Sometimes, if you write speculative works, you look like a genius when you “predict” something.
It’s not like anyone tries to predict anything in their writing, unless you do technothrillers, which, good on you if you’re still trying… But that’s a whole mess of another set of disappointments.
There were blogpost Charlie Jane Anders wrote for io9 back in 2012 about how something she wrote predicted the near future. In her case, her story “Intertstate” on Tor.com involved the idea of calling in drone strikes on civilian targets, which became de rigueur by the time it saw print. A few years later, she’d remind everyone in 2016 about the short story “A Logic Named Joe” by Murray Leinster from 1946, where the information device in someone’s home decides to start sharing a lot more knowledge than it was supposed to, like how to murder someone with untraceable poisons or how to pull off a perfect bank job (hello, Reddit…).
And now, I have my “Interstate” moment…
Below is an excerpt from my book, Red Jenny and the Pirates of Buffalo, which takes place in a world kicked in the nethers after we ignored climate changes for too long. Here, Tia, a woman who snuck over the closed border from Canada, which won the last war with the US four years earlier, and embedded herself with the West Seneca Crew, a gang of pirates that plying Lake Erie. We have our pirate leader, Jenny, and one of her crew, Tomo, explain how housing works in this time:
[S]aid Jenny[,]. “I get the crash course on data architecture between target practice rounds.”
“It’s a good trade,” said Tomo. “She gets enough computer cloud meteorology to know what to look for if she needs it, I get to fire off clips in full auto. Beats the crap out of the last gig.”
“What was that?” Tia asked.
“Data organization for a McLandlord.”
“A what?” Tia asked.
“A McLandlord,” Tomo replied. “You know- Do they have them up in Canada?”
“What are they?”
“They’re franchises that the bigger banks license responsibilities for the houses they own to. You know, all those houses they own, they can’t care for all of them themselves, so they offer businesses a fee for watching them, making sure that they stay in good condition and that the renters pay their rents.”
“Oh,” said Tia, “like housing agents.”
“Except that it’s not quite that well put together,” said Jenny. “I mean, a housing agent like what you have, they’re smaller and generally care a lot more. A McLandlord, they’re not quite as good.”
“Yeah,” said Tomo, “it’s more ‘How much can we get to make the business profitable?’ than really being a landlord, because most of them, they just put a bid in for the contract to manage and then collect fees off what they can. I mean, the people I worked for, they bid to manage thirty houses, and they kept maybe five of them standing. Some of them were barely better than a roof and two walls standing, but the fees they recorded for those met the bank minimums and didn’t cut too deep into the rents they charged the rest of them.
“And to add to that, I had to learn in a hurry when I was in their office how to cover the entries so that the bank’s cross checks didn’t detect the crap they were pulling. Fake entries, billings for repairs that didn’t get made, stuff to keep the bank stupid about what they were doing so that as far as they knew, these thirty houses on their ledgers out of the thousands they franchised out were not any worse managed than the rest of them, so that an auditbot wouldn’t raise the flag.”
“And how many houses are franchised out by the banks?” Tia asked.
“Most of them,” said Jenny. “My Nana used to say owning a house was the American dream, but I don’t think there’s a lot of people who do anymore. The moneyed over on the West Side are about it; the rest of us ain’t.”
“And your place, Jenny, is that managed by a McLandlord?”
“The guys Tomo used to work for, yeah. They used to have someone working for them that came around every month for the rent, and he used to offer some of the girls ‘discounts,’ if they were willing to shave off some of their rents through other means.”
“Was that as… disturbing… as it sounds?” Tia asked.
“Yeah. We had one girl who took him up on it, and when she disappeared one night to skip the rent, he tried to make me a ‘special offer’ to cover her part of the rent.”
“What did you do?”
“Well,” said Jenny, “Shaun was still in one piece, and he looked him up to talk about it. I never saw the guy again, and never asked Shaun about it, so-”
Now, when I did this, I was just going a little wild with the whole “how bad can we make it in the housing sphere” detail for a scene. It was taking the whole franchisee model and applying it to housing, which seemed extreme to me but worth a little shock value for the dystopia I was projecting.
And then, this pops up this morning:
The article was something of a shock to read, about how houses were becoming portfolios to invest in under an overall clearing house. Which is pretty close to the franchisee model. And Arrived’s website itself doesn’t offer much to allay any fears the article raises.
It was probably inevitable in a world of diminishing resources and unequal capital distribution that this was going to happen. I was probably naïve to think I wouldn’t be around to see it myself, and to be honest, I thought it was so outrageous that of everything in the book that came up, that this would be the least likely to occur, and if it did it’d be long after all the other seismic geopolitical changes whammed us pretty hard.
Should I be congratulating myself on calling something like this? I dunno; I can’t imagine Murray Leinster going online and smiling, so…
James Ryan 