For those unfamiliar, Clarion West is an intensive six-week residential workshop for aspiring and neopro science fiction writers, held in Seattle. I went in 2001, as one of seventeen students learning from Octavia Butler, Bradley Denton, Nalo Hopkinson, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack.

Here are some things I learned, in no particular order:

• Cheddar cheese tastes remarkably good on apple pie.
• It’s impossible to read aloud more than two paragraphs of The Eye of Argon without breaking out laughing. Try it yourself. I dare you.
• Instead of saying hell in a handbasket, Canadians say hell in a handcart.
• I can write a 4000-word story in a day.
• We managed to embarrass Bradley Denton with a copy of his first novel, Wrack and Roll.
• Near the summer solstice, the sun descends the gap between buildings in downtown Seattle at about 10:30pm.
• There’s a technique for creating an absolutely fitting, yet totally unexpected, near future society. Sorry, I can’t tell you what it is–we were sworn to secrecy.
• Microsoft will collapse by 2005. (When a science fiction writer makes a prediction, take it with a grain of salt).
• Octavia Butler was one of the most patient and grounded people I’ve ever met.
• Last but not least, it is an incredible delight to be able to immerse yourself for six weeks with people passionate about many of the same things you are.

So when one of my classmates, Emily Mah, proposed we put together a reunion anthology, I jumped at the chance, as did ten of my classmates.

I’m pleased to announce that a hard sf story of mine, “Selling Short,” is appearing in Under the Needle’s Eye, coming out on Thursday, May 3 in a Kindle-only ebook edition. It will be free for 24 hours, starting at midnight Pacific time on Thursday. Thanks to Emily, we even have a book trailer!

What was your most intense, immersive experience, and what did you learn from it?

As you may know, Connie Willis will be named an SFWA Grand Master at Nebula Awards weekend this May. She joins a long, distinguished list of recipients going back to the first honoree, Robert Heinlein, in 1975. (Sorry for the link to La Wik, but the link from Google’s search results to SFWA’s page of winners 404s at this writing). She has earned the honor through her long career of steady productivity and multiple Hugo and Nebula wins, along with her stature in the sf/f community.

Reviewing that list got me wondering a few things.

Who will be named a Grand Master in 2013-2015?

The three biggest names missing from the list of recipients are Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany. All three have long careers with multiple Hugo/Nebula wins, critical acclaim and influence within the field (and Wolfe and Delany outside it). They represent three very different strains of sf, all valid contributions to the genre dialogue. I’d be astonished if at least two of them did not win in the next few years.

Who will be named a Grand Master in 2015-2025?

This is a much fuzzier category. The “Killer B’s” (Benford, Brin, and Bear) are on the short list. Dan Simmons writes excellent sf, but not enough of it, and the thirtieth anniversary of his first Hugo/Nebula winning novel won’t come until 2019. William Gibson has publicly moved away from sf, and though you can do that, you can only be named an SFWA Grand Master if you publicly come back. (See Silverberg and Ellison). Orson Scott Card meets the longevity and multiple awards criteria, but his recent political expressions might be held against him by some SFWA members. I’ll mention Walter Jon Williams as an underappreciated writer who merits consideration.

If there were a Posthumous Grand Master award, who should win it?

To clarify, only living writers can be named Grand Masters. So for a posthumous equivalent, Roger Zelazny and Octavia Butler are the two names to consider. Tiptree and Cordwainer Smith both had short careers. Kornbluth and Kuttner also had short careers and died so long ago (1958) that their work is fading from memory. (Plus, where does Kuttner end and C.L. Moore begin)? Gordon R. Dickson occupies much the same fiction space as Poul Anderson and doesn’t merit inclusion for that reason (said by someone who reread Time Storm about five times in high school). Frank Herbert comes close, but other than Dune and its sequels, his work is also fading from memory. Seriously, name three non-Dune Herbert novels without resorting to a search engine.

Who was named a Grand Master who didn’t deserve it?

