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Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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A little has been made in economic circles of how Charles Stross portrays interstellar finance in his new book, Neptune’s Brood. In the first of the series, Saturn’s Children, Stross established the physical mutability and psychological constraints of Freya, a transhuman sex-bot. In that story Stross took on more than just sex after it’s become obsolete. Stross took on slavery, inherited class and feudal control, and he illustrated how we are all at the mercy of our rulers’ damaged obsessions.

In this sequel Stross has a new protagonist, the banker Krina. With her Stross pivots away from the robot apocalypse of the near future. He skips forward thousands of years and brings the story back to the economic headlines of our world today. Krina’s story spans currency areas, economic expansion, economic depression, wage slavery, sovereign debt, banking regulation, and takes the story to the poor schlubs who audit the books after everything has gone wrong.

This story too often dominates our own news and Stross explores the world of finance with some subtlety. Stross also touched on these issues in Rule 34 but in this new novel he delves more deeply into the mechanisms and blends them into the sauce of space opera. The chief example of blending is the way Stross resolves transactions where a transaction must wait years for interstellar laser communications to transmit digital signatures. It’s fiddly science fiction at times but it’s grounded in real situations. Understanding it is worth the effort.

The book’s appeal is heightened by the constant peril faced by the protagonist, Krina. Compared to humans, Stross’s transhuman Krina is a cyber-superhero. Like the other transhumans of her universe, she is physically strong and able to shrug off the fatal effects of vacuum, radiation, and toxic atmospheres. Krina can back up her consciousness and transmit herself across the stars into new bodies. She can regrow practically any damage to her body by consuming partially-processed raw materials—or in extremis, another person (see Stross’s short story Bit Rot, the only plausible medical premise for zombies I’ve seen). Over time and with help Stross’s characters can be re-engineered into any imaginable form and can live essentially forever.

But Stross’s characters face a well-modeled web of new tensions. The protagonists of both books address the possibility of mind control, mind wiping, doppelgangers and compelled interrogation, but in Neptune’s Brood there’s less sado-masochistic sex slavery and even less discussion of the long-ago lost world of “meatsack” humans. Instead Stross falls back on how survival works in any world. His characters have to eat. They have to make a living. His protagonists have adventures, yes, but they are adventures that are mediated through their work. Their actions are often dictated by their bosses and institutions. When Freya and Krina express their own agency, their professional and economic survival are in the foreground. Stross has his finger on the thready pulse of our own times.

The cover of Neptune’s Brood is a change. The covers of some of Stross’s novels have been afflictions, Saturn’s Children Space Cleavage, for one, The Apocalypse Codex This Guy Looks Like a Jerk for another. But there’s hope: the new UK covers for the Laundry Files are an improvement; they err on the side of abstraction. The cover for Rule 34 was very cyberpunk-y and did justice to the character without exploitation. The cover for Neptune’s Brood continues the trend away from the cheap art that depicts latex or a chain-mail-bikini. The mermaid of the cover of Neptune’s Brood is naked, yes, but is fig-leafed by its frame, rendered well, and has a posture and expression of purpose.

I know the backlash against bad sci-fi/fantasy covers may seem prudish, but giggle-inducing crappy covers don’t allow for content that is well done and thought-provoking. The West is a couple decades past the point where we needed to Stick It To The Man by putting silly soft-core pornography on the cover of a book. The Man stuck back by giving up on prudery, then dumped books from the checkout aisle. So it’s a good thing that Neptune’s Brood can be put out where people can see it. Checkout customers have economic ideas that need updating.

Time, Wealth, Workflow, and Influence

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

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A comment on Paul Krugman’s column last week: “Profits Without Production”.

People at the top have a problem to go with their wealth. In determining their available economic strategies, the time available to a wealth owner is as important a factor as their available capital. A 100M$-aire like Mitt Romney has a great quantity of capital, but very limited time per unit of wealth. That will determine his capital allocation and his time allocation. While the risk and returns of the abstract capital and financial markets aren’t all that good in the long run, those markets are excellent in their time-cost to the investor.

With money managers to offload the work to, a wealth owner can maximize time for leisure, family, and building relationships. They can cultivate influence and secure rent-seeking rights and other political favors. The wealth owner can simply leave behind any active concern for their wealth while reaping its practical advantages.

The chief advantage a wealth owner has is the status and time for other high-profile pastimes—like racing cars or seeking high public office— which the wealth owner may or may not be suited for. In the case of Steve Forbes, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, or Mitt Romney, they were not suited to winning elections but that didn’t prevent them all from wasting enormous amounts of wealth and connections to pursue their political hobby.

