It is a fact universally acknowledged that all trends continue without limit, whether the top speed of vehicles, the growth of the human population of Earth, or the acceptance that all trends grow without limit. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude from the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands that there will come a day when one person owns the whole of the Earth.
Luckily for SF readers unsure what such a situation would mean for them, SF authors have long pondered how such a situation might arise and what the consequences might be. Consider these five works.
Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith (19751)
Rod McBan faces two existential threats. First, he cannot pass his native Norstrilia’s adulthood test, which means that Rod will eventually be euthanized. Second, Rod might not live long enough to fail the test. Honorable Secretary Houghton Syme is determined to usher Rod into the grave through fair means or foul.
With the help of his faithful computer, Rod is able to parley his already vast wealth into an even vaster fortune. This in turn allows him to purchase the Earth. Thus, Rod can flee Norstrilia’s adulthood test and Syme’s kill-birds for the safety of distant Earth. Or at least comparative safety—Earth is an old and complicated world, and by purchasing it, Rod has entangled himself in a struggle about which he knows nothing.
There are some parallels between Norstrilia and Dune: both are arid, both are the sole source of an immortality drug. There is one very important difference: Norstrilia is a sovereign world and the austere life imposed on them by the planet’s draconian import duties and eugenic laws are the result of a conscious choice by the Norstrilians themselves to avoid the corrupting effects of luxury.
“Call Him Lord” by Gordon R. Dickson (1966)
(Originally published in Analog, collected in The Man From Earth and other collections.) Earth is but one of the hundred worlds the Prince will own… once he is of age. Even Emperors-to-be are bound by the law. Thus, the young heir is required, just as his predecessors were, to return to the mother world. That the Prince would prefer not to go is of no consequence.
Kyle Arnam has the unhappy duty of escorting the Prince. Kyle discovers that the future emperor is a boy who believes he is a man, a spoiled aristocrat who cannot conceive that his every whim will not be indulged, a crown prince who is in no way suited for the throne to which he is entitled, and most importantly, a fool who cannot understand that he is being tested… or comprehend the consequences of failure.
Language can be ambiguous. For example, Kyle twice assures the Prince that “your life is in my hands, Lord.” The Prince assumes this means that Kyle is his bodyguard. As it turns out, the Prince is an idiot who has seriously misunderstood Kyle’s role.
Michaelmas by Algis Budrys (1977)
Laurent Michaelmas is a journalist without compare. This is because Laurent secretly possesses the nigh-omnipotent AI called Domino. Domino has infiltrated every electronic system on Earth. There are no secrets that Laurent cannot uncover; no inconvenient truths Laurent cannot order edited to better suit his goals. Laurent effectively controls reality and in a very real sense, owns the Earth.
Except, somehow, Laurent does not. It becomes increasingly clear that someone or something is working against Laurent’s grand plan. Whoever it is, they are utterly invisible to Domino and Laurent. Is Laurent the planetary puppet master he believed himself to be, or is he simply blind to his own strings?
It’s amazing what one can accomplish given only a single, unique nigh-omnipotent AI (see also Norstrilia). I don’t know why more people don’t use them.2
Knight Moves by Walter Jon Williams (1985)
Eight hundred years ago, Doran Falkner solved Earth’s material problems, from energy supply to relativistic star travel to extended lifespan. There was a price: anyone seeking immortality had to surrender their terrestrial wealth and emigrate to one of the many newly discovered habitable exoplanets. Almost everyone agreed, with the result that Doran is now effectively Earth’s owner.
Eight centuries of immortality and isolation equal stagnation and worse. The discovery of an alien lifeform that can teleport at superluminal velocities offers hope of ending the isolation, if the trick can be duplicated. What genius is better suited to the task than Doran Falkner, the man who saved the Earth? Or rather, Doran Falkner, the man who took credit for saving the Earth and has been lying about it for almost a millennium…
The novel makes it clear that the real problem isn’t the isolation, but the fact that people can become quite peculiar after centuries of carefree indulgence. The reason that the characters fixate on the superluminal travel challenge is the same reason that a drunk person looks for lost keys under a streetlight, rather than in the dark where the keys were dropped: it’s a physics problem, which, unlike social issues, is solvable.
Jupiter Ascending, written and directed by the Wachowskis (2015)
Jupiter Jones cleans Chicago homes for a living. This humble occupation keeps her off ICE’s radar and safe from deportation (at least for the moment). There is nothing remarkable about an impoverished housekeeper. Why, then, do alien assassins keep trying to kill or kidnap Jupiter?