Not to rag on him, but van Vogt. Bits of his work stick in my mind: “the right to buy weapons is the right to be free” and the slingshot ending “This is the race that will rule the Sevagram.” But the clunky writing and rubber science are things no one can read these days with a straight face. Better to have named him an Author Emeritus and let Damon Knight win the judgment of history.

Via Virginia Postrel, an op/ed piece by Bob Bruegmann has some thoughts on driverless cars’ impact on urban life.  Since sf colors how I think, I found the lack of thought-through details disappointing. The main take-away is “driverless cars wouldn’t necessarily lead to more sprawl,” which suggests to me the piece is intended to lodge in the brains of Congressional aides and other people who won’t build the future, but can stop or slow certain embodiments of the future.

The idea of an on-demand vehicle–essentially, a robot taxi–is certainly appealing. (I have an airborne version in New California). However, given that the right to own a manually-driven taxi is immensely profitable, thanks to an artificial, government-created shortage ($1 million for an NYC taxi medallion!?), the vested interests would oppose it. (I picture a smoke-filled room where representatives of Big Taxi promise money to charlatan do-gooders who’ll astroturf an anti-robot-vehicle movement).

I also found interesting one comment on the article, that equates “robotic” with “centrally controlled.” Not at all. The first robotic vehicles, e.g., the one that one the DARPA challenge a few years ago, or Google’s Bay Area-to-LA robotic Toyota, are autonomous. They know the rules of the road but make their own decisions about how to get to their destination. (After all, do the police instruct your car’s nav system to take or refuse certain routes?) The commenter’s confusion suggests those of us eager to build a pro-freedom future need to better play up the angles of distributed decision making, spontaneous order, self-organization, etc.

What would a world of driverless cars feel like to live in? Here are a couple of thoughts.

Commuters would get more done. I usually enjoy driving, but I’d gladly trade the 45 minutes I spend in my car on a typical day doing something more productive. We already multitask when we drive (listen to music, listen to audiobooks, have phone conversations), but I think most people would like to do more. Or take a nap.

Cabins of cars would become like the passenger compartments of limos, with all the seats facing one another and more luxuries (TVs, computers, etc.) available.

We wouldn’t need parking lots near our destinations. The driverless car could drop us off and go find a parking lot somewhere nearby. E.g. the Toyota Center in downtown Houston has a parking garage that sees use maybe 120 times a year, almost always on nights or weekends. The biggest obstacle to using it for parking during the workday is that it’s a few blocks from the nearest office buildings (and you wouldn’t want to walk half a mile in Houston in the summer if you didn’t have to). But if your car drops you off, it can make that drive. You’d tell it to pick you up at a set time, or you could call it to come get you a few minutes before you need it.

The autonomy of a driverless car might make it easier for a family to have only one car, if they choose. It drops off the kids at school, then takes the parents to each of their jobs, then picks up someone for an appointment or a lunch meeting, etc.

Would roads full of driverless cars look like a stereotype of Italy today, cars driving pell-mell without regard for lanes and intersections? Probably not, for two reasons. First, driverless cars would share the road with human drivers for a few decades, and pedestrians after that. People need signs and lights. Second, even if there were roads where the only people are passengers in driverless cars, don’t underestimate the lock-in effect of human expectations. Does your cell phone’s camera still make a shutter sound when you take a picture? We expect cars to follow the rules of the road, and that won’t change if robots are driving them.

There’s a car I often see in the parking garage with a sticker honoring a family member, a soldier killed in Afghanistan over a year ago.  I don’t know the owner of the car.  I certainly never met SSG Jesse Ainsworth, KIA on 10 July 2010.  But every time I see that reminder of him and his death, I feel a wave of emotions.

I deeply respect him.  He volunteered to join the Army.  He knew it would involve hard work and low pay.  Though no soldier plans to give his life, he knew the risks of service, where each step could trip an IED or put him in the sights of an enemy’s rifle.  He risked, and lost, his life for the sake of our country.  No, that’s too abstract–he risked his life because he thought it was the best way for each and every American to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  He risked his life so I can write science fiction stories and you can pursue the things you’re passionate about.  He risked his life for a stranger.  Not just one stranger–three hundred million strangers.

