Supply chains and the fragility of society in science fiction: John Scalzi's Interdependency Trilogy
As promised, I'm continuing with some odd selections for the science fiction posts amid the coronavirus pandemic. Today, we'll have a look at a particularly unusual choice. John Scalzi is one of the most prominent authors in science fiction today, but for a discussion of a pandemic, his obvious books would be the Lock-In series. Those are good books, and in fact, I have assigned the first book in that series to my students when doing my science fiction thing. I recommend those books, but I have something else in mind for today.
Scalzi's current trilogy-- The Collapsing Empire, followed by The Consuming Fire, and we are awaiting the release of The Last Emperox-- is a distant future space opera about, well, an empire that is collapsing. Here's the deal. The empire in question is called "The Interdependency." It spans a bunch of systems that are mostly space stations and domes on otherwise uninhabitable rocks, and really only one inhabitable planet. That'd be End. Why is it set up that way? The Interdependency is spread out around a thing called "The Flow." The Flow is kind of like a hyperspace river, or something. You can travel faster than light within The Flow, but only along the pathways of The Flow. So, the settlements that make up The Interdependency are along The Flow, the way settlements have historically been placed along rivers and waterways. That was just how you traveled (and lived, given our need for water), so that was where the people were. Same deal. We're all good so far, but maybe you're noticing a bit of a problem. There's only one inhabitable planet in The Interdependency-- End. It's called "End" because it's at the ass-end of The Flow. It's really hard to get to, so it's basically a backwater. Everyone else is in domed cities, space stations, etc. That means everything is dependent on trade. Interdependent.
Like, I need sprockets, and you need widgets, so we trade. Otherwise, my dome and your space station break down, and we all die. That'd suck.
And here's where everything gets totally crazy. The Interdependency. Some wackadoo (her name was Rachela) came up with the idea of having each system be controlled by a family that gets a protected monopoly over a particular enterprise. So, I produce widgets in my domed city in my part of The Flow, you produce sprockets in your space station* in your part of The Flow, and we trade so that everyone gets along nicely.
So, if you know anything about economics, this should sound familiar. Rent. I have a government-protected monopoly over the production of widgets, and you have a government-protected monopoly over the production of Spacely's Space Sprockets, and because we are protected from competition, we get to charge whatever we want. Profit, above and beyond what a market would allow. The profit we get from that protected monopoly is called "rent," and rent is bad. Very, very bad. Except for the people who get it.
So, The Interdependency is one big rent-seeking scam. How the hell do you sell this scam? With two things. First, you tell people that the "interdependency" created by this system is necessary to end wars-- think creation of the EU, globalization of trade as a way to prevent WWIII in response to WWII. Second, make a religion out of it! Yup, tell people you had a divine revelation, and start a church around it, and combine that church with the state, and bam! Bob's your uncle, you got yourself a rent-seeking empire! You get the backing of the other merchant families by promising them their protected monopolies, and everyone wins! Except... consumers, but hey! You get filthy rich!
OK, so this system can chug along and keep people in sprockets and widgets and all that for a long time. It's all dependent on The Flow, though.
So, what if The Flow collapses? Oops. The first book-- The Collapsing Empire-- is about what happens as a scientist realizes that some anomalies mean that the flow is collapsing, and not merely shifting. A shift, and trade routes alter in ways that can be used, but a collapse? Space stations and domes need supplies, and if I only make widgets, not sprockets, and you only make sprockets, not widgets... you see the problem here? Remember, there's only one inhabitable planet. End. Trying to maintain those domes and space stations when they are set up to be interdependent for the sake of a rent-seeking scheme just doesn't work. They'll collapse.
In the second book, The Consuming Fire, some of the characters discover a space station long cut off from The Flow-- Dalasysla. A tiny group of people remained, hundreds of years later, having spent centuries scavenging from a massive space station and surrounding ships, but they're on the brink, and screwed. Without a planet, without the capacity to produce the parts and tools to maintain a station, there's only so long you can live in space.
Sorry, Neal Stephenson. Seveneves was fun, but I think Scalzi got it right.
Anyway, the point is that everything about how the Interdependency works requires The Flow. It requires trade. Without that trade, it all comes down. I'll be very curious to read how Scalzi resolves it in The Last Emperox, and he's given himself a couple of avenues, from End, to other stuff that I won't spoil if you want to read, but my point for today is the necessity of the supply chain, and what happens when it breaks down.
