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While glad to hear you are thinking of that next “Share” novel and exploring the darker side of the ‘verse. Sounds intriguing.
However, please don’t forget “South Coast”. Lots of us hoping for that next one. 🙂
Please. 😀
1) There is – obviously – room for *EVERYONE* in the Deep Dark.
2) Bean (the lead character in Ender’s Shadow) is not trying to kill Ender.
3) I think the most idyllic part of life on the Lois was the utter lack of “Other Duties As Assigned”, the kind of bullshit jobs assigned simply to keep someone busy, and which all too often are used a way to push someone else’s job onto someone, leaving them doing too damned much during their shift, and *STILL* having extra BS to do after they’re officially off-duty.
4) Your discussion of Pip using credit chips, vs. the electronic transfers with fingerprint readers in the tablets (and I do hope – please – that there is more than just fingerprint reading going on!), strikes a note with me, as I run a trophy & plaque shop – but I do *not* accept the more electronic forms of transactions – such as credit cards and debit cards. I do get a large number of customers who’d like to use them – but they have no problem going to hit the ATM in the bank in the parking lot to get cash. This kind of thing is likely to continue – under the table deals, or simply the convenience of having value to trade without the need for having a bank account set up locally – with the shown speed of information transfer in the Solar Clipper universe, it’s not likely that individuals are going to set up accounts in every port; more likely they would make transactions against a ship account, which would get reconciled against their pay checks, and the ship accounts against the home office accounts at visits to the home port. However, I would expect that for walking around, such as transactions in the flea markets, credit chips would be the way things would be handled, save for larger bulk transfers such as Pip buying significant quantities of an item for private trading. However, these kinds of transactions, you really never *show*, one way or the other – no mention is made of the Co-Op having a separate PDA/ship’s tablet for carrying out sales on, nor do you show Ish counting out credits, for example to the shaman at St. Cloud. Until you present a Word of God that all legitimate transactions go through the ship/station nets, the reader is left to their own imagination as to how it works, and those of us who still use cash on a regular basis are going to presume that it works likewise in the future.
5) Barter and alternate currencies – these are in play even today – and sometimes in surprisingly high levels of economic value. As money started out, it was simply a way of keeping account of incomplete barter trades, or in a sense, of trading trades. The insane complexity we have raised it to in the last 500 years or so, starting with Corporations and up to the default credit swaps and other BS financial instruments the largest financial institutions use to create money out of thin air, is what has brought about the majority of the instability in the economic systems.
However, there are also a number of alternate currencies already in play – green stamps, frequent flyer miles, etc. There were reports in older magazines of towns in Alaska where old *checks* would be traded around, simply because there was a need for a currency that was not being met for one reason or another. Currency is simply what people agree is worth something – and electronic currency always has the problem of float – if you can visit planets B, C, and D before C & D have gotten the updates from planet A that you’ve spent the money on B & C, and it’s a throw-away account created with false information, then you’ve created money from no-where. The modern credit/debit card electronic transfer system would not be possible without the essentially instantaneous transfer of information to prevent that abuse of float.
Libertarians think on this stuff a *LOT*.
I do have to wonder if some of this darker traffic takes place through “bunk bunny” ships. To a great degree, as seen through Ish’s eyes, we’ve been presented with a very negative view of such ships – but this negative view also contributed to Ish’s problems with Gretchen, as he never was properly presented with the full understanding of family ships as a third alternative – nor does anyone ever seem to really suggest that not all bunk bunny ships are the result of lax discipline (like the Tinker), but may well be something of an alternate culture with its own rules and strictures to keep things under control.
Still – ultimately – it’s your verse. I’ll most likely keep reading, unless you end up with Ish joining the Joint Committee Marines. Then, I’ll have to decide… But you said you’ve been writing the stories you haven’t been able to find – and Ish joining the Marines would almost certainly be a story it’s not hard to find already written, just with a different name as the lead.
On alternate currencies … I wonder if perhaps there might be a currency from some world that might be widely used by people wanting less traceable transactions (a la Pip’s credit chips). Sort of like US dollars are used widely around the world (you can’t walk in to a shop in Europe and expect to pay in dollars… but you can in China). I don’t really think it would be metal coins or paper notes at that stage, but perhaps chips.