I feel sympathy for his family.  He left behind at least one sibling, and there’s a good chance he left behind one or both parents.  I have a young son.  If you don’t have a child, take my word for it:  if my son died, I know a pit of grief and despair would open up and pull me in.  I don’t know if I could ever get out.

I can only imagine the suffering SSG Ainsworth’s family has gone through.  And that imagination crashes on the knowledge that I don’t know what I could do if I ran into his sibling in the parking garage.  “I’m sad for your loss”?  Could a few words convey what I would need to say?

Finally, I feel anxious sadness.  He was only in the danger zone because the people we let lead our society–no, that’s letting us off easy.  Because our society, not least you and me, are casting pearls before swine, sacrificing trillions of dollars and thousands of young men’s live in a vain effort to turn Central Asian tribesmen into middle-class Americans.  It doesn’t matter what your politics are.  Maybe you’re a liberal who thinks of Afghans as noble savages who should be free of American cultural imperialism.  Maybe you’re a conservative who thinks of Afghans as barbarians who can do all the goat rustling they want, so long as they do it in Afghanistan.  But the idea that we can turn Afghans into people like us, when they’ve been building their culture their way for thousands of years, is the height of hubris.  Only some Washington insider, with an Ivy League degree in international relations and a giddy drunkeness at wielding the levers of power, could believe it.  That belief would be ridiculous, except that its believers play on the higher instincts of men like SSG Ainsworth to get them to do the dirty work required.  That makes that belief evil.

RIP, Sergeant.  A man becomes a hero when he returns from his adventures with a boon for his community.  May a reminder to our society not to risk young men’s lives on fool’s errands be the boon you brought back with your remains.

Now that we know religious sentiments will be the only rationale for space settlement, how can we expect space settling to unfold and what will space settlements look like?  Here are some initial thoughts.

1. Space settlements will be founded by colossally wealthy individuals

As we discussed previously, the costs of space settlement will be extremely high in the near term. At $400K to put a person on the Moon, and assuming a person requires 10x his mass in initial infrastructure and 1x his mass in replacement infrastructure every year, a lunar colony of 150 people would cost $660 million up front and $60 million every year.

In the farther term, even though the absolute costs might drop thanks to nanotechnology or the like, the relative costs (in a purchasing-power-parity index) will remain very high. So only very wealthy individuals will have the money to pay for these costs.

Given that individuals who amass immense wealth tend to be committed to their work and immune to fanciful, fanatical ideas (e.g. Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Warren Buffett), few of the founders of space settlements will be first-generation billionaires. (Bill Gates is one of the few to walk away from business and devote himself to charitable work). More likely, second- and later-generation billionaires, with inherited wealth, without the drive of their ancestor, and a craving for meaning in their lives, will be the primary population of space settlement founders.

1b. …not corporations or governments

Although these entities have the colossal wealth, they lack any religious motivation. Corporations are driven solely to profit. Governments are driven solely to amass the social capital equivalent of profit–support from the powerful, acquiescence from the masses, and deterrence of potential foes. (Government space programs are the equivalent of Mayan stelae, ostentatious displays designed to show foes the power of the government so the foes don’t challenge it).

While both classes of entities are willing to use the religious sentiments of their customers/subjects, they themselves are immune from it. They would still have roles to play in the space settlement process. For example, corporations may profit by providing transport for space settlements, on the principle of “in a gold rush, the only man who gets rich is the shovel salesman.”. Governments may provide the impetus for space settlements–consider local governments in Illinois and Missouri supporting vigilantism against the Mormons, or the French government’s alliance with anti-Semites during the Dreyfus Affair as reported by Herzl.

2. Most space settlements will be undertaken by Westerners

There are two reasons why. First, in the near term, most billionaires of the recent past have lived in the US or other Western/Westernized countries, so most of their heirs will too. For the foreseeable future, the world’s new billionaires will come disproportionally from these same regions. Amassing great wealth requires a large number of prosperous customers, which in the near term means Western/Westernized countries. Developing countries may have faster economic growth rates then the US and EU, but the developing countries are starting from a lower base and will have slower growth as low-hanging productivity fruit are picked. Thus, the West will have the lead in large numbers of prosperous consumers for many decades yet.

