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!
