Genocide Doesn’t Pay The Bills

As a writer, I like to riff off (as opposed to rip off) other writer’s ideas.

In the case of the Portal series, it began with a search on Kindle for new military science fiction. The first three hits I got started the same way. “The war against the genocidal aliens is going badly, and only the crew of …”

As a literary device, I get it. It sets the stakes high, pitches the reader into the thick of the action, gets things started with a bang. Strictly from a personal viewpoint, I have trouble suspending my disbelief.

The first problem I have is economics. Given any reasonably plausible technology, starships are going to be costly. Military starships are going to be really expensive. From what we know from the exoplanet searches, inhabited star systems are going to be widely spaced. A military campaign is going to face long, expensive supply lines. Genocide doesn’t get you much except enemies. Very determined ones with little to lose and no reason to compromise.

Loot has been a motive for conquest throughout human history, but as militaries got increasingly large, complex, sophisticated and expensive it got less and less relevant. Gold teeth and looted art didn’t pay the WWII Wehrmacht’s bills.

Translating this to the context of a Galaxy with multiple races makes it even less viable. Most of what humanity considers “wealth” would be incomprehensible and/or useless to aliens from an entirely different evolution. Slavery doesn’t fare very well as a motive, either. A starfaring race could mass produce cheap robots and machines to do almost anything, far more cheaply and without the risk of slave rebellions or the cost of military campaigns.

So, what would a viable interstellar transport network look like? How would it be funded? What would the wildly different alien races it connects have to trade with each other?

My answers to those questions form the foundation of the Portal series. Check it out if you’re interested.