I love science fiction. Given a choice between any other type of book (especially touchy-feely chick lit) and a sci-fi book, I will choose the sci-fi almost every time.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how two sci-fi books I’ve read presaged the existence of blogging and its culture. The first, and one of my favorite books of all time, is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, written in 1985. Quick synopsis: Genius children are bred and enter military training at a young age to save the Earth from another invasion by the Buggers, an alien civilization that has been fought off twice but threatens to return. Ender Wiggin is the best and brightest student at the Battle School, and believed to be the last hope for humanity.

Ender’s older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are also hyperintelligent but were not deemed suitable as military commanders. They take it upon themselves to foment political change and eventually unite the world’s governments under Peter’s rule.

How do they bring about this change? Basically, by blogging on the “nets,” though in 1985 when this book was written, blog was still just a typo for blob. Here’s how they started:

Her main identity on the nets was Demosthenes — Peter chose the name. He called himself Locke. They were obvious pseudonyms, but that was part of the plan. “With any luck, they’ll start trying to guess who we are.”

“If we get famous enough, the government can always get access and find out who we really are.”

“When that happens, we’ll be too entrenched to suffer much loss. People might be shocked that Demosthenes and Locke are two kids, but they’ll already be used to listening to us.”

They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric…Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.

Peter took careful note of all their most memorable phrases and then did searches from time to time to find those phrases cropping up in other places. Not all of them did, but most of them were repeated here and there, and some of them even showed up in the major debates on the prestige nets. “We’re being read,” Peter said. “The ideas are seeping out.”

“The phrases, anyway.”

“That’s just the measure. Look, we’re having some influence. Nobody quotes us by name, yet, but they’re discussing the points we raise. We’re helping set the agenda.”

Sound familiar? I remember when I first read this book about 10 years ago, I thought it seemed pretty unrealistic that someone could just start anonymously writing and posting their thoughts on the internet, and that people would pay so much attention to it when there are so many other posts by so many other people getting in the way. Card turned out to be prescient.

More recently (perhaps a couple of years ago), I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (who is now more than a little familiar with blogging). The plot is not so important for my point, but the story basically revolves around people in the 22nd century who live at Walt Disney World, which is no longer owned by Disney and is more of an open source project. In a post-scarcity economy, where people are immortal and have everything they need, the currency is not dollars, but something called Whuffie. Whuffie is essentially the respect and esteem that other people hold you in; you get more Whuffie when you do good things for other people and contribute to society postively, and you lose Whuffie when you treat others poorly or screw up in some way. Using digital implants in their eyes, people can track how much Whuffie they and other people have accumulated.

This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money; in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success.

This book came out in 2003, so blogs were already in existence, but I don’t think that blogs were mentioned anywhere in the book. So how does this concept relate to blogging?

Most bloggers do not get paid for their posts. Why do we do it? To establish ourselves as industry thought leaders, to gain influence for our ideas, to get noticed. Yes, with the ultimate hope that it will lead to paying gigs or positions of power, but in the short term we get paid with Whuffie. When one blogger links to another, that is a form of Whuffie. As our Technorati or Alexa rank rises, that’s blog Whuffie. A blogger is only as good as her peers and audience think she is, and if she does not continue to perform, the Whuffie will eventually sink. I guess for most bloggers who don’t have ads on their blogs, it comes down to ego boosts, because we can’t actually buy anything with the blog Whuffie, but at some point for the best bloggers, the prestige translates into monetary compensation.

Does anyone have any good sci-fi books to recommend?

Technorati Tags: blogging, science fiction, sci-fi, orson scott card, enders game, cory doctorow, whuffie

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