The Aristillus Series

There’s a contradiction at the heart of science fiction. Science fiction tends to celebrate the engineers and other techies who are its main fans. But there are two conflicting ways to do this. One is to fill a story with credible technical details, details that matter to the plot, and celebrate characters who manage this detail well. The other approach is to present tech as the main cause of an impressive future world, and of big pivotal events in that world.

The conflict comes from it being hard to give credible technical details about an impressive future world, as we don’t know much about future tech. One can give lots of detail about current tech, but people aren’t very impressed with the world they live in (though they should be). Or one can make up detail about future tech, but that detail isn’t very credible.

A clever way to mitigate this conflict is to introduce one dramatic new tech, and then leave all other tech the same. (Vinge gave a classic example.) Here, readers can be impressed by how big a difference one new tech could make, and yet still revel in heroes who win in part by mastering familiar tech detail. Also, people like me who like to think about the social implications of tech can enjoy a relatively manageable task: guess how one big new tech would change an otherwise familiar world.

I recently enjoyed the science fiction book pair The Aristillus Series: Powers of the Earth, and Causes of Separation, by Travis J I Corcoran (@MorlockP), funded in part via Kickstarter, because it in part followed this strategy. Also, it depicts betting markets as playing a small part in spreading info about war details. In addition, while most novels push some sort of unrealistic moral theme, the theme here is at least relatively congenial to me: nice libertarians seek independence from a mean over-regulated Earth:

Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals used a privately developed anti-gravity drive to equip obsolete and rusting sea-going cargo ships – and flew them to the moon.There, using real world tunnel-boring-machines and earth-moving equipment, they’ve built their own retreat.

The one big new tech here is anti-gravity, made cheaply from ordinary materials and constructible by ordinary people with common tools. One team figures it out, and for a long time no other team has any idea how to do it, or any remotely similar tech, and no one tries to improve it; it just is.

Attaching antigrav devices to simple refitted ocean-going ships, our heroes travel to the moon, set up a colony, and create a smuggling ring to transport people and stuff to there. Aside from those magic antigravity devices, these books are choc full of technical mastery of familiar tech not much beyond our level, like tunnel diggers, guns, space suits, bikes, rovers, crypto signatures, and computers software. These are shown to have awkward gritty tradeoffs, like most real tech does.

Alas, Corcoran messes this up a bit by adding two more magic techs: one superintelligent AI, and a few dozen smarter-than-human dogs. Oh and the same small group is implausibly responsible for saving all three magic techs from destruction. As with antigravity, in each case one team figures it out, no other team has any remotely similar tech, and no one tries to improve them. But these don’t actually matter that much to the story, and I can hope they will be cut if/when this is made into a movie.

The story begins roughly a decade after the moon colony started, when it has one hundred thousand or a million residents. (I heard conflicting figures at different points.) Compared to Earth folk, colonists are shown as enjoying as much product variety, and a higher standard of living. This is attributed to their lower regulation.

While Earth powers dislike the colony, they are depicted at first as being only rarely able to find and stop smugglers. But a year later, when thousands of ships try to fly to the moon all at once from thousands of secret locations around the planet, Earth powers are depicted as being able to find and shoot down 90% of them. Even though this should be harder when thousands fly at once. This change is never explained.

Even given the advantage of a freer economy, I find it pretty implausible that a colony could be built this big and fast with this level of variety and wealth, all with no funding beyond what colonists can carry. The moon is a long way from Earth, and it is a much harsher environment. For example, while colonists are said to have their own chip industry to avoid regulation embedded in Earth chips, the real chip industry has huge economies of scale that make it quite hard to serve only one million customers.

After they acquire antigrav tech, Earth powers go to war with the moon. As the Earth’s economy is roughly ten thousand times larger that the moon’s, without a huge tech advantage is a mystery why anyone thinks the moon has any chance whatsoever to win this war.

The biggest blunder, however, is that no one in the book imagines using antigrav tech on Earth. But if the cost to ship stuff to the moon using antigrav isn’t crazy high, then antigravity must make it far cheaper to ship stuff around on Earth. Antigrav could also make tall buildings cheaper, allowing much denser city centers. The profits to be gained from these applications seem far larger than from smuggling stuff to a small poor moon colony.

So even if we ignore the AI and smart dogs, this still isn’t a competent extrapolation of what happens if we add cheap antigravity to a world like ours. Which is too bad; that would be an interesting scenario to explore.

Added 5:30p: In the book, antigrav is only used to smuggle stuff to/from moon, until it is used to send armies to the moon. But demand for smuggling should be far larger between places on Earth. In the book thousands of ordinary people are seen willing to make their own antigrav devices to migrate to moon, But a larger number should be making such devices to smuggle stuff around on Earth.