Another objection is that clearly the locksteps are going to be vulnerable while they’re asleep. Those thirty-year spans are perfect opportunities for raiders to come in and steal all your stuff, and that’s true, but it’s only the human beings who have to fall asleep in the lockstep. Their defenses can be awake, or at least alert and ready to be awakened at all times. Another objection is that economically, obviously any planet that runs in real time will outperform the lockstep, like the thirty years and one month one, by a factor of 360 to 1. That might be true, but any world that operates like that will also be using its resources at a rate that’s 360 times faster than the lockstep, and more importantly, any world that’s running real time will have far fewer trading partners per lifetime, if you will, per lifetime of its citizen, than a lockstep. If you live in a lockstep, you can get trading goods from worlds that are light years away, from thousands of different planets, and you can trade with all of those planets. Subjectively, for you, it seems as if you send away for something, buy something that’s maybe a light year away, and it arrives a month from now. If you’re living in the lit worlds, living in real time, all of these things take much longer, and your number of trading partners is smaller. You’re living in a much more impoverished civilization, basically.
You mentioned the protagonist, Toby. Do you just want to say a bit about the characters and the plot of the book?
Everything I’ve said so far sounds very complicated and kind of abstract. The story itself is kind of a family drama, as a matter of fact. It all circles around Toby McGonigal, who is just coming of age when his family pulls up their roots and moves past the edge of the solar system to a homestead on the micro-planet Sedna. They do this because everything in the solar system is owned by the trillionaires. There’s no possibility for any wealth to be appropriated by anyone else anymore, so they want to escape. They want a homestead in a place where they could actually make something for themselves.
It’s kind of a desperate gamble. While Toby is taking a journey between Sedna and one of the nearby comets, an accident occurs, and he has to go into cold sleep to ride it out because his life support is failing. When he awakes, he discovers that he’s awoken to a completely different world because so much time has passed. Rather than cold emptiness and interstellar space, he’s surrounded by the lockstep empire, which is the oldest civilization known to man all of a sudden. Worse than that, he appears to be some kind of messiah for some kind of major religion in this civilization that he knows absolutely nothing about. Even worse, or even stranger than that, his younger brother and his younger sister are still alive, and for some reason they’re gunning for him. The book follows Toby as he tries to find out what the heck is going on, and also evade his inexplicable murderous siblings as they come after him.
One detail I really liked is that when Toby first wakes up, somebody talks to him and their voice sounds strange because they’re in an atmosphere that has more argon in the air. Could you talk about that?
The planet is “Lowdown.” That’s the name of it, and it’s got argon and neon in the atmosphere, which you can get on these trans-plutonian objects. It’s been hypothesized that Pluto has a large neon atmosphere. So one of the things the locals do is they pump oxygen into it. You can certainly breathe that mixture, although you tend to get intoxicated if there’s too much argon. You’ve got to keep the balance right. One of the things they do is they use the sky as a giant neon light and light their cities that way. It’s an incredible place of bizarre environments.
Another world has cities under the ice in a Europa environment, a global ocean under an icecap. Another one is a little cloud civilization of aerostats, two mile-wide spheres with life support inside them, floating in the sky of a super-Earth. So there’s nothing like Earth out there, but there are things that are really cool and places that have thrived using the lockstep method.
The Europa-like world you mentioned, I thought it was really interesting. You describe how it has water toward the core, and the gravitational force actually compresses the water into a substance harder than steel.
You don’t want to go down too far in that world. You certainly don’t want to drown. They’ll never find you. There’s that, and there’s, of course, the impossible cold that you have to deal with, but what happens is that during these month-long flowerings where the people in the lockstep extravagantly use their energies to turn their back on all of these harsh conditions and create Earth-like or exotic but wonderful environments for themselves, and to them that’s their whole life. They live that way all of the time, so it’s not a bleak and cold place for them at all.
Another idea I really liked was this idea that Toby’s been in suspended animation for 12,000 years, and so that means that there’s been 12,000 years for new diseases to develop that he might be susceptible to.
Civilizations have risen and fallen; languages, cultures, religions come and gone, but because the lockstep is always there, it’s developed into some kind of backup for humanity and for human civilization. So some catastrophe will happen, rogue A.I.s become godlike and devour everything, human civilizations fight wars and blow up each other’s planets and everyone gets blown back into the Stone Age, and then the lockstep wakes up, and they look around and say, “Oh, it happened again.” And they send their people in, and they rebuild the civilization, and over tens of thousands of years it happens repeatedly, and they’re always there to pick up the pieces. They literally do a backup and restore of human civilization repeatedly. One of the reasons they can do this is because, of course, they’re so insignificant as far as everyone else is concerned. They are in suspended animation nearly all of the time, and they’re in the places no one wants to go to, these little worlds between the stars. So no one has any incentive to go after them.
