Business As Usual During Alterations – A Review

When the music changes tempo. Essay. 1100 words, 6-minute read.

Image: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/business-as-usual-blitz.html?sortBy=relevant

Business As Usually During Alterations – A Review

By Ray Tabler

There are some short stories that lodge in the memory, popping up unexpectedly years later when events stir the sediment of the mind. Such a story is Business As Usual During Alterations, by Ralph Williams. The story was first published in the July, 1958 issue of Astounding Magazine. And the tale resonates to this day.

Ralph Williams was the pen name for a man named Ralph Williams Sloane, who was born in Illinois, in 1914, and died in a fishing accident in Alaska, in 1959. He wrote several books novellas, and short stories, about (among other things) a portal to another world in the Alaska wilderness, and a race riot between human colonists and indigenous aliens on a planet around Alpha Centauri. Not much information is readily available online about Williams, but the man could spin a yarn.

Such is certainly the case with Business As Usual… In a nutshell, a bunch of busybody aliens are worried about the human race and, and our imminent expansion off our little planet. We don’t measure up to their moral standards, and are deemed a threat to Galactic tranquility. To be fair, I can see their side of the argument. Not sure I’d want us as interstellar neighbors either.

As a remedy, the aliens saturate Earth with duplicators, devices that will create a copy of any inanimate object. The intent is to precipitate the collapse of human civilization, by knocking the props out from under the global economy in under 24 hours. Why buy anything when you can just zap up what you need at home? Money’s no good anymore, and society is at peril as a result.

The POV character is the manager of Brown’s department store, Mr. Thomas. Who points out, “…We haven't had money since 1933…Those green paper slips you carry around in your billfold are just credit tokens, to simplify the bookkeeping…” The story consists of Thomas managing the chaos of a snap transition from an economy of scarcity to one of abundance over the course of one long business day. He does pretty well. And, by the end of the story, the prospects for humanity weathering this particular alien-pitched curve ball are looking up. (How many more metaphors can I mix into that sentence? 😊)

It's often informative to go back and read classic science fiction stories. Our forebears, literary and otherwise, were not so clueless as we tend to assume. Beneath the 1950s paper-based procedures and male-dominated hierarchy lay some fundamental facts about humanity. We will get by, and adapt to just about any surprises fate rolls our way. It’s literally bred into us. Might take us a little while, and not everybody can follow the music when the tempo shifts. But we adjust to the new normal. Until the next change up. The title of the story comes from the phrase which described daily life in London, between nightly visits by the Luftwaffe, and their unsolicited urban renewal via high explosives. (Refer to the image at the start of this essay.)

Perhaps it is not coincidental that Ralph Williams lived in Alaska. That was, and is, a place where the delay time between f#&king around and finding can be shockingly brief.

Thomas keeps his eye on the ball, marshaling and managing his staff through the reshuffling of the social and economic order and the dealing out of a new hand. He realizes that the world of yesterday revolved around the mass production of goods, and their transport to markets. The world he faces today is no longer constrained by assembly lines and freight schedules. Every person can simply duplicate whatever is desired, at home. As long as a model to be duplicated is available. The balance of power shifted to creators and craftsmen overnight. People still need to eat. So someone has to grow at least enough food to feed the duplicators. People still need to travel about, be entertained, housed, clothed, etc… So, someone still needs to make those items for duplication. Perhaps by hand.

I wonder how much this story influenced Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a post-scarcity society for Star Trek.

During my re-reading, it struck me that we may be living through just such an alteration, in the publishing world. Prior to the e-reader, and print-on-demand, the publishing industry was dominated by the economies of scale demanded by large print runs, and the logistics of distributing crates of physical books to stores across the globe. No more. In the span of a decade (a blink of the eye on a historical scale) the rug was pulled out from under Big Publishing. Instead of publish-or-perish, now the guiding principle reads publish-the-new-way-and-maybe-perish-anyway.

Channels to the reader used to be the scarce resource, which were controlled by a few. Now those channels are not only cheap, but open to anyone who bothers to use them. This situation is paralleled by home-made video on the internet, where (if desired) everyone can have their own, personal TV channel. You are reading this essay via what is in effect my own online magazine, published essentially for free. Granted, a slap-dash, stunted magazine, but a publication all the same. The reach is limited only by the degree of attention and buzz I can summon via social media. Post-scarcity indeed.

Of course, the world is not perfect. Writers are no longer at the mercy of autocratic publishing houses. Not completely. If you want to get your work out there for the public to read, you can go around the traditional publishing industry. That monopoly is broken. Still, there’s no guarantee people will read what you write. You still face stiff competition from all the other independent authors out there, reaching for the same brass ring. Curse them! 😉

And it might just be tougher to make money as an author than before. But, do you really need to? Frankly, on average you’d make better money selling insurance, or greeting patrons at Walmart than typing into the void. Self-publishing is more or less free. And, as Mr. Thomas points out, "…We haven't had money since 1933…Those green paper slips you carry around in your billfold are just credit tokens, to simplify the bookkeeping…”

Business as usual, during alterations.

END.

Reference Link:

Text of Business AS Usual During Alterations, by Ralph Williams: https://andrewmbailey.com/money/readings/BusinessAsUsual.pdf

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