Warning: this post may will probably bore you.

To avoid the problem I had last year, I decided to start researching and working out the backstory before the start of the 1,667-words-per-day torture that is NaNoWriMo. Probably a good move, as I've found myself getting mired in, of all things, economics.

The novel will be set on a generation ship, a slower-than-light interstellar vessel en route to a star system containing a planet suitable for human colonization. Obviously, with limited resources (and no natural resources), a radically different socioeconomic model will have to be set in place.

It is the ultimate job of everyone on board, crew and passengers alike, to reproduce, in order to maintain both a diverse gene pool and a specific population density. To that end, certain things must be guaranteed to everyone: food, living space, medical care, childcare, education. Such things are essential to the survival and stability of the community, so charging money for such things — and denying them to those unable to pay — would ultimately be detrimental in the long term.

Yet money can't be abolished altogether; humans aren't by nature altruistic. If the basic needs are automatically met, why would people bother to become educators, doctors, crew members — especially the more work-intensive jobs such as the mechanics and maintenance workers who keep the ship in top condition for hundreds of years? They'll have to have some incentive to work at such jobs. And though many Earth-based professions will suddenly become irrelevant aboard ship (realtors, architects, miners, automobile manufacturing, all of the agricultural-based industries, most resource-based industries such as oil and steel refining), there'll be other professions necessary in a population as large as I'm projecting (entertainers, lawyers, law enforcement, and so on). So anything above and beyond basic subsistence-level needs ("gourmet" foods, entertainment, literature, recreational facilities and so forth) should incur a cost to encourage the passengers to contribute work.

Some science-fiction authors have proposed "work units" as a basis for pay, with one hour of work resulting in one "wirr", "wu" or "credit", but I doubt the jealousy of the human spirit would make that workable. I think it's pretty unlikely that someone whose job involves a high degree of learning and skill wouldn't resent someone who gets the same pay for cleaning the nozzles on soup vending machines. So some jobs would pay higher than others, which would quite probably result in a class (or even caste) system. Which undoubtedly wouldn't lead to optimum conditions at the journey's end, when everyone will have to pitch in equally in order to establish the colony. So the "government" of the ship (probably the crew) would have to level things off somehow — preventing the inheritance of credits, for example — which would naturally lead to friction (or possibly worse).

Grrr. I don't want to make this a political novel, but even if the societal structure is relegated to the background, it'll have to be worked out. Hopefully it won't turn out as naïve as Marx's philosophy, which though it sounds nice and warm and fuzzy on paper, entirely neglects to take human nature into account.

On the other hand, utopian societies don't make for tremendously great storytelling. The trick would be to find a balance between using the pitfalls of an enforced economic system as a basis for storyline conflict, without being either expressly political or dry and boring (like this post).