Three of my examples are known for having real (as opposed to honorary) jobs as venture capitalists, CEOs and corporate board members. But as a job these don’t primarily have to do with operations. Fiorina and Whitman spent their time at the top of the corporate world operating their charges as if they were whales, as if their corporations were wealth owners whose wealth they were “managing”. HP’s leadership has all been down this road, as have most major corporations. And as those corporations get big, their wealth managers produce ever more abstract and narrow returns.

Wealth management by playing capital markets doesn’t have that good a return, long term. Much of the time, however, the risk and returns of the markets seem good enough for wealth owners to indulge their lazier options. For a competent individual to do a good job at growing wealth as a capitalist, the capitalist must demote himself to working very long hours doing real work and organizing real work. This is not to most capitalists’ liking, even to those who might have the competence to manage their capital applied to production. So wealth owners drift away from active economic activity toward reading monthly statements, learning to fly helicopters and visiting Iowa.

Perhaps the wealth owner trusts the wealth managers, perhaps they don’t. Either way, wealth manglers as a whole will suffer more scrutiny and skepticism in the future. If the day-to-day returns of abstract profits in the market casino were substantially cut by tax policy or some other mechanism, capitalists would have to do something more direct with their capital. To maintain and improve their position, wealth owners would need to change their workflows so that they would have them.

In an alternate history…

22 Monday Oct 2012

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November 7th, 2012: America Called Romney’s Bluff

Our new President is a Master of the Universe, a child whose father was a virtuous (and losing) candidate for the Presidency in 1968, a bully of a boy who was raised into the quickest growing religion most focused on prosperity, a vigorous (if less virtuous) young man who skipped Vietnam to attend the best schools and enter the most profitable profession two yards from the end-zone, a corporate operator who became a politician of the most reactionary party at the height of its popularity, a flexible deal-maker who won the governorship farthest inside enemy territory by promising not to be the guy everyone worried he might be, a helmet-haired opportunist who benefited from the dullest field of dullards to win the latest Republican primary, and a mendacious and non-human shoveler of such a huge blizzard of bullshit who barely won against the most-hated moderate to ever be elected, a tottering tower of entitlement who owes his position to Republican filibustering and the vociferous stupidity of Tea Party “revolutionaries” who would rather be dumb and poor than blue.

I hope he realizes he’s playing poker and not rummy.

Fortunately, Obama’s floor of support is 47% and Romney’s roof is also 47%. I also like to think Romney’s oiliness will ooze through in the next couple weeks. I guess we’ll see.

Moist and Fragrant Fruit of Villainy / Cloud Atlas 2 of 3

24 Monday Sep 2012

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I’ve been thinking about this post for nearly two weeks now, bad for my status as a blogger I know, which is funny in itself. This post began as a glib and valueless bit of snark about Mitt Romney’s inability to simply buy the election. Then as September 11th evolved, Mitt-ish events climbed up a tree and began throwing poo at everyone. As a result, this post has had to evolve in my subconscious before I could address it properly. To take my mind off it I’ve consumed Scinemax’s Strike Back, loading up my forebrain with soft-core sex and explosions.

I also read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as part of another blogligation. There are parallels in what I have to say about both things—Mitt Romney and Cloud Atlas, not my speculation about whether we’ll be treated to Rhona Mitra in the the buff.

Cloud Atlas and Conventions of Literary Futurism

Cloud Atlas is a fine book with some flaws. Its structure is its most distinctive feature and it is David Mitchell himself that makes the best non-spoiler comment about it, in the voice of Robert Frobisher:

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds.

The structure is not a flaw except in the shameless way it requires the reader to complete the book to figure out if it’s any good, or at least not too annoying. The book is, in fact, not too annoying, but that’s because only three-elevenths of the story is set in the future. Like so many works of literary futurism, Mitchell’s take on the future is a tragically sad bit of angsty, tearjerking humbuggery.

Margaret Atwood and seemingly every other future vision that gains acclaim in the literary world presents technology as magically self-defeating when it is mixed with human agency. Our moral flaws will lead us to a techno-doom where the best we can hope for is to sink into an illiterate, unremembering de-evolutionary twilight. Because of… slavery, plague, and cannibalism? These are sins and afflictions that have only been undercut in a lasting way by technology, libraries, and human communication, but in the future they get worse?

Mitchell follows in these footsteps. Sigh.