Second, Western cultures seem more susceptible to intense religious fervor than many others. Perhaps this is a product of the West’s greater individualism and loss of faith in traditional things-greater-than-oneself. The US has long held the lead in inventing new religions (the Great Awakening, the Latter-Day Saints, Scientology, UFO cults, etc.). Europeans spent a century and a half, from the French Revolution until the fall of fascism, devising secular ideologies that filled the same psychological need. The West also has had decades of a high material standard of living, with resulting affluenza. The developing world hasn’t had enough wealth for enough time to suffer the same ailment. So even if the wealth to build space settlements is amassed in the developing world, the needed fervor is likely to be missing.

2b. …but not necessarily white people

The industrialized West has tens of millions of persons of color, many of whom have imbibed the cultural traits discussed above. African-American history has prominent examples of ethnic solidarity rising to the level of religious belief, culminating in separatist urges. Marcus Garvey, Rastafarianism. (Bradbury wrote sixty years ago about African-Americans escaping prejudice by settling Mars). The growth of evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism in Latin America indicates eruptions of religious fervor could happen among Hispanospheric peoples and cultures, especially those with the most exposure to the US.

3. Space settlements will be established by fanatics

Whatever their skin color and their belief systems, space settlers will have beliefs so intense and/or out of the mainstream and/or confrontational that space settlement–a prodigiously expensive and dangerous undertaking–will seem the best option for them to preserve their way of life. They will be in contrast to average people, folks who go along to get along and adapt their beliefs to life in their home culture on Earth. ‘Fanatic’ seems a good label for the minority who won’t.

4. Space settlements will stay fanatical longer than religious settlements on Earth did

Most of the settlements founded for religious reasons that we discussed last time have evolved over time to have few, if any, beliefs outside of the mainstream.  (Today, the descendants of the post-1848 German atheist-socialists who settled central Texas go to church and vote Republican no less than their neighbors). Pressure, and especially economic pressure, from the outside world ground down the sharp edges of strange beliefs and practices. The Latter-Day Saints’ dropping of polygamy happened to remove the last obstacle to gaining the benefits of US statehood for Utah.

Space settlements built using foreseeable technology, where settlements would be dependent on Earth for imports of specialized goods and spare parts, would be exposed to those same pressures. But under foreseeable technology, space settlements will be uncommon for reasons of cost.

Nanotechnology, or comparable magic wand technology, changes that. If space settlements have nothing to import from Earth, then they can ignore the threat of economic sanction for sticking to their beliefs, as well as the carrot of economic reward for moving to the mainstream. Also, they will have little, if any, exposure to travelers, traders, and other strangers bearing different beliefs. Thus, space settlements can maintain their fanaticism. (Eventually, the fanaticism will erode for internal reasons. I have a character in New California say “The passion of youth turns into the settled habit of middle age.” But the absence of external pressure will slow the process).

5. You would dislike most space settlement cultures

Remember, space settlers will be fanatics who can’t or won’t fit in with the mainstream of their native culture on Earth. If you’re part of your culture’s mainstream, then space settlers will seem like heretics or madmen. And if you’re a fanatic, you’re probably a different sort of fanatic, and think of all other fanatics as your enemies.

This poses a challenge to an sf writer: How do I make likable a character from a fanatic culture?

But note, what we think of as our cultural mainstream is likely to seem primitive and barbaric to the cultural mainstream in the medium to far future, when self-sufficent space settlements may be possible. An sf writer could write a satire in which a culture thinking all the things we’re supposed to think (democracy is the best form of government, church and state should be separated, markets should be generally free but regulated for the common good, every child should go to college and then work a white-collar office job for the next fifty years) is made up of deranged fanatics who self-exile to escape the Earth of 2100.

In the first two installments of this series, we discovered:

1. Using foreseeable technology, it would be too expensive to go to space, stay there, find or make valuable things, and send those things to Earth.
2. Any technology that would lower those expenses would lower the cost of finding or making those same things on Earth, meaning space settlements couldn’t compete no matter how low it cost.

