Logic of Empire
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"Logic of Empire" is a science fiction novella by Robert A. Heinlein. Part of his Future History series, it originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1941), and was collected in The Green Hills of Earth (and subsequently The Past Through Tomorrow).
Two well-off Earth men are arguing about whether there is slavery on Venus, and one of them gets shanghaied there--or so he believes; they later find out that they've bet one another about the topic, gotten drunk, and signed on. Upon his arrival, he finds his contract sold to a farmer. His discovery that it will take him years to work off his debt is compounded by his realization that he cannot get to sleep at night without rhira, an expensive local narcotic, thus increasing his debt every day.
Ostensibly a tale about a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his struggle to free himself from the oppressive circumstances in which he is plunged, this story also serves to explain how slavery develops in a new colony.
Even in the future, the technology available to a new colony is always initially low. If a machine to do a necessary job is too expensive to import (say a wheat harvester, a water pump, or even a washing machine), a human must do it instead. If too many jobs must be done by hand, a market for slavery develops. Decades later, this market remains because the colony itself has quotas to meet and debts to repay-they cannot spare the money to develop local industries and build the machines themselves.
Throughout the story, Heinlein takes the view of the objective narrator when describing Venusian society. Logic of Empire places different rationales on the people who participate in slavery. There are no real villains; everybody's just doing their job, trying to maximize income in a capitalist system. Even the plantation owner who owns the hero is portrayed as a struggling — and failing — small businessman, whose main motivation is to secure a livelihood for his daughter.
Insofar as it is part of Heinlein's "Future History" series, the story has some interesting minor anachronisms consistent with it being written some time before other material in the series. We are not told when the story is set, but towards the end, the slave-owning planter speaks of things being different on Venus "when he was a boy". The planter we might surmise to be an overweight middle-aged fellow in his late fifties or perhaps older. Therefore at the time "Logic of Empire" is set, there would have been a colonial plantation culture on Venus for not less than fifty years. We read elsewhere in Heinlein (references needed) that the initial settlement of Venus took place in the 1970's or 1980's. Therefore, "Logic of Empire" is arguably set sometime after 2030. But, almost the finishing page of the story contains a reference to the coming of the First Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder, who we know became President of the United States in 2012 (Methusalah's Children, Time enough for love). This would lead to a suggestion that the story is set before 2012.
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