Another interesting implication of that is that the newest immigrants to the lockstep civilizations have the longest cultural histories.
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that one, and I wish, in retrospect, that I had spent more time on this idea in the novel. I might have to write another book to follow this thread, but yeah, for the people who started the lockstep only forty years has passed, which is why Toby’s brother and sister are still around, but for people who are joining the lockstep now, who are recent immigrants, it’s been around for over 10,000 years, and it’s literally the oldest, most stable culture that they know, and it’s woven into all of the myths and stories that they know going back into the mists of time. So they are the ones who are most familiar with the lockstep, and this paradox is something . . . wow, you could play with this for ages. It’s a fun concept, and one that I came across fairly late in the creative process because, of course, I was dealing with so many of the other implications as I went along, and all of the possibilities. It’s quite possible that there are other implications that are equally cool and bizarre that we just haven’t thought of yet.
Do you have specific plans to write any more fiction set in this universe?
I do have some ideas. There are ways to turn this around. You can look at this civilization from within lockstep time or you can look at it from real time, and the story can be told from both points of view, and intersections can happen as well. I do have a short story set in the universe called “Jubilee,” which you can download right now. It’s a Tor Books original. It’s available from, say, Kobo or Amazon, it’s like a dollar or two dollars to download. That explores some of the real-time implications of having a lockstep around if you live on a planet. There’s many possibilities yet in this world.
People can also read the story for free on Tor.com, at least, that’s what I did. It’s a terrific story. It’s basically told from the point of view of, as you say, people who live in real time, and there’s this kind of Romeo and Juliet . . . well why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the story.
It’s a really pretty banal story of young love, in some ways. It’s two kids who meet, fall in love, and exchange l
etters, but the thing is that they live in different locksteps. One lockstep could have a sleep to wake ration of 360 to 1, so 360 months asleep and one month awake, another lockstep could have another ration of let’s say 270 months of sleep to one month awake. This boy and this girl are from two locksteps that go in and out of phase with one another. In other words, they’re both awake at the same time only once every 900 years of real time. In order to be able to courier their letters between them they have to use the people who live in real time who see both of the civilizations whenever they awake, so they send their letters through a hereditary courier system, basically. And the story is of the last set of letters exchanged between them and of the courier who delivers them.
It was so interesting to me because it’s almost like you have this legend, this famous story of young love like Romeo and Juliet that everybody knows, that’s existed for thousands of years, but it’s still going on at the same time too. So it’s almost like these ultimate kind of fans get to interact and meet with Romeo and Juliet in a way.
If you just start to think about it, all kinds of other stories could be recast in the same way. “Sleeping Beauty” is the obvious one. But I made myself a list one day of myths and legends that fit perfectly into the lockstep universe, and there’s a whole bunch of them, so I’m very pleased, because, in a way, it’s like having discovered something, and now I get to explore it, but also the readers get to explore it, and the writers get to explore it, now that the idea is out there, anybody can write a story set in a universe like this. Nobody owns these ideas, so I’m curious to see what other people might do with the concept.
To what extent are there precursors to this idea in science fiction that you’re familiar with?
There are a lot. A lot of people have done similar things over the years. There’s really no new ideas. We all borrow and steal from each other, so I’m not going to claim some kind of tremendous originality here. What lockstep is is this synthesis of different ideas that people like everyone from Fred Pohl to Greg Egan have played with at one time or another. There are lots of explorations of hibernation and its implications that have been done, and of near-light speed, and of deep space civilizations. The trick here, or the innovation, is really only the synchronization of the cicada beds and the lockstep concept itself. The rest is, as I say, very well developed by many other writers over the years.
Some people I saw online mentioned Phillip Jose Farmer’s Dayworld series where it’s a much more modest thing, but the idea basically is that Earth is overpopulated, and so there are only enough apartments for 1/6th of the population, so 80% of the population at any given time is in hibernation, and then you wake up one day a week and share the same apartment with six other people who you never meet.
I haven’t read those stories, but it doesn’t surprise me. It never surprises me when I come up with an idea, and I get really excited about it, and then I find out that somebody did it potentially forty years ago. It’s fine, and that is another thing that you can do with the lockstep; in fact, in the novel we encounter planets where there are multiple locksteps that are out of phase with one another, and they share the resources of the world exactly as they do in Farmer’s story.
But as the saying goes, “nothing is truly new.” I’m not surprised that other people have done it before. The thing is to not say, “Oh it’s been done before,” and not try and do something new with it. All of these ideas are playgrounds for us all to try and extend and see what new things we can come up with, and that’s all I’ve done with lockstep.
You mentioned that most of the labor in this universe is done by robots, and there were some really interesting economics in the novel. Could you talk about that?