In The Interdependency trilogy, it brings down an empire. It does so because the empire is designed around supply chains. That is its function. Right now, supply chains are beginning to face disruption. How much disruption will they face eventually? Can they be put back on track? That... we don't know. There is so much we don't know about the economic impact of coronavirus, but we have an economically interdependent world. Not because some scam artist set up an international rent-seeking arrangement, but because the world works on the principle of comparative advantage. We have a more efficient system of production if my country produces what it can produce most efficiently, and your country produces what it can produce most efficiently, and we trade. Trade works, mercantilism is stupid, protectionism is the death of economics, and anyone advocating mercantilism or protectionism in the modern world... oy.
So, we need trade. Trade, though, is complex. It isn't even that a finished good is produced in one country anymore. Complex goods are put together piece by piece, with each piece completed in different countries, and that means there are so many ways that everything can break down. If you are following business news right now, you are seeing threads of this. At a basic level, any factory that can't produce, can't produce elements of the supply chain, and there are signs of countries introducing protectionist policies, not just with respect to immigration, but trade. So far, that's just for medical supplies, but once that starts, it's hard to say where it stops. The world is dependent on trade, and supply chains. Of course, this is a habitable planet. In most senses. Civilization as we know it, though, is dependent on the maintenance of supply chains, and as those are disrupted, we can see breakdowns that may, in principle, turn very ugly.
Where does this go? I don't know. I'm just referencing a fun trilogy of science fiction books, for which Book III isn't even released yet.
I'll conclude with a simple observation about science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc. Apocalyptic scenarios in fiction set around diseases tend to have diseases with mortality rates far higher than COVID-19. Not every disease-based apocalypse is Captain Trips, but in the scheme of things, the mortality rate here is far lower than what you will generally see in "genre" scenarios either that bring everything down, or even that just mess everything up. We are looking at a virus with a morality rate of probably somewhere around 2%, although I continue to see estimates ranging from far lower than that to up to 3.5%. Unfortunately, eventually, we'll find out the hard way. Even that high estimate, though, is nothing compared to, say, Kellis-Amberlee, about which I wrote last Sunday. That was the zombie plague from Mira Grant's Feed trilogy.
A virus can still do a hell of a lot of damage to the structure of civilization as we know it by shutting down not just domestic economic activity, but supply chains. Watch. And read Scalzi's books. They're at least fun, unlike this.
*Required by law to be called "Spacely's Space Sprockets"
Scalzi's current trilogy-- The Collapsing Empire, followed by The Consuming Fire, and we are awaiting the release of The Last Emperox-- is a distant future space opera about, well, an empire that is collapsing. Here's the deal. The empire in question is called "The Interdependency." It spans a bunch of systems that are mostly space stations and domes on otherwise uninhabitable rocks, and really only one inhabitable planet. That'd be End. Why is it set up that way? The Interdependency is spread out around a thing called "The Flow." The Flow is kind of like a hyperspace river, or something. You can travel faster than light within The Flow, but only along the pathways of The Flow. So, the settlements that make up The Interdependency are along The Flow, the way settlements have historically been placed along rivers and waterways. That was just how you traveled (and lived, given our need for water), so that was where the people were. Same deal. We're all good so far, but maybe you're noticing a bit of a problem. There's only one inhabitable planet in The Interdependency-- End. It's called "End" because it's at the ass-end of The Flow. It's really hard to get to, so it's basically a backwater. Everyone else is in domed cities, space stations, etc. That means everything is dependent on trade. Interdependent.
Like, I need sprockets, and you need widgets, so we trade. Otherwise, my dome and your space station break down, and we all die. That'd suck.
And here's where everything gets totally crazy. The Interdependency. Some wackadoo (her name was Rachela) came up with the idea of having each system be controlled by a family that gets a protected monopoly over a particular enterprise. So, I produce widgets in my domed city in my part of The Flow, you produce sprockets in your space station* in your part of The Flow, and we trade so that everyone gets along nicely.
So, if you know anything about economics, this should sound familiar. Rent. I have a government-protected monopoly over the production of widgets, and you have a government-protected monopoly over the production of Spacely's Space Sprockets, and because we are protected from competition, we get to charge whatever we want. Profit, above and beyond what a market would allow. The profit we get from that protected monopoly is called "rent," and rent is bad. Very, very bad. Except for the people who get it.