Earth is a farm and humans are its product. Thanks to a quirk of galactic law, Jupiter now owns the Earth. Academic, unless Jupiter is somehow apprised of her legal rights and how to use them. That development would inconvenience powerful oligarchs. No great concern for the off-worlders. After all, how hard could it be to kill one cleaning woman?
While not a perfect movie, Jupiter Ascending is perhaps the finest two-hundred-million-dollar film featuring a hunky, brooding wolf-man flying around on anti-gravity roller skates. After watching it, I had just two complaints3: why, given the amount of time Jupiter spends falling off high structures, was she not given her own set of anti-gravity boots? And how could someone cast that particular actor (you know the one) in a supporting role and not kill their character? Isn’t that illegal?
It is striking how many stories about People Who Own the Earth are really about the corrupting effects of wealth and status, a subject I am sure will have absolutely no relevance in the days to come. Still, it makes me wonder if there are any stories about people who own Earth that are not about the toxic effect of unchecked privilege. Any examples come to mind?
- Although the two stories that make up Norstrilia, The Planet Buyer (AKA “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth”) and The Underpeople (AKA “The Store of Heart’s Desire”), appeared about a decade earlier.
- Real AI, I mean, not spicy autofill or plagiarism engines.
- Well, three complaints. The third is in no way unique to this film. It was filmed in macular-degeneration-vision, which meant I had to watch it in pitch darkness. Even then, it was hard to tell what was going on. Older films and TV shows don’t have that issue on rewatches. I don’t know why modern productions embrace presentations that make it next to impossible to watch the films and shows in question.
At the end of This Immortal AKA …And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny, Conrad becomes the owner of the Earth because the alien Vegans don’t want to deal with it anymore.
Yes, and Knight Moves is rather plainly a tribute to And Call Me Conrad. I even seem to recall Williams saying something to that effect on his blog.
I saw this too late. Great book!
Not Earth, but there was an interesting novel called MONUMENT that was going to be adapted—Starlog had a write-up early on.
An inexplicable typographical error appears to have occurred. In my version of this piece, I specified that Jupiter Ascending was by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski. Would it be possible to correct what was no doubt an entirely unintentional elision and credit the creators by their full names?
At least this elision didn’t screw up a plot, unlike the merger of Jake and Josh Treves in the hardcover of The Shockwave Rider….
Possibly some well-intentioned editor changed it because that’s how they tend to refer to themselves as a team (and how they are credited on the movie, if I remember correctly)?
Yes…just to confirm, when Lana and Lilly are credited as a directing team, they are credited as The Wachowskis (as you can see below in the credits of Jupiter Ascending). Since that’s how they preferred to be credited, that’s what we tend to go with :)
https://youtu.be/qD20yjXsELo?t=17
Would a footnote be redundant, since it’s been worked out down here anyway? And I assume there are other Wachowskis, probably? One tough lady private detective… no, that’s not quite right?
That particular actor had also already survived Troy a decade before (when I saw him in that role I started wondering just how much they’d changed the story! But then he survived, though almost no one else did).
Also, do the mice who own the Earth in the Hitchhikers Guide count for this list? Or is it only for human(ish) overlords?
I though the rule was he had to play someone on the level of Sharpe to survive a TV or movie?
He cheated death so many times as Sharpe, killing him off in everything else is just a way of balancing the universe.
He was Odysseus in Troy, so that probably counts a Sharpe-level.
I read that Dickson story when I was in middle school and it stuck with me. Every time I think of it I wonder if I should reread it, but then I worry the Suck Fairy may have made a visit…
I have a whole shelf of Dickson books, as he was one of my go-to authors up to about The Final Encyclopedia. Revisiting him has thus far been a bit disappointing, although I did like the moral of Soldier, Ask Not that being a misanthropic recluse is no way to spend one’s life. Still not going to sell his books, as the covers bring back fond memories.
I wish I could find my way back to the books I remember having read in the 1970s, rather than the 1970s books I now find on my shelves.
Didn’t Heraclitus say something about nobody reading the same book twice?
Cratylus “is famous for capping the doctrine of Heraclitus […] by adding that you cannot step into the same river once: the river is changing and gone even as a single event of stepping occurs.”
No doubt the same applies to books, or anyway the person reading it.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095646158
Yeah, James White’s Nuisance Value landed very differently after I connected the dots to Bloody Sunday.
Does D.D. Harriman count?
Harriman couldn’t even control his own self, let alone the world. In fact, he didn’t even really set policy for the company he owned. In The Man Who Sold the Moon, he has a long speech about how vital it is space travel be safe, despite which by The Green Hills of Earth it is anything but safe.
I thought he sold the Moon?
