Excerpt from Novel Project 1

“What in Dys is this?” Veit asked his sister as he examined the plates on the cafeteria dinner counter.  “It looks like a...meat egg.”  

    

“It’s haggis,” one of the servers said.  “Sheep.”

    

“What part of the sheep?” Veit asked.

    
“Most of it.”  The server turned back to his work.

AESIR Excerpt

AESIR is currently requesting an exception from the UN Space Treaty for the deployment of weaponized geosynchronous mass drivers; the request has thus far been denied as, in the words of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “we cannot authorize major exceptions to legislation regarding weapons of mass destruction merely because it is thematically appropriate.”

Magitech Revolution

So, this one time I needed to figure out what the economy of a magically industrialized civilization would look like.

I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the end result to look like:  a combination of steam and magic power, late 19th/early 20th century.  I had a pretty good idea of what magic was and wasn't capable of, the manufacture of magical tools, etc., so I knew what kind of materials would be in demand and some of what would be possible to manufacture.

The empire I have been/am building is one that I want to be seen as the kind of place readers might like to live.  This gets into the area of my ideological biases, and for some excellent thoughts in that head space I recommend you check out this article before continuing further.

It's cool.  I'll wait.

Most of my ideas on the kinds of policy this state would have are spurred by things I think we in America should be doing better.  I'd also dearly like it to be as authentic as possible.  Call it practical idealism.  The main characters are going to be members of this empire and while I will have a lot of fun with some of the bad things that happen in their system (it's human-based and therefore as prone to error and abuse as anything else) I would ultimately like it that when someone says, "I'm from the Empire and I'm here to help," the reader will more likely than not give them the benefit of the doubt.

I may have also bolted on some things that may not be optimal legislative or socially but I think are fun.  I think the concept of holdover pseudo-ceremonial feudal rank makes for a cool garnish, but I'm not about to suggest we start appointing anyone to a dukedom.

HAHA! CROWNS FOR EVERYBODY!

So I have some political and technological goals that this economy needs to serve, and a little vice versa-making sure there is a level of economic empowerment for people is going to require particular laws be in place as well as certain societal checks and balances.

The basic principle behind developing this economy was that it was the state's responsibility to equip all of its citizens with the tools they need to better themselves.  This includes a guarantee of healthcare, food, education and housing.  I'm a big believer in capitalism and competition as an excellent engine of progress, but for that engine to be the best that it can be it needs to be made out of the best materials you can find.

I came up with some historical reasons for why a society would develop like this and tried to figure out how it all would come together.  Healthcare is relatively easy as there are extant systems that work in a fashion that I find compelling.  Food can be obtained through subsidy, and in a setting where the government is paranoid about being cut off from a food supply the subsidies will be coming in from both directions.  Education is another system that is already done pretty well in some places.

Housing presented a problem as I always associated government housing with poor conditions and upkeep, however again it appears that's just because we are doing it wrong.


So there's a lot of government investment in the economy, as well as a large amount of regulation.  That means taxes.  And because they have a military that makes up about 6% of the population, they are going to need an assload of taxes.  I'm trying to keep things pretty progressive, so that means the more you make the more tax you have to pay.

My idea of the way taxes work is a yearly income tax being the sole method of collection: any money you receive from a salary, sale of stock, any time money comes into your possession, it's taxed as income.  Tax fraud results in heavy prison sentences and is very expensive.  On the other hand, there's no property tax, no sales tax, no other taxes to think about-just a percentage of the money you've made in the previous year.  There are even local tax offices that provide compliance services to make sure the process is relatively painless for everyone.

Now, obviously the best way to try to evade this is to attempt to pay people in barter.  This is, however, both fairly inconvenient compared to using cash, and the biggest earners most likely to benefit from it are going to be some of the closest watched by the in-universe version of the IRS.  Again, no system is perfect: some people in both high and low society are going to avoid taxes.  They, however, will be a small criminal minority.

What do you mean I can't declare Aragorn as a dependent?  He's only 87!

So I have an economy where food is very cheap and readily available, shelter is easy to come by, healthcare and education are provided and there are heavy taxes.  What about income-generation to provide for both taxes AND provide spending money to support growth and a consumer-based economy?

Food production and manufacturing will be large sectors, especially as while the magitech available does not automate things it does provide very significant labor multipliers.   Exporting both food and finished goods would be significant sources of income, though the technology level of the rest of the world is such that it could not absorb the level of exports the Empire could theoretically provide.  That is why internal consumption is so important, not just as an engine for growth and advancement but to keep money and goods flowing through the system.  Fortunately, there is not any real competition for home magitech appliances, and the infrastructure doesn't exist elsewhere to support them.  There are cultural and historical reasons for this-and the Empire isn't about to share the most critical magitech that allows it to hold a monopoly on a high standard of living.

Now, there is another facet here: corporations.  I was thinking that by law corporations would need to issue voting stock to their employees with a certain dividend payment from any profits (I don't know that I'll need to specify a percentage here; if I do, I'll have to figure that out as well).  There would also be fairly strict controls on corporate expenses in lieu of salary to avoid the tax dodge of having all your expenses paid for by a corporate account that technically doesn't belong to anyone and therefore isn't taxed.