I encountered a problem—and I’ve encountered this with most of my books, actually—which Frank Herbert encountered when he was writing Dune. He wanted to have a particular kind of civilization, but that civilization would be essentially ridiculous and impossible if artificial intelligence and robots existed. So he, in the case of Dune, used the Butlerian Jihad. It was this holy war to destroy artificial intelligences, basically a political reason why there would not be A.I. in that particular universe. I did something sort of similar with the technology in lockstep. It was going to be a world much like the world Toby had known. In other words, his brother and sister don’t change much, even though technology advances spectacularly quickly around them. They just basically draw a line in the sand and say, “Okay, if you’re going to live here, you’re going to live this way.”
But the robot economy itself is essentially based on Rome. Rather than having hundreds of slaves, each person in the lockstep has a number of robots. It’s illegal for corporations to own robots; they can only own single-purpose machines. Only an individual can own robots, so what people do is they send their robots out as a workforce, essentially as their slaves to do the work for them, and they reap the profits. Except that what happens in the novel is that some people subcontract some of the robots. It saves wear and tear on the robots.
Just in our society right now, we’re having an increasing problem of technology rendering labor obsolete. Do you think that this idea of banning corporations from owning robots has any sort of analogue to something we might try today?
Maybe. We have this, certainly in the U.S., this legal concept of the corporation as a legal individual, which always struck me as kind of a dodgy concept. If a corporation can be a legal individual, then why not other things that are not strictly abstract entities, like, say, ecosystems, rivers, mountains? There’s a lot of flex and play in what we can consider to be a person and what we consider can own things. Actually, a lot of this is going to be highlighted very strongly in the next few years as bitcoin and the things that you can do with the bitcoin protocol start to hit the mainstream. We do need to create structures like virtual nations and virtual corporations on the bitcoin blockchain. So, far from being abstract, issues like this are actually going to become concrete real fast for us.
I went to a lecture recently by Jaron Lanier—he wrote a book called Who Owns the Future?—and his solution to this problem with technology making labor obsolete was something along the lines of micropayments for anytime you did something useful on the internet. I’ve also heard in Switzerland they’re experimenting with a certain guaranteed minimum income for anybody, so it doesn’t matter if technology renders all labor obsolete. Everyone is still provided for, in a sense.
A guaranteed minimum wage is kind of a no-brainer. We’ve experimented with it both in the U.S. and up here in Canada. The Canadian experiment was quite successful. If you don’t have a structure like that, eventually you get to a situation where you know you don’t need the workforce at all, but then you also don’t have any consumers. You have no one to buy the products that you’re making if they don’t have some source of income. So either you jack up corporate taxes and you feed that back to people as a guaranteed minimum income, or you find out some other way of continuing the circulation of wealth in society, so that it actually produces more wealth. Otherwise, it just gets concentrated as a kind of singularity event and that’s it.
I actually saw you say on Twitter, “This conversation has me wondering about leapfrogging, guaranteeing basic income via guaranteed ownership of certain assets.”
That’s just one thing I floated out there. Another idea that I’ve been exploring over the last few days is the idea of smart currency, a self-redistributing currency. In other words, it’s a bitcoin-like currency that looks around itself in the wallet and says, “Oh, there’s a million other of me here. It’s too crowded in here. I’m going to leave.” If there gets to be too much concentration of wealth, the currency itself, not any kind of legislature, or any kind of body, or any kind of human power structure, but the currency itself, redistributes a small fraction of itself into empty wallets on a random basis. You can do this with the kind of smart currencies that are made possible by bitcoin. So that’s another example of a possib
ility of a way to approach the problem. I’m sure there are many others. You can attach these ideas to various ideologies.
In fact, that’s what you find with the various alt-coins that are being created around the bitcoin protocol right now. People are creating alt-coins that represent one or some other political ideology or economic ideology. But you can also just approach this as a pragmatic problem, a problem in systems design, if you will, that in the end the solution might end up appearing to be capitalist, socialist, something else that you have never even imagined before. But the point is to think of imaginative ways to solve the problem.
I saw recently Charles Stross had an essay that unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to really read, but he was basically arguing that bitcoin was going to be a catastrophe. Did you see that?
I’m aware of the essay, and my interest is not in bitcoin as a currency, despite what I’ve just said. Bitcoin is the first throw of a completely new game. Regardless of the deficiencies of bitcoin itself, the protocols that lie behind it are the important thing. The problems that have been solved in creating it are far more important than the details of bitcoin itself. There are issues of societal trust, of law, of governments in general that have been solved in the creation of bitcoin. So for me, bitcoin itself is a distraction. It’s taking us away from examining the deeper implications of what the blockchain technology is actually capable of.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 23