From that, we conclude that space settlements will never happen for economic reasons.

But that doesn’t mean space settlements can’t happen. Human history is rife with examples of settlements founded for non-economic reasons. What do the original US states of Massachusetts, RhodeIsland, Pennsylvania, and Maryland have in common? Not ringing a bell? Maybe Utah? The Transvaal Republic? The modern state of Israel? Not to mention smaller examples, the Amish, New Harmony, the Amana Colonies, post-1848 German atheist-socialist colonies in central Texas, and post-1960s hippie communes in the US; Hutterites in western Canada; and odd colonies scattered across Latin America. All these places were founded as havens for religious* communities.

(* I use “religious” as a shorthand. The US states listed above had explicitly religious origins, providing havens for Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, and Mormons. But Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, had little if any religious motivation, and instead sought a home for the Jewish people as defined on ethnic and cultural dimensions. Likewise, the Voortrekkers felt  their way of life threatened by British customs, language, religious practice, and government policies. So “way-of-life” or “cultural” communities, or “communities dedicated to something greater than the individual” might be better descriptions than “religious.”)

This also explains the mystical overtones that advocates of space settlement tend to use. “We need to get off Earth in case a disaster destroys the planet.” Nevermind that in terms of cost, it would be cheaper to protect 1 billion people on Earth from a massive disaster than to set up 1000 people in a self-sufficient colony on Mars, Luna, or the asteroid belt. The spread of Earth-life across the solar system and beyond is seen as something greater than the individual, and rational discussion stops.

Or take Tsiolkovsky’s famous quote. It sounds motivating and galvanizing: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” The hard-headed, economically-literate sf fan knows the intended conclusion only follows if we let the metaphor cloud our thinking. Why not remain on Earth? We evolved for this cradle. Climbing over the crib walls doesn’t get us into the rest of the house. Instead, it gets us into a frigid, irradiated, airless environment, with no food or toys. But for someone caught up in the religious fervor of Tsiolkovsky’s quote, those economic objections are irrelevant.

Further, to the truly fervent, high costs and low rewards are not a bug, but a feature, of space settlement. Making an investment that will never pay back shows one looks beyond crass economic calculation. If anyone can make a buck in space, then our lunar colonies, asteroid colonies, terraformed planets, etc. will soon be overrun with salesmen and tax collectors.

So if the only motivation for space settlement is religious, along what lines would space settlements develop? We’ll get to that next time.

January is a good time to remind you of my novels and stories that saw their first English-language publication in 2011 and are award-eligible in 2012.

Short stories

“Nine Views of Transco Tower, by Iak/Sohu” (post-alien-takeover sf)

“Mike Fink Goes to Big Bend” (sfnal retelling of American and Mexican folklore)

Novelette

“Selling Short” (solar system space opera)

Detailed descriptions, and links to free samples and full ebook editions for Kindle, Nook, and ereaders supported by Smashwords, can be found here.

Novels

The Blank Slate (near future sf/thriller)

The Sirens of Bangalore (sf, virtual reality)

New California (hard neuroscience/evolutionary psychology sf)

Detailed descriptions, and links to free samples and full ebook editions for Kindle, Nook, and ereaders supported by Smashwords, can be found here.

Enjoy!

Previously, I talked about why space settlement, using current technology, would cost too much to ever happen.  But what if the costs were to drop enough, through nanotechnology or some comparable magic wand?

Simple: the price of goods sold by space settlements would be too low to pay back even those new, low costs.  Why?  The same nanotechnology that lowers the costs of space settlement would lower the cost of finding or making those same goods on Earth.

Consider the Niven/Pournelle dream of asteroid mining.  (I cut my teeth on Pournelle’s science fact essays collected in A Step Farther Out.)  All it costs to bring thousands of tons of highly pure iron or nickel to Earth from the asteroid belt are the capital and operational expenses of round-trip travel and smelting.  At current nickel prices, those expenses would have to be less than about $9/lb of delivered nickel to pay off.  For iron, those expenses would have to be closer to $0.10/lb of delivered iron to pay off.  (Remember, using current technology, the expenses would be at least $1000/lb, if not much more).