Big stick? More like MAGIC stick!

So there's a lot of money here that is circulating into the state, but it's circulating back in the form of needed services and back into private businesses when people have the means to buy neat new stuff and better their station in life.  I'm a big believer that most people will actually try and go out and make money to eat better food, take in entertainment, live in nicer surroundings and feel accomplished.  Especially when they see their neighbors being able to move up by doing so.  Sure, there will always be some people who live mostly on the dole, but I don't think a few people taking advantage of a system should cancel out all the people who benefit and contribute back.  Here there are also some checks on abuses by corporations as well.

Those are the kinds of thoughts that I go into when designing the background economy to a setting.  They're not just important for a worldbuild-wank, but inform the kind of backgrounds characters have and references they will make to the way their culture works. 

Fantastic Economics

Creating fantasy economies is hard.

First, one needs to have an understanding of the kind of economy they are attempting to model.  In fantasy, this is usually a medieval economy.  Second, one needs to be able to extrapolate how additional services and required materials will disrupt and modify that baseline.

There has already been a bit of work in that vein.  Some of it is good, some of it doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Extrapolating particular technologies and wizardry can have unintended consequences for your setting; you can easily accidentally industrialize it if particular things are easy and cheap.  Feudal economies came about to grapple with particular sets of problems using particular resources and skills that they had at their disposal.  They depended on conditions where there was relatively little trade, education or marketable goods.  With an increase of these three you begin to see larger cities, specialized professions and general growth in society.

Thus, magic and wizardry will likely both depend on and contribute to a society's economic growth.  You need academies for wizards-or, at least, mentors that receive some rumination for teaching and doing wizardly things.  That is, unless wizardly things take care of basic necessities like food, shelter, etc., in which case everybody wants to be a wizard.  So there has to be an infrastructure there to support them.  For an infrastructure to be there, wizards have to provide some sort of service.  A service that likely enhances economic conditions in some way, whether through producing goods or blowing up other people who want to take them away/are competing with you/have land you want, etc.

Do you provide services and/or fireballs?

Shoot, maybe the wizards are the ones in charge of the feudal society.  In a lot of cases this makes a lot of sense, as the upper echelons are the only ones that have time for education.

One therefore needs to figure out what conditions will be like to have a plausible basis for the number of wizards running around their world and what they can do.  This is a LOT of devil in the details work, and as much as I wish I could provide further thought on the matter building something like that is highly dependent on what you are attempting to accomplish.

An area that has not received a great deal of thought that I have been able to find is how one might model a magitech society.  That is, a magically industrialized economy.  This is particularly relevant to me because I've had to design one from scratch.

More on that later.

Comitatus

For some time now I've been fascinated by the idea of the comitatus, the group of heroes who form a collective legend.  Recent examples would include groups like the Avengers, but I haven't found very many of them compelling.  The Avengers as presented in the movies aren't really a team with, well...history.  They are thrown together, accomplish a common goal, and then go their separate ways. 

The kind of comitatus I find compelling is more in the vein of Buckaroo Banzai's Hong Kong Cavaliers.

Not exactly King Arthur's court.

They've got history and community, a kind of shared culture.  It makes them far more interesting, and allows them to pull on more threads than a bunch of heroes who join together just because they can't deal with a threat alone.

You almost have this with Thor's Warriors Three + Sif + Loki, but the presentation doesn't make me feel like these are characters that have known each other for, well, centuries.  Now, I imagine this is extremely intentional as to make them as accessible to audiences as possible.  Banzai managed to get away with a lot that most producers would likely see as risky, and the result is a more authentic and compelling movie - and a more compelling and authentic group of heroes.

I'm hoping to achieve a group with that level of authenticity as I write now.  I like to imagine a small community like my own circle of friends could achieve heroic things, and I think other people would like to think the same.

Dark Radio

Recently I've become enamored with the idea of radio presentation.  Specifically, the kind that is professional but, for lack of a better term, intimate.  The kind that makes you feel like it's just you, the radio and a host in a room somewhere, all alone, speaking to the night, the only other sound being the occasional rustle of papers in the background.

I kind of wish I had a reason to get one of these.

I'm thinking of incorporating something similar into my Sentinels urban fantasy project.  Some sort of mysterious radio voice that could add to atmosphere and act as an instigator.

Some good examples of this sort of thing can be found at thedebofnight and WBJC during their news segments.  It's likely a combination of little production and equipment that emphasizes deeper, darker audio tones.

Another neat project might be to do an in-universe podcast along those lines.  Don't know that I have the voice for it, though.

The First Last Thing I've Published

Amelia Belden's Ratcatcher Service.

Well, half of it.

I was once a Many More!

The folks over at Steampunk Tales decided to serialize it, so they put the first half in issue #13.  Somewhat fittingly, that's the last issue they ever put out.  You can't even buy it online anymore, and it was a little bit of effort to get a decent sized picture of the front page.  Their website appears to be hosted by a Japanese early retirement/investment scam. Oddly enough, their Facebook page is still active.

Sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there who read the first part and dearly wished to find out how it ended.

I also wrote and revised a sequel.  It occurs to me that if I should write enough to fill a book, I might want to try and have it go as a collection.