Space Opera Fans discussion

The THEME category for January is Trading. Nominations will be open until Saturday.

I would like to discuss interstellar Trading in general, with links to specific books as appropriate.

How can you trade with a new species where might not even share a common pidgin language yet? What types of trade goods would be appropriate there?

If you do share at least a pidgin, do you offer manufactured goods, raw materials, rare gems, artistic items, food, seeds, or instructions for new technologies?

I'll let someone else respond before I start giving example books.

I can't think of any books offhand, but there was a boardgame on this subject back in the mid-90s.

It was called "Solar Trader", and broadly speaking it was "Monopoly" in space.

The backstory had it that an enormous artificial world called Zastra had appeared at the edge of the Solar System, and - in exchange for certain commonly found Earth commodities - gold, silver, and diamonds - they would give us Earthlings a "solar energy crystal" that would solve the world's energy problems at a stroke.

You had to trade your way around the Solar System, buying and selling different items - oil, fuel, robots, food and so on - to different planets, so you could upgrade your ship for the arduous trip to Zastra.

First one to get to Zastra and back to Earth with the Solar Energy Crystal wins the game.

For trading when exploring new planets where you have no clue what the inhabitants might want and might not have any shared language, one approach I have seen in multiple books is to place pairs of (some type of surface) on the ground, grouped with one of each pair empty and the other having an item to barter. Nothing super expensive because the beings might think they are gifts, or be the type to steal. The idea is that if the beings grok barter, they would place something of theirs on the empty pair. If we like it, swap the pairs and remove the item they traded. If we aren't interested, remove our item. If the offering isn't sufficient and our item can be split, break it up with only part of the item left.

One book that uses something like this when they had a real communication problem is The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet by Mackey Chandler. I didn't mention it in the nominations thread because it's the second book of a series.

I vaguely recall a different book where a colorful magazine (comic book? Playboy?) ended up split into separate pages with the natives trading a gem for each page. Was that perhaps Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein? Edit: yes, something like that in chapter 12.

A Fire Upon the Deep is one book about trading.

I read the whole series some years back, so I can't remember what was in the first book in the series and what was in the series as a whole, but the whole universe is predicated on a couple things:

1. Some beings are super advanced, and trade with the lower level people
2. Advanced beings are uninterested in conquering territory of the less advanced because it lacks the resources to be advanced

Cool series, definitely worth a look for our BOTM

Dan, you are welcome to nominate it on the Trading thread. I don't think you have already nominated on that thread yet. Oops... we have already read it as a group, before I joined.

In my favorite book, Hellspark, trading between two species actually began as an attempt to communicate. They couldn't talk to each other but they had spent enough time observing each other to realize the other species valued certain things. When one being offered a prized object to a human indicating a possible trade, the bad humans murdered the good human to eliminate the possibility that the alien species would be recognized as sentient.

Trade and first contact are often intertwined.

In general, trade appears to involve two things. The major first is food and spices. Like our own human history, the introduction to coffee or chocolate leads to communication and a desirable trade. The 2nd theme is that when humans are the lesser evolved species or seen as being the untamed tribe, then art is desired. Also, not uncommon in our own history where we have gone through the aboriginal phases in the worlds of art, collectibles, and fashion.

I would think that in most cases shipping large amounts of food to another planet wouldn't earn enough profit, unless the cost of shipment is covered by very profitable small, light items, and you can't afford to buy enough of those for a full shipment. Luxuries such as coffee and chocolate work when the aliens share a similar biochemistry.

I strongly suspect that information, seeds, and tools to jump start technology would be more what the aliens desire. Artistic items perhaps. Whether we want to trade away our technological improvements is another matter.

Of course, those on a ship will be likely to need supplies of some kind for their own use.

Hmmm... and the travel time would make a huge difference too. If a trip takes a week vs a year vs a decade or longer. Traders who would not live to make a return trip don't need to worry about reputation etc. If it is cheap and fast to get there, then selling frozen fish is practical. If it takes years, you want to trade information.

Poul Anderson has written a whole series of books/stories centered around trade. The lead character is either Nicholas van Rhyn or David Falkyn, and sometimes both, since the latter works for the former.

Well obviously it depends on what you need. In a lot of sci-fi raw materials are easy to obtain but you can always use new information or technologies. Whether art and cultural items have any value is subjective.

I'd guess the easiest way to begin if you have almost nothing in common is to give gifts. They might just take it and walk away but they might give something in return and that's the beginning of trade.

Interstellar trading inside a known, regular group of star systems would be quite different from a first contact type trip.

This month's themed category is trading, and the book randomly chosen The Pride of Chanur. Here we have something that is in between: a multi species civilization that often only vaguely understands each other, then a new species appears.

I would think that the first contact type trading would have more conniving, cheating traders, particularly if it takes years between planets. No repeat business, and no easy way to warn other customers about the cheating. I vaguely recall one story where the trader used something like a solar sail, and preferred to trigger the current sun into going nova after trading finished, to give them a boost to the next system. And of course there's the way Manhattan was purchased.