Let’s assume nanotechnology can lower those expenses 10,000-fold.  It would do so by making both the machines to do the travel and smelting work, and the energy to drive that work, much cheaper than today.  So nanotech-using miners could settle the asteroid belt, ship nickel or iron to Earth, and make a profit, right?

Except for one thing.  Those lower expenses for smelting machinery and the energy to run it would also apply to Earth-based mining.  Reduce the costs of Earth-based mining by, let’s say, just 1000-fold, and iron and nickel deposits that today are too marginal to pay for themselves would become immensely profitable.  For that matter, mining landfills and salvage lots for the iron and nickel in junked appliances and cars would become immensely profitable.  I haven’t run the numbers, but I suspect it would be profitable under those conditions to extract iron at its baseline abundance of 5% in Earth’s crust.

Comparable reasoning would apply to essentially any element or compound.  Regardless of the state of technology, there’s nothing useful to Earth’s economy you could find or make in space you couldn’t find or make more cheaply on Earth.

But, but, strangelets!  Stringlets!  Magnetic monopoles!  Unobtanium!  Yes, there may well be exotic matter out there, but no one’s going to spend a large sum of money hunting for it.  What economic value would it have?  And if it had any, would it be cheaper to substitute for it using terrestrial materials?  The answers very much seem to be “none” and “yes,” respectively.

So, Raymund, there will never be human settlements in space?

I never said that.

But you spent the last two posts stating that human space settlements make no economic sense and never will.

True.  But that doesn’t mean human space settlements will never happen.  I’ll get into the reasons why they might happen in my next post.

As a longtime sf fan, one of the toughest realizations I ever came to is that Space settlements will never happen for economic reasons.

In part, the costs of getting to space are too high.  Charles Stross has discussed the costs at great length here.  To get one person to the Moon, bringing along the life support he needs for the trip, using advanced versions of the rocket technology we have today, would cost about US$400,000 as an optimistic estimate.

That’s far too expensive for anything except government boondoggles or multimillionaire’s larks, i.e., the current state of space travel.

Things get worse as go further in the solar system, even keeping in mind Heinlein’s comment that “Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere.”  The cost of travel to Mars or any other place in the solar system would be even higher than $400,000, for at least two reasons: (1) you have to carry the fuel for the return trip, and (2) you have to carry more life support infrastructure for the years of round-trip travel time forced on you by Hohmann transfer orbits.

Interstellar travel?  Alpha Centauri is about 250,000 times further away than Mars.  The energy cost to get a solitary explorer there in less than one lifetime (at 0.1 c, 40 years in transit) is comparable to the yield of all nuclear weapons ever built, or the energy consumption of the entire world for a couple of weeks.  Generation ships are even worse:  the energy savings from their slower speed (call it 0.01c, 400 years in transit) is offset by the mass of hundreds of people and the infrastructure needed to keep them alive and safe for four centuries.  And we haven’t even touched on the individual and social psychology issues these avenues would bring up.  How well would you do living in your car for four decades?

So nevermind settling the solar system; the idea of normal people going into space is so expensive, it’s a non-starter.

About now, a reader might protest, “But what about nanotechnology?  Advanced materials and cheap energy production will lower all those costs dramatically.”

I read Stan Schmidt’s mid-’80s Analog editorials on nanotechnology, and K. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation.  Although I think Drexler is intoxicated with his ideas, I completely agree that some of the fruits of nanotechnology–the super-strong, super-light materials and cheap energy referred to above–are entirely possible, and are in fact likely to appear somewhere on Earth in the coming decades.  Yes, those advances will make space elevators and fusion-powered torchships possible.  Yes, nanotechnology would greatly lower the costs of space travel and space settlements.

But.  Nanotechnology would also greatly lower the benefits of space settlement, leaving the prospect as uneconomical as it is today.  More on that point in my next post.

I want to thank whomever bought a copy of “Selling Short” from the Kindle store sometime November 3-4, 2011.  I’ve never been more proud to earn $0.35.  Comment here or drop me a line at raymund – at – raymundeich – dot – com.