I have not done any parodies before, though it's very clear I like humor and I read a LOT. Almost all of my stories have been completely original works, no fannish stuff among them. I have my own stories to tell, thankyewverymuch, and although I've taken some humorous jabs at this and that, I've never outright parodied anything.
And like most parodists, I'm a fan of what I'm parodying. I've read and enjoyed the entire EarthCent Ambassador series. But the definition of “parody” explains why I did it: “a parody targets or mimics an original work to make a point.” And I wrote “Late Nights At Onion Station” to make a point about something that bothered me about the original work: its libertarianism. I'm more of a socialist.
The libertarianism in the Earthcent Ambassador series is very subtle, well buried in the story. But once you see it, you can't unsee it: the EarthCent Ambassador series is a pure libertarian fantasy at heart. There are little clues: the protagonist, despite being the chief representative of humans on Union Station, is paid very little money, so little that she lives in a slummy area of the human sector of Union Station and has to save up money to buy a comfy chair.
Why is she paid so little despite her important government position? Because she's a government official, of course, and government is not important in libertarian fantasy land. While the protagonist of Union Station makes so little money that the food at diplomatic receptions is an important part of her diet, all her friends and acquaintances who are independent businesspeople make huge amounts of money from their activities. They can't do anything at all without making huge piles of money. Because they're independent entrepreneurs, you see: the good guys.
As a socialist, this was annoying, but what was REALLY annoying was the usual libertarian obliviousness to the fate of those who don't work out well in his paradise. This is in face my major problem with libertarianism in general: their focus is always on those who succeed in libertarian society, with a general feeling that almost anyone can succeed if you put forth a little effort, gosh darn it!
Most libertarians, in fact, have little or no interest in what happens to those who don't do well in their libertarian fantasy. Often you get a sense that they would be fine with people who aren't good bargainers in the free and open markets starving to death and dying, that they would happily kick their bodies aside on their way to the bank.
You can see this by the way libertarian authors focus on the successes in their stories and ignore the losers. The successful entrepreneurs who make scads of money and get loads of power in their lives are the FUN part of the libertarian fantasy. Of course that's who gets all the attention in a libertarian story.
But if you don't pay attention to what happens to all the other people in your society, you're basically building a hell on Earth, and honestly, that's what I think most libertarians are doing. They don't WANT to create a hell on Earth, any more than the original Communists wanted to create the Soviet Union from Imperial Russia, but as the Soviet Union demonstrated (and China) if you're at all sloppy in thinking about how you get to your paradise, you can so very, very easily wind up with a dictatorship or an oligarchy that commits crimes against humanity without so much as blinking.
And libertarians are even worse than Communists in this respect. They really, really don't want to deal seriously with the hard part of their fantasy, which is how do you handle the people who don't do so well in the free and open marketplace? The phrase “ideological blinders” was invented for this phenomenon. Libertarians are like architects who want to build a skyscraper that will truly scrape the clouds, but have little or no interest in building a solid foundation.
The problem is, when you look at any group of human beings statistically, for almost any set of abilities and skills, including success in business, if you graph the results it forms a bell curve, with the bulk of people falling in the middle of the curve, and a considerable portion (half, even!) falling on the wrong side of the halfway mark. That being the case, you need to ensure that your system, whatever it is, provides a decent standard of living to the people who fall on that wrong side, not just the lucky winners.
Just assuming that everyone will magically be above average in a libertarian scheme is ridiculous, but a lot of libertarians do just that.
I think the reason that libertarians aren't willing to address the “ground floor” issues is that it may require making an exception to their rule that every problem can be solved by the invisible hand of an unfettered marketplace.
It might require some crude actions like taxing the very rich and successful (the beneficiaries of the invisible hand) at higher rates to fund housing, food and medical care for the poor. It might require, in short, some form of socialism.
It's time to call the belief that the invisible hand of the marketplace can solve all social problems and allow people to live free of government of any kind what it is: magical thinking.
And that's what really bugs me about libertarians, that they let this magical thinking fuck them up time and time again, because you know, if they took the time and effort to work out how a libertarian society could help the losers in the marketplace, they might just have a robust ideology that could compete successfully with democratic socialism.
But they can't, they won't and they don't, and so they remain a fringe, though a markedly more successful fringe than their ideology deserves, because many parts of it (the economic parts) dovetail very nicely with traditional conservatism.
And so you have many, many science fiction books written with this profoundly dumb, magical thinking, wish fulfillment hoo-ha presented as a wonderful basis for a society to exist on.
I found a very nice way to dramatize the problems with libertarianism in the story. I also manage to point out how adherence to libertarian principles makes one inherently blind to the suffering of others. And I ramped it all up to 11, to make it funny. And by damn, it IS funny. Some of the best humor comes from annoyance. I hope you enjoy it.
