Maybe I'm misreading, but I don't see anybody in this thread arguing that extraplanetary societies would be politically unstable.
It takes a lot of resources to keep one materially & demographically stable until it becomes self-sustaining: a tax on starting any.
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But we could all absolutely imagine Elon Musk cutting a deal with the california dept of corrections to send prisoners from "crowded" jails to do forced labor on Mars in order to pave way for future upper-crust colonists & some jobsworth falsifying consent signatures.
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I mean, PKD's psychological insight whenever he models extraplanetary colonies is "it'll be just like on earth, only with fewer resources and a greater distance from established states" so he models them on company towns, skid rows, and burnt-out suburbs.
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For PKD, outer space is california-but-more-so: you don't just have to pay through the nose and invoke massive government corruption for water, but also for air; you get massive influxes of population via scams like the gold rush and by indentured minority populations; etc.
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I liked Confessions of a Crap Artist. It was deeply uncomfortable in exactly the same way as his science fiction, but it hit harder because of the setting. I interpreted it as being about the way toxic masculinity can interact with economic precarity (much like his noir novels).
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Honestly, all of PKD's books are set in 1960s California, even the ones that are set in space in the far future.
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That’s a better way to think of PKD and most social science fiction. Space as a convenient allegory for talking about eart. Foundation saga was basically fall of Rome with 1950s Cold War bureaucracy thrown in. The robot stories were really about bureaucracies, not robots.
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Sure, but also, because social structures change very slowly (and social and technical structures evolve together, with technical structures that require or imply massive social change getting rejected or growing a protective sheath of norms) it's not wrong to use SF that way.
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PKD's work remains "relevant" because he knew enough history to recognize that 1950 wasn't *that* different from 1850 or 1650, and to project a 2050 that was based on systematic tendencies rather than naively projecting 1950 forward with progress in only one domain.
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Sure, it’s relevent and mild fun as social commentary and psychological insight. It’s just not that interesting as technological speculation because it underindexes on tech potentialities and overindexes on societal inertia. I look elsewhere for tech speculation.
Pure tech speculation will tell you what is possible, but will not tell you whether or not anybody will be willing to actually do it (and how the technical problems change under social pressures). Most technical problems are mostly social problems, even when the tech matters.
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