Finding Conflict in a Post-Scarcity Future
So, I wrote a novel. It’s called Mercyblades and it’s about a trio of transhuman vigilantes fighting the good fight in an optimistic, post-scarcity future. I encountered an interesting challenge while writing it: Where do you find conflict in a sci-fi utopia? Let’s talk about it…
What is post-scarcity & how does it work?
In short, it’s a hypothetical economic situation where goods can be produced so cheaply, and in such abundance, that everything is effectively free. To put it another way, everyone is independently wealthy. Sounds pretty good, right? If you want a new space house, you design it and send a probe out to the Kuiper belt to grab some cold, dead rock and process it into the spin-gravity habitat of your dreams.
In Mercyblades, this is achieved with a combination of fusion power and automated manufacturing. Access to places and resources is controlled through a system of trust networks. If I like you, you can have access to my stuff. If I don’t… fuel up your ship and get the hell off my station, cause the tech won’t let you do anything else.
At the macroscale, all of these trust judgments are aggregated into a kind of distributed, direct democracy. Preferences are weighted by proximity, so the opinions of people in orbit around Saturn matter less to what happens back on Earth and vice versa. The only codified laws are about human rights. For example, self-determination: If I don’t wanna play by your rules, I’m always free to leave your community.
Why was it a writing challenge?
Most of the thrilling situations you find in adventure fiction come from oppression or crime, usually fighting them. In my rosy vision of the future, there’s no real motivation for either. When everything’s free, there’s no need to steal (or to police theft). When everyone can build their own world, there’s no utility in oppressive regimes (or freedom fighters). When your mind is software, crimes of passion can be prevented before they happen (no surveillance or police state required).
Where were the space pirates?! Where was the evil empire?! I needed people for the Mercyblades to cross swords with and conflicts for them to cross swords over!
So, that was a challenge. At the same time, it didn’t want to give up me optimistic vision of the future. I love Blade Runner and the Expanse, but they just transpose modern-day social problems into the future, as if there’s nothing we can do to improve the human condition. I wanted to embrace to potential for a technological utopia and explore it.
Finally, I’m a big fan of cool megastructures like O’Neill Cylinders and Orbital Rings. You need a massive construction capacity to build things like that and, at that point, providing food and shelter for people is a rounding error. If we’re being reasonable, settings with such miracles have to be post-scarcity.
So… where did you find conflict?
In a few places, but it took some digging. The first is in the subversion of human rights. When any jackass can build their own bottle world and f — right off into deep space, some of those jackasses are going to be cult leaders or tyrants. They’re going to abuse the people under their care, using all the manipulative tricks we know today.
As a child of the nineties, and a student of psychology, I can name a lot of different kinds of cults. The antagonists in Mercyblades became a rogue’s gallery of charismatic leaders, multi-level marketing schemes, two-faced utopians, oppressive luddites, and more. (And one misogynistic hunting preserve, Westword meets Jurassic Park.)
The Mercyblades’ whole bit is that they identify people who need help escaping an abusive situation, they infiltrate the bottle world where they’re being held, and break them the f — out!
The second place I found conflict was in the issue of personhood. In a democratic civilization of immortals, you have to take the creation of new people pretty seriously. If bad actors could just spin up infinite copies of themselves, like stuffing a ballot box, the whole system would fall.
So, I made one of my protagonists an illegal person: a copy of someone who died shortly after making them… and committing a horrible crime. Ashe was born an outlaw twice over. That puts her in conflict with Arbitration, a group of volunteers who monitor and maintain the trust network system.
So, there are a few legitimate sources of conflict, even in a post-scarcity utopia, but I also realized that there are lower stakes for violence. With so much medical technology, damaging someone’s body becomes less a matter of assault and more like a property crime. Duels over honor, brutal gladiatorial combat, and exciting space battles might just be part of everyday life. That’s good news for Roka, my swashbuckler, but bad news for everybody else.
Oh, and in the sequel I’m planning, there’s a fourth source of conflict: shenanigans. The artists’ colony around Saturn is full of people vying for fame and status. They often engage in acts of sabotage or vandalism and, so long as the results are entertaining, nobody gets in too much trouble. Combined with the low stakes for violence, these shenanigans can get pretty exciting… especially when you’re a gullible tourist!
What advice to you have for other authors?
It’s been said that science fiction is a genre about technology solving all our problems… and cyberpunk is about how it won’t. Mercyblades falls somewhere in the middle. It’s about how technology can solve our problems, but only if we’ll let it. Even in a utopian future, there will be people who reject progress or insist on oppressing each other. Technology doesn’t have to be the root of every evil.
Mercyblades is now available on Amazon Kindle.
