Friday, October 30, 2009

Yeah, But I Was Making it Up...

This is the premise my SF world starts with: in about 2100, I say, America completely privatizes its prison systems (the real religion of America, as I frequently tell my students, being not Christianity but Capitalism).  

This is an idea I have seen floated about on a few right-leaning economic blogs already; left-of-center bloggers responded with why it was a really stupid idea, which was that once you make something profitable, d'oh, people do more of it.

The commenters on the blogs, though, were who interested me.  You can imagine the comments.

Anyway, I ran with that idea, especially since I had been reading half a dozen other books at the same time -- Billy Bragg, and Octavia Butler's work, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, and I forget the others.  I didn't read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name until later, but that book got folded into my research on the revision level.

However: look here.  Apparently what I thought was fiction, ain't.  And I am entirely off on the year. Go figure.

Oh: and here is why this is a really bad plan.

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