Democracy’s Denouement Deemed Robotic and Out-of-Touch

Carefully limited communication and controlled presentation of information have been the foundation element of another, less literary trope. On Fox News, the bravest face they’ve been able to put on their latest losing endeavor is to embrace the world of Mitt Romney’s “gaffes.” “Own it!” they cry. Regarding the very latest, they declare that the 47% is indeed lazy and doesn’t pay taxes—directly in the face of evidence to the contrary and confusion about which 47% is being referred to at any one moment. For example, the 47% that (in theory) don’t pay income tax are not the same 47% that are committed to Obama. White working poor are overrepresented in the first group but underrepresented in the second. If the number “47” is really a thing, it is a coincidence. Conflating these various populations is similar to the idea of not having to worry about the thirty thousand people killed by guns every year because the same thirty thousand people have already been killed in traffic accidents. *

*Note, I’m not claiming that 30k people are being killed every year by either cause. If they were, however, they would be separate populations. And yes, I realize that the mutual exclusivity of these populations is the exact opposite fallacy. Think of it this way: if it were possible to be both killed by gunfire and a traffic accident in one year, being killed by gunfire would not necessarily mean you’d have to be killed in a traffic accident. My point is that there are many wrong ways of looking at a number.

Going back to the most recent September 11th exercise which spawned my extended spasm of paralyzed amusement, Fox and Romney both pushed the meme “Obama apologized for the 1st amendment!” in the middle of an ongoing, tragic international crisis. This was a hastily designed fantasy for insertion into our moral consciousness. Instead of taking hold in the larger world, the idea paused during its consumption in other channels. The charge became news in itself: contemplated, considered and ridiculed, becoming a complete reversal of the intended propaganda. Typical for this campaign cycle, Romney and his fellow travelers have not been able to convert their corporate power and wealth directly into corporeal power. The attempt to do so is becoming more nakedly transparent.

I’ll leave aside the possibility of a conspiracy by the librul media to distort everything Romney does into a caricature of badly-calculated and cockeyed flailings. I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that Romney is what he appears to be: a well-connected finance operator who has swum far away from his native audience of like-minded investor douchebags, political operatives and doting but blinded fellow Mormons.

 Malthus Takes a Holiday

From the point of view of a writer of science-fiction, the hilarious failure of the Corporate CEO-King in the real world poses a dilemma: how do we take seriously the ever-raining cyberpunk twilight of franchise municipalities and walking organ farms?  Why instead is the Romney Future turning out to be the finely-combed tip of a cold and putrescently melting berg of incompetent LaRouchiite zombies who rant about mud people and the fall of Gold from Holy Grace? Why is Papa Song sucking so badly at his job?

One issue is the fact that a common trope of the future, the inevitability of Malthusian collapse, is being found wanting in the real world. It was found wanting in the 19th century in England; it was found wanting in the mid-20th century in Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States; it was found wanting in China, Korea, Turkey and Iran in the late 20th, and the Malthusian Apocalypse is found wanting everywhere else which has educated the other half of its population and given it the right not to be baby-slaves.

So Malthus and his collapse isn’t looking so inevitable as he did twenty or thirty or two hundred years ago. Yet in Cloud Atlas he appears in the corporate future as a revered prophet in statue form. It’s appropriate that the evil corporate state put it there but the statue should be a forgotten target of ridicule—or just target practice—and not a warning.

I Blame George Lucas

Because why not? Yes, his dystopias seemed hip and edgy in the 70s but it turns out that like every other evidence-averse, reactionary democracy-hater working in fantasy and science fiction, he’s a frightened amoral zombie making up cockeyed bullshit to warn us of an even worse horde of frightened amoral zombies hot on his heels. Or robots with magic underwear.

Since then, to guarantee an audience the future has to be crappy with acid-spewing aliens popping out of every cavity and neutral, atmospheric endings turned ludicrously happy or “properly” edgy and depressing.

And somewhere in there vampires became killable. Was that Lucas? Or was it Ann Rice gone wild with world-building? Vampires (the past) should be known, respected, and feared while people (the future) should be imagined to continue existing, being born, living, and dying, regardless of the plastic-to-ichor ratio of their flesh.

I Don’t Blame David Mitchell

Whaddaya gonna do? The book needed eyeballs and it was published eight years ago when corporate idiots seemed destined to be in charge forever, so if less than a third of the book makes me feel manipulated and grumpy, I can live with that given its redeeming features.

Cloud Atlas is a cleverly crafted work with engaging structure and images and several interesting characters. That may be the reverse of the typically successful formula but it works here. Hopefully in the Wachowski Siblings’ movie it will be the structure, images, and characters that shine through and not the gloomy stereotype of a future.