Plot Scarcity in Post Scarcity Paradise?

The fine fellows over at SfSignal asked to me join one of their
‘Mind Melds’ and answer a fascinating question. The had many replies,
and posted the answers in two parts:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/mind-meld-character-stakes-in-post-scarcity-novels-part-one/

and

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/mind-meld-character-stakes-in-post-scarcity-novels-part-two/

I answered with an essay when they only wanted a paragraph, and so
they cut it down to size. For any reader interested in the full essay, I
give it here below:

—————————————————-

Post Scarcity and Post Singularity novels have a problem of
giving interesting conflicts to characters. When scarcity is no longer a
concern (or sometimes even death!) what are the stakes for characters?

On one level, the question is easy to answer: think of every story
you’ve ever enjoyed where the danger that the protagonist faced was not
one which threatened him with poverty, penury or death. Any and all plot
conflicts of those tales could be transposed into a post-singularity
background with no loss of drama.

The recent movie THE KING’S SPEECH, for example, concerned a
sovereign just at the dawn of the era of radio and mass media, and at
the dawn of World War, attempting to overcome a speech impediment, and,
by artful coincidence, his personal shortcomings. Had the exact same
tale been set in a background where the Prince of Wales and his speech
therapist and every other denizen of earth been granted the Fountain of
Youth and the purse of Fortunatus, endless life and bottomless wealth,
no events in the foreground would need be changed, because neither
wealth nor deathlessness cure disabilities of speech (just ask Vidur the
Silent, Odin’s son.)

On a deeper level, the question is hard to answer, because the
concern of any science fiction story that is not mere fantasy is that
the unrealistic premise or conceit of the tale be treated realistically.

When Lamont Cranston the Shadow, Sue Storm the Invisible Girl, or
Frodo Baggins the Invisible Halfling decide to vanish, for example,
clothing and gear conveniently vanish also, whereas Griffin the
Invisible Man from the HG Wells novel of the same name must practice
nudism to practice his vanishing act. Wells imagined logical details,
and that makes it science fiction rather than merely a flight of
imagination.

Likewise, the realism of unrealistic SF requires the author to invent
the realistic details of a world where the limitations of the human
condition have been banished by unimaginably sophisticated and powerful
technologies, so that even death itself reduced to a curable medical
condition. If the immortals of the Utopia of Tomorrow want for nothing,
how can trivial things like speech impediments or personal shortcomings
be serious problems to them? To wait a hundred years for a solution, to a
deathless being, would be no more troublesome than to wait a million.

The supermen of futurtopia, if pictured realistically, should be
incomprehensible characters in an unimaginable landscape: how, then,
does an author lure a reader to imagine the unimaginable?

Read more