So, The Interdependency is one big rent-seeking scam. How the hell do you sell this scam? With two things. First, you tell people that the "interdependency" created by this system is necessary to end wars-- think creation of the EU, globalization of trade as a way to prevent WWIII in response to WWII. Second, make a religion out of it! Yup, tell people you had a divine revelation, and start a church around it, and combine that church with the state, and bam! Bob's your uncle, you got yourself a rent-seeking empire! You get the backing of the other merchant families by promising them their protected monopolies, and everyone wins! Except... consumers, but hey! You get filthy rich!
OK, so this system can chug along and keep people in sprockets and widgets and all that for a long time. It's all dependent on The Flow, though.
So, what if The Flow collapses? Oops. The first book-- The Collapsing Empire-- is about what happens as a scientist realizes that some anomalies mean that the flow is collapsing, and not merely shifting. A shift, and trade routes alter in ways that can be used, but a collapse? Space stations and domes need supplies, and if I only make widgets, not sprockets, and you only make sprockets, not widgets... you see the problem here? Remember, there's only one inhabitable planet. End. Trying to maintain those domes and space stations when they are set up to be interdependent for the sake of a rent-seeking scheme just doesn't work. They'll collapse.
In the second book, The Consuming Fire, some of the characters discover a space station long cut off from The Flow-- Dalasysla. A tiny group of people remained, hundreds of years later, having spent centuries scavenging from a massive space station and surrounding ships, but they're on the brink, and screwed. Without a planet, without the capacity to produce the parts and tools to maintain a station, there's only so long you can live in space.
Sorry, Neal Stephenson. Seveneves was fun, but I think Scalzi got it right.
Anyway, the point is that everything about how the Interdependency works requires The Flow. It requires trade. Without that trade, it all comes down. I'll be very curious to read how Scalzi resolves it in The Last Emperox, and he's given himself a couple of avenues, from End, to other stuff that I won't spoil if you want to read, but my point for today is the necessity of the supply chain, and what happens when it breaks down.
In The Interdependency trilogy, it brings down an empire. It does so because the empire is designed around supply chains. That is its function. Right now, supply chains are beginning to face disruption. How much disruption will they face eventually? Can they be put back on track? That... we don't know. There is so much we don't know about the economic impact of coronavirus, but we have an economically interdependent world. Not because some scam artist set up an international rent-seeking arrangement, but because the world works on the principle of comparative advantage. We have a more efficient system of production if my country produces what it can produce most efficiently, and your country produces what it can produce most efficiently, and we trade. Trade works, mercantilism is stupid, protectionism is the death of economics, and anyone advocating mercantilism or protectionism in the modern world... oy.
So, we need trade. Trade, though, is complex. It isn't even that a finished good is produced in one country anymore. Complex goods are put together piece by piece, with each piece completed in different countries, and that means there are so many ways that everything can break down. If you are following business news right now, you are seeing threads of this. At a basic level, any factory that can't produce, can't produce elements of the supply chain, and there are signs of countries introducing protectionist policies, not just with respect to immigration, but trade. So far, that's just for medical supplies, but once that starts, it's hard to say where it stops. The world is dependent on trade, and supply chains. Of course, this is a habitable planet. In most senses. Civilization as we know it, though, is dependent on the maintenance of supply chains, and as those are disrupted, we can see breakdowns that may, in principle, turn very ugly.
Where does this go? I don't know. I'm just referencing a fun trilogy of science fiction books, for which Book III isn't even released yet.
I'll conclude with a simple observation about science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc. Apocalyptic scenarios in fiction set around diseases tend to have diseases with mortality rates far higher than COVID-19. Not every disease-based apocalypse is Captain Trips, but in the scheme of things, the mortality rate here is far lower than what you will generally see in "genre" scenarios either that bring everything down, or even that just mess everything up. We are looking at a virus with a morality rate of probably somewhere around 2%, although I continue to see estimates ranging from far lower than that to up to 3.5%. Unfortunately, eventually, we'll find out the hard way. Even that high estimate, though, is nothing compared to, say, Kellis-Amberlee, about which I wrote last Sunday. That was the zombie plague from Mira Grant's Feed trilogy.
A virus can still do a hell of a lot of damage to the structure of civilization as we know it by shutting down not just domestic economic activity, but supply chains. Watch. And read Scalzi's books. They're at least fun, unlike this.
*Required by law to be called "Spacely's Space Sprockets"
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