Blog hop: Accessing The Future Fiction

I just found The Future Fire thanks to a friend of mine, That Crazy Crippled Chick, because she linked me to an article listing 5 positive representations of disability in science fiction. As a disabled person (and a disabled writer who sometimes does science fiction and fantasy,) that's totally a thing I want to see.

Anyways, they author of that post is also crowdfunding for Accessing The Future, a planned anthology of speculative fiction (so basically everything I read and most of what I write) with disability themes. I'm totally going to submit a story once they get to that point.

Also a blog hop.

1. Tell us about your Work In Progress (WIP) / Current Read (CR) and the world it's set in.
   
   I'm almost done with a story tentatively titled Where None Have Known to Look, where a smuggler and her friend visit a race of sentient computers on a planet no one else knows about... and the friend has the choice to become part computer. It'd be useful, certainly, but people already think he's not fully human- is he willing to let them be right?
   
   The reason folks think he's not fully human is that he's autistic, so while I didn't think too much about the world it's set in before... I'm going to say it's socially pretty similar to that of today, just adding in contact with interstellar trade routes and the extra technology involved in making that possible.
   
   By almost done I mean tomorrows post is probably going to be the announcement that you can buy it on Amazon. (I've got other stuff there already.)
   
2. Who are the most powerful people in this world?
   
   At a local to planetary level, there's a good bit of variation, but in general, the folks who control interplanetary trade control most everything else. At planetary levels, that means whoever was rich enough to get into the space trade early (for their planet) has come out on top.
   
3. Where does their power come from?
   
   Controlling trade means they're controlling how goods and services flow, which means they can make or break a planets economy if they really want to. Mostly they just want to have that as an unspoken threat, but it's effective enough. Think the current corporate mess, just at the interstellar level.
    
4. What physical and/or mental characteristics underpin their positions of power?
   
   Whatever underpinned power on their planet before they made interstellar contact still does- so on Earth, being white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, ambulatory, generally able-bodied, close to neurotypical, and having received a western-style education is still a big determining factor.
   
   If you get off your home planet for whatever reason, most people you meet won't know what your species-typical and culture-typical things are, so it reverts to your place within the trade hierarchy, unless and until you're dealing with someone familiar with your planet and species, at which point the same biases you deal with at home are coming into play.
   
5. How does this affect the weakest people in the world?
   
   It's theoretically possible for someone closer to the bottom of the heap to be an exception and get off-planet, which is totally a functioning escape method: Trevina is Hispanic, and she faces racism on Earth. But she's an independent trader/smuggler (mostly grey market,) and when she's off planet she'll rarely run into anyone who knows enough about humans to understand that skin color has any significance... or even that we come in multiple colors. She'll just deal with her status as an independent trader (common folk love her, big trading companies hate her, law enforcement doesn't really trust her but will probably look the other way unless she does something really egregious because she's considered a little fish) and as a foreigner.
   
   But she's made it to that level, which means she's rather emphatically not one of the weakest people in her society. She's got some social categories in common with her planet's share of them, which is very different, especially considering that she's mostly not on her home planet.
   
   People generally don't starve- it's gotten to the point where starvation would be bad enough publicity that they make sure everyone can eat- but it's not pretty. Shelter is not a given, nor is medical care, unless you can pay. Most people don't actually have any contact off-planet unless a close friend or family member has gone to labor on an asteroid or in helping make a new planet fit for life, but jobs are often moving to planets where wages are lower or resources cheaper. For the moment, resources are fairly expensive on Earth but wages are low, so service jobs and low-resource crafting (artisanal work) are easy to find. 

I didn't realize I knew this much about my universe. I might need to write more in it...