On the Impossibility of Cultural Estrangement

Charles Stross writes on his excellent blog about the lack of cultural estrangement in far-future science fiction. His objection is that far-flung societies ought to be significantly removed from what is familiar to us; and yet many space operas present a future that is essentially the status quo, plus made-up technology:

The gender politics, religious framework, ideologies, fashions(!) and attitudes of today—specifically, of a type of Anglophone developed-world middle class lifestyle that lots of folks aspire to—has become a universal norm. And nothing else gets much of a look in.

He brings up two examples, one of which I am unfamiliar with; the other one is Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton, the first book in his Commonwealth series, of which I am a big fan. I have my own problems with Hamilton's writing, but they are not the same as Stross's problems. In fact, I was very surprised by his objections; and while Charlie is very good about engaging with his fans, the comment thread stands at 348 entries as I am writing this, and I just don't see the value of riding into the middle of the discussion on the back of a white rhino. So you get to read this on my blog instead.

My first counter to Charlie's objection is that he is guilty of this himself. He grants that Hamilton at least has a fig-leaf explanation, that the rich people who are the majority of Hamilton's protagonists have access to rejuvenation and their society is therefore frozen in time (in the later books, access to rejuvenation for the middle classes and working poor is also addressed). Yet let's look at Stross's own far-future books. He's come up with two compelling space-opera universes: that of the Eschaton (abandoned due to mechanical inconsistencies that bother Stross far more than they ever bothered fans), and that of Saturn's Children. In the latter, society is frozen in a sort of today-plus-ten-years, with middle-class aesthetics predominantly influenced by the Western fascination with Japanese pop culture which has - today, in 2014 - become thoroughly mainstream and is well on its way to being diluted into banality; and much of the rest of that world is a direct copy of the modern vintage hipster approach, co-opting the symbology that is already retro in his reader's time. Stross's fig-leaf excuse is that he is describing a rump society left over after humanity essentially ground to a halt, stopped reproducing and died out, all within a lifetime of the observer's now, and the remnants are compelled at firmware level to ape that moment in time when their creators perished. In the Eschaton universe, Stross goes further still - his god-machine takes various historical human societies, including quite recent ones, and deposits them around the universe in such a way that they would come into contact with each other simultaneously - but at different points in their own development. The compelling culture of the original Eschaton book is late-stage Imperial Russia, but with starships and lasers. The most distinctive culture in the second Eschaton book is literally Space Nazis.

Secondly, the most obvious retort: every writer is told to write what they know, and every reader consumes a story via their own perspective. For a human, fallible writer to create a universe that is fundamentally unrecognizable would be a neat trick indeed, especially if it is supposed to have developed from an existing modern one. Have any managed this? Answers in the comments, please...)

For the human fallible reader, that universe would be confusing and without meaning - the semiotic equivalent of opening a PDF document in Notepad. This is why the works of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells do not accurately describe real-life 2014-or-thereabouts. For even the best futurist to predict events more than a decade or two in the future, without firmly grounding them in historical precedent of similar developments, is a blind lottery: you might succeed accidentally and occasionally, but you can't pull it off reliably and repeatedly.

Thirdly, I think there is a counter-argument to be made to Charlie's assertion that a comparison of our present with our own past implies an unrecognizable future. Yes, the world of 2014 is incredibly different from the world of 1914; but that world is far less removed from 1814 in the view of the man on the street. And the world of 1714, in that same perspective, would be remarkably similar to the world of 1214. That's just taking Europe - a continent and culture that famously had a thousand-year chasm in its civilizational development, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance; and if Hamilton's criminally familiar universe is set 400 years in the future, well - there are 400-year-old buildings a stone's throw from where I'm sitting right now, still perfectly functional. And if I go into a shop, I can buy food from farmers and artisans who use 400-year-old methods to produce a premium, higher-added-value product. I live in a country that is often lauded in global media as the world's most advanced digital society, but in this same country, heating your house with a wood-burning stove is still a perfectly valid infrastructural choice.

The classic SF soundbite about the future being already here but unevenly distributed applies at both the macro and micro scales. Parts of our lives are incredibly advanced, but transport a modern literary novel four hundred years back in time, edit it slightly for spelling and vocabulary, and I think it would still be readable to the people of that age, as one of those new-fangled notions in the style of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Fourthly, I think the grounding of far-future SF in modern culture is simply a normal part of the compact between the reader and author. The escapism that draws readers to space opera is about being a better version of yourself - not about associating with someone entirely different. From the days of "Utopia", it is understood and accepted that the author uses the expanded horizon of speculative fiction to make a relevant point, to say something about the society in which we live today. If the future they have described does not come to pass, the artistic value of the work is not diminished - we still enjoy Verne and Wells, and Asimov and Heinlein.

The best futurists are not the ones who have guessed right - they are the ones who have presented a future so consistent, believable and attractive that the generation of their fans goes out and builds it.

And now for something different.

I'm going on vacation (motorcycle trip up to Nordkapp) and suddenly realized that my European medical insurance card - proof of insurance that gets me free healthcare anywhere in the EU and EEC - expired two years ago. Previously it was sort of irrelevant, because I had good travel insurance, but on this trip there's very little to insure - ferry tickets are cheap, and hotel bookings are usually free.

