swords so sharp and durable from a technique they still can't quite replicate from the past, but they know it existed. Another example is the Strausberg violin which sounds like "magic" to violinists, but comes from the past and can't yet be replicated in how it was built to produce the same sound.
Dresden Files is a bad example. Jim Butcher, the author, did go out of his way to write in attempts to link Dresden's "magic" to real world science when he would describe gravity effects, or friction, etc.
What Gandalf can do in the Tolkien's trilogy may be quite possible in the future.
The difference between fantasy and science fiction is that SF can be explained with today's science, and what you can't is fantasy. Jules Verne's submarine--from the past--was fantasy until it was made into reality. So then novels about submarines are science fiction because they use proven science in a story that is fiction.
It wasn't my intention to imply that things from the past can't be futuristic, or unscientific. With Damascus steel, or Greek fire for that matter, the technology of making them has been lost, but at this point in our development, we have wonders of our own; for example, science just created a titanium/gold alloy that's harder than diamond. The point is that in fantasy, the plot or character motivation is in finding or recreating Damascus steel, while in science fiction, it would be achieved by finding a new alloy. I really meant that it's a matter of perspective: do we look to the past for answers, or to the future?
As Clarke famously pointed out, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I'm saying the difference between fantasy and science fiction lies in the use of plot devices from the past, or the use of plot devices from the future. And not all of science fiction's tropes are scientifically based - human teleportation, warp drive, and time travel (just to use examples from Star Trek) have little to no basis in current scientific theory. This is not to say that we can't invent them at some point, but at this time there's not much theoretical basis for any of them - and yet Trek is undeniably science fiction.
H.A.B. : What would you say the difference between fantasy and science fiction is? My book is set in an ancient world with ancient customs that I created ( which at first made me think fantasy), but then there are shifters involved ( which points to paranormal). I'm not quite sure where the story falls then.
Well, again, genre is really just a marketing tool. Both science fiction and fantasy are what I'd consider meta-genres, in that you can throw elements of many other genres - supernatural, horror, mystery, whatever - into the mix and it'll still be science fiction or fantasy. The question you should be asking is "Who is my intended audience?"
Joto-Kai  : I would say: that's a fascinating hypothesis, an intriguing concept, and a very useful distinction. (Psych student here.) But, I think you might be right.
What's great about this is that it frees up my wizards to be scientists, as in rational, analytical and skeptical. It links me to ideas like "The lost golden age" in general and Atlantis specifically. It allows me to have machines that work "Just because the character deserved for it to do, not because it probably should" -- a believability metric I always thought limited to fantasies--and many other options. (It also explains the difference between me and my ex fianceé and points up the possibility that my space opera is actually a fantasy 'underneath it all'). Bleeding brilliant!
As I've noted before, Star Wars is both space opera and fantasy. And it's not science fiction. So... yeah.
Than Pence  : I work a lot in the Fantasy genre but I was just recently wondering about how Science Fiction and Fantasy relate to each other. Then this wonderful Newsletter shows up and helps clarify a couple of things.
I personally enjoy writing Fantasy more because it's easier to make up a magical world with rules I create rather than try and base something on a scientific property that I don't fully feel confident about.
Thanks. It's certainly good to "write what you know," or in this case what you can make up, but I've found that the more you learn about the laws of physics as they're currently understood, the more believable your writing gets. But it's best not to fall into the quantum spirituality trap - the idea that since there's basic uncertainty at the quantum level, the uncertainty can translate to macro-scale items and events. They usually can't; at any scale we can visualize, things act deterministically.
That's it for me for now! Thanks for all the feedback. Until next time,
DREAM ON!!! |
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