Footnote to a footnote: The Underpeople and The Planet Buyer are not “the two stories that make up Norstrilia. Rather, they (along with a couple of short stories first published in Galaxy) were carved out of Norstrilia after Paul M.A. Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith found it impossible to sell a science-fiction novel of Norstrilia‘s length in the early 1960s.
Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune changed all that, of course, and nearly a decade after Linebarger’s death, his estate was able to publish it as it was intended.
Of course the Emperors in Asimov’s Galactic Empire owned Earth, though I imagine that most of them never even heard of it, it being a minor, obscure planet nobody cared much about (except for its inhabitants, of course, who insisted that it was the original homeworld of humanity, a claim scholarship disproved over and over again). I suppose the same would be true of any genuine Galactic Empire (so long as it was set in the Milky Way and not in, say, a galaxy far far away).
Typhon, in Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle” (but mostly Urth of the New Sun) was,. or appears to have been, emperor of an interstellar, uh, empire which included Earth, to which he was forced to retreat as other forces not specified in the books pressed in upon him.
And I suppose any “last man* on Earth” can be said to own it. Unless, y’know, there are other things that took Earth away, and that last man happens to have survived by some unspecified means, as in “Come out, Neville!” or “I am a great soft jelly thing.”
But there are certainly stories where the last, oh, let’s just say human person on Earth really does own it, a tradition which goes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man or that Twilight Zone episode … come on, you know the one I’m thinking of.
Whether this makes them happy is another story.
______
It’s always a man. Because of course it is.
The Elf Sternberg’s Journal Entry¹ stories, he does have someone buy the Earth but not for any selfish or nefarious reason: Ken Shardik wants to preserve it for its historical and natural value. It was also a way of giving the powers that be on Earth an excuse to accept the payment, (a ringworld for everyone to move to).
1: Which are “mostly science fiction, mostly furry, mostly straight and mostly erotica,” with Elf being very clear that he just means “over 50%”. So be aware before you go looking.
in this vein i’ve loved “The Man Who Used the Universe by Alan Dean Foster”. A man who contrives to (and succeeds) in becoming the most powerfull man in the universe just to ensure his own independence.
John Brunner’s “The Totally Rich” doesn’t feature an Earth owned by a single individual, but can be seen as a world that could eventually lead to such an individual owner.
Great story – I just read it the other week. Nicely divergent from what I expected.
There’s a good example of long-term indulgence in the Really Good Place in the show The Good Place–when Janet can give you everything you need or desire, boredom sets in faster than you think. Our four characters react in different ways Jason gives up first, or so we believe, but it turns out he spends time in the forest just *waiting* and always loving Janet. Tehani learns as many different things as possible and ends up as part of the staff serving others. Chidi finally leaves after finding all the philosophy he ever wanted. And Eleanor? She finally leaves as well, if only to go where most of her friends have gone.
Eternity seems like a really good idea at first…
The Sleeper Awakes by H G Wells fits this criteria! An often overlooked classic.
This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny. The story is a character test!
I’m very happy to see Nostrilia, and Jupiter Ascending, appear in the same article. The film (which I love, despite it’s flaws which I see as mainly poor plotting) was really unfairly lambasted, I thought. I still have people who say, when I mention how much I like it, “but what about the stupid stuff with the bees”? Not stupid at all – the idea is the who planet’s biology has been altered to recognise (in subtle ways) its overlords. Also, having the hero of the piece be a cleaner, with no superpowers, one of who’s major acts in the film is to say to someone who is holding their family captive “You’ll have to kill them then – they wouldn’t want the whole earth to be mortgaged for their sake.” – when did we ever have this in a hollywood film before? Wonderful.
Anyway, one thing I’ve always thought while watching is “This is the closest we will ever get to a big screen Cordwainer Smith adaptation”. I was more thinking of the obvious Underpeople analogue with the Splices (as I think they are called), but the Nostrilia comparisons are also apt. In fact, I hope we may even be in Voyage of the Space Beagle/Alien territory.
As a completely irrelevant nitpick, I don’t recall anyone meeting under a flag of truce in Norstralia. The word you’re looking for is probably parlay, a betting term.
That should be parley flag, as in all the pirate stories you have ever read.
Yes, parley derives from the French parler, meaning to talk. Parlay derives from the French paroli, or the Italian cognate parole, meaning promise. Our good host has already made his famous remark about where English gets its words from.
These all sound like books I would enjoy, but I’m not sure my list can stand much more.
Jupiter Ascending is a film I love for no particular reason. Do you have an HDR setup? That can really help with dark films (otherwise some picture adjustment can compress the dynamic range and help).