So I go on the Estonian state services portal, X-road, and order a new card. But it's going to take some time to get here, and I leave within a few days. I go to the health insurance authority's website and find that I can get a replacement certificate immediately at any of their regional offices, it's only valid for 3 months, but does the same things as the card, and it's also free. Excellent.

So I go to the Tartu office, and have a really weird interaction with the lady at the service desk. An older woman, she speaks to me in a really stern and loud voice. That leaves an unfriendly impression. But once I quickly explain to her what I need, and that I've taken all the other necessary steps (ordered the new card online, etc.), she quickly and efficiently prints out the certificate and explains to me all the relevant stuff - such as that it's in Estonian, but that's fine, because every country in the EEC prints them in their own language based on a common template, so a hospital will know which row contains which bit of info. A perfectly efficient and successful interaction that took me about three minutes from walking into the building, including finding the service desk itself. The only weird thing was the lady's tone.

Now, this is the point where a Mingus or a Vello Vikerkaar or a Justin Petrone might launch into a philosophical treatise on the Estonian psyche and the nature of customer service in this country. Mostly I've dismissed such wonderings - foreigner friends have told me about weird interactions they have had at places where I had no problem at all, so I generally think it's down to Estonians not being able to quickly parse the English of a visitor, or their non-Russian-accented Estonian: the clerk expects the foreigner to have, by default, a non-trivial problem, and experiences a brain freeze. But what was the weirdness in my interaction all about? The lady's tone didn't change all throughout the conversation, even though she understood what I needed before I even finished explaining, and in every other way her attitude was very efficient and helpful.

I thought about it for a while, and then it hit me. This is the administrative office of the health insurance agency. It exists for people who can't get their issue resolved online, for whatever reason. I was the outlier, the person who needed a piece of paper to be used abroad, a piece of legacy, backup technology for those venturing outside the cool, efficient environment of E-stonia. But who makes up the majority of the service desk's clientele? The elderly and the confused, people who can't figure out the Internet, or people who are just bored and come there with pointless queries to get some human interaction. The clerks at the healthcare authority have naturally trained themselves to speak slowly, loudly and succinctly, to convey information to people who are probably hard of hearing. And even when it's not necessary, they can't actually stop. And it wouldn't make sense for them to change their mental patterns just for a few minutes, for a rare type of customer.

It still feels weird, though.

How would this work, exactly?

There's a common argument that making taxes too high just leads to sneaky rich people squirreling away their capital in tax havens. The argument is, on the face of it, compelling: a huge number of filthy-rich Brits are not domiciled in the UK, meaning that they don't pay income tax to Her Majesty's Customs & Excise. Conversely, the new French president is talking about a 75% income tax on top earners, leading to the British PM saying he, for one, welcomes his new cheese-loving donors. I'll leave you to ponder just how much money a French tycoon is willing to pay just to avoid moving to London.

But does that work with the Estonian tax model? Since corporate profit gets taxed at the point it becomes someone's income, is it really possible to put the money in a bank in Grand Cayman and tell EMTA to go to hell? Yes, an investor gets his dividend in a lump sum and is personally responsible for setting aside the tax until it's due. But let's assume I took all the money and moved it abroad, to a place where the Estonian government can't get their hands on it.

What about next year?

The tax man knows exactly how much tax I owe, because the corporation is submitting its own records. If I am behind, enough for the tax man to really take an interest, surely he just orders the corporation to stop next year's dividend payout, and confiscates it to cover the taxes due.

This could get quite difficult in countries that attempt to tax one chunk of earnings multiple times, such as a tax on a person's net worth, or the notional appreciation of their non-liquid assets. Once somebody's moved their cash offshore - the clean cash, on which all the proper taxes have been paid - and continues growing that capital, either through deposit interest rates or stock market investments via offshore-based funds - it can be very hard to get a clear idea of just how much money they have at any one point. But Estonia only taxes actual income, at the point that it is converted to cash.

Leaving aside the issue of payroll taxes. Property taxes in most of Estonia are minuscule and only pay for the administration of the county clerk's office; this year, mine was too small for them to bother collecting. There is no inheritance tax. Capital gains of some types are charged as income - for example, buying a condo and selling it shortly after for more, if you can't prove that you actually lived there, the price difference is treated as income. I'm not sure how sales of artwork by private individuals are taxed, if at all. There is no car tax or pet tax, if we're getting really ridiculous.


I am genuinely interested. Is capital flight really an issue of loopholes, or simply of shoddy enforcement? I don't seriously believe the richest Estonians are paying their full share of tax, even though that share is the same as the rest of the country. I'm just trying to figure out the hole in my argument.


An investor won't abandon a working, profitable business just to avoid one year's tax. This is borne out by the convincing argument that the US has had tax rates of over 90% in the 20th century, and indeed, nobody's going to say, "if I make money on this deal, I'll have to give a lot of it to the government; so out of spite, I'll leave the deal and make no money at all!"

And to the French captains of industry: Welcome to Estonia! Our income tax is 21%, for everyone. And if we have to, we can learn to cook our snails and frogs.

In today's "what do you suppose happened there?" feature, I received a Stockmann catalogue by post, with a scrap of paper inside, listing all the alcoholic drinks mentioned in the spread, with a big warning that alcohol will damage your health. New EU directive?