I missed The Desolation of Smaug movie when it was in cinemas, but my wife and I just watched it on Netflix, and while she was all ‘look at the giant dragon!’ I was all ‘look at the giant pile of cash he’s sitting on, I mean, I know dragons like gold, but Scrooge McDuck would weep. If Thorin and the gang plan on reintroducing that to the money supply Middle Earth is in for some hellacious hyper-inflation.’
Yep, I’m an economics nerd.
Like most fantasy fans, I love intricate worldbuilding, and writers like Sanderson, Jemisin, Le Guin and (of course) Tolkien exhibit in spades. When it comes to religion, language, xenobiology and magic systems, fantasy is as inventive as it gets: Sindarin, allomancy, dream priests, scarab-headed women, what more could you want?
When it comes to economics though? Invention tends to be less in evidence. I’m not saying fantasy writers don’t think about economics, quite the reverse – especially in some of the more recent, ‘grittier’ epics, it’s a massive driver of the plot. Economics is how the Lannisters derive their power in the early books of ASOIAF (they own gold mines, and the crown’s deep in hock to them), and the debts they wind up owing are an important strand in some of the later volumes. China Miéville’s Bas Lag novels, especially The Scar, and Iron Council are all about the bludgeoning power of economic forces, as devastating a weapon of an ambitious empire as any magic.
The thing is though, fantasy writers don’t seem play with the economic systems in their worlds the way we play with the religious or magical ones. As far as I can tell, we just faithfully reproduce them as they are in the real world.
Take money. The money of most fantasy worlds is of a really familiar type: precious metals, worked into coins, especially gold: Golden Dragons, Gold Galleons, to quote Terry Pratchett: “Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold…”
It doesn’t need to be that way, though. There’s nothing intrinsically useful about gold. It’s fairly ductile, but in pre-electricity age you aren’t going to care about that. Historically, it got used for coinage because it was rare and soft enough to work into small pieces: i.e. hard to get but easy to standardise and transport, but if you’re building a world from scratch, you can make your money anything you want.
Think about the evolution of money in Westeros, if it became apparent that the Lion’s share ( – geddit? Lannister? Lion? Oh I should see myself out? Okay – ) of your metal of choice for currency was in the hands one power-hungry family, that would be a pretty powerful incentive for everyone else to switch to some other medium of exchange, wouldn’t it? Just as in the real world people have used clay tablets and notched twigs (not to mention paper) as money at various times when the gold was scarce.
Why does it matter though? Why do I care? Partly, it’s because I am as I mentioned, a massive econ nerd, but mostly because economics is a huge world-building and story-telling opportunity. Whatever commodity the people in your fictional universe land upon as the universal medium of exchange, it’s going to mark them. It’s going to affect how they think, and wind its way into their language and their stories. It’s going to be what they wind up describing as the root of all evil, or the adjective that describes their particularly gifted generation of athletes. It’s going to be what their dragons sleep on.
It’s going to say an absolute ton to your readers, about the world, and about the characters that live in it.
I was trying to play with this when I wrote The Glass Republic, the second Skyscraper Throne novel. In it, London-Under-Glass, the city behind the mirrors, is a society obsessed with beauty. And your face is a commodity, its features separable and tradeable: the rich are beautiful, and the beautiful rich. As for the poor, they lack a face as well as a voice, and some of them will kill to get one.
(Okay, I never said I was subtle.)
So if you’re building a fantasy-society up from scratch, why not spend a little while thinking about the economy? It can take you to some interesting places, after all, when they said ‘money makes the world go round’ they never said what money,
Or which world.
P.S. I read super slowly, so I’m not the widest read. It’s entirely possible I’m just missing all the super-inventive economic systems in fantasy. I’ve heard Daniel Abraham’s Dagger and Coin sequence is spectacular for it. Anything else I should be looking out for? Let me know in comments, and cheers!
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Tom Pollock is the writer of the Skyscraper Throne series. The Guardian, in a review of the first book, praised Tom as ‘a powerful new imagination’ in the genre. The third book in this series, Our Lady of the Streets, is due out this Month, August 2014. As well as writing incredibly inventive fantasy novels, Tom Tweets and Blogs. Be sure to follow him!
Kellie Doherty
Julia Kitvaria Sarene
Jennie Ivins
Excellent post. The Aztecs and Conquistadors are another example – the Aztecs couldn’t understand why the newcomers were so obsessed with a pretty but commonplace metal and not at all interested in their precious feathers.
I recently blogged about fantasy economics, but only encouraging world-makers to consider it (I think a lot of people genuinely believe that economics didn’t exist before the 18th century). I like your suggestions about being inventive with it.
Funny enough, one of my favourite fantasy series out there is actually all about the economics. Spice and Wolf, by Isuna Hasekura, focuses almost entirely on the economics. With only a dash of supernatural in a world eerily reminiscent of ours, it’s a blast of a story that I highly recommend if looking for more economic oriented tales.
The manga(of which there are several,the versions that has” KOTOWARU” in the title is the best) and anime(pretended that it dosen’t) Maoyuu: Maou Yuusha – “Be mine, Hero” “I refuse!” dose focus on the impact of economic am technical development in a fantasy world. Along the occasion bit of balls to the wall action.
This was a brilliant post. In all honesty, playing about with the money system was something I decided not to invest too much time into, because I felt that so much in my fantasy world is already foreign that if there aren’t enough of the little familiar things to create footholds for the reader, then it would put them off. I know it’s sure happened to me in the past.
However now I think it would be worth giving the mechanics of money more attention. In most fantasy tales, especially the adventurous ones, it’s so vitally important to the survival of the characters! The concept of beauty as a commodity is soo uniquely interesting. It’s making me think about economics in a very different way.
Did anyone see the recent documentary about the Mesoamerican kingdom of salt. It seems they traded locally scarce salt for the gold for offerings they sacrificed in the sacred waters of a deep lake. The conquistadors were sure they would find gold mines. Apparently, the wealth came from salty springs! Pits me in mind of the worth-their-salt Roman legions.
Was that one of the Lost Kingdoms of South America ones? I seem to remember that talking about a realm whose great wealth was in salt. It’s not really surprising – historically, salt is one of the most intrinsically valuable commodies there is, only surpassed in the 20th century by oil.
Thanks so much for this thought-provoking post. I’m going off to do a little tinkering with Book 2 now….
What an excellent post. Thanks for this. It is something that is so often overlooked, and fantasy and in SF. It’s going to give me a new avenue of thought for world-building going forward.
Great post. Generally all economies are based on a type of currency – more currency has more value. It sounds like a key distinction would be whether the currency itself has some intrinsic value (salt, metals in the Mistborn novels, beauty in the author’s example) or if it’s simply a token of value (gold/coins). You could also have an economy whether there isn’t really a currency – a barter-based market. Coins are really just an intermediate in a barter-based market.
Using something biological (beauty) as a currency is an interesting twist. What about muscle, or brain cells [under the premise that brain cells correlate to intelligence]?
Bravo. I never thought about the importance of money.
[…] Clarkesworld Magazine did interviews with some authors about the economics of their worlds, and Fantasy Faction has a post about it […]
[…] So my approach is going to be non-technical, cursory, and simple. If that’s too simplistic for you, then check out the books Grain Into Gold and/or Farm, Forge, and Steam (the last of which is free), or some interviews from Clarkesworld Magazine or Fantasy Faction. […]