Photo: ArtGrafx Authors of science fiction and fantasy have cultivated a special skill (beyond the ability to torture characters and be tortured by commas all authors acquire). Simply, we speculate. Yes, all authors need to build a world, but we spend hours (or months, or years...) creating an internally consistent alien species or a complete currency and economic system to back it up. Put more poetically, it’s the ability to see the water we are swimming in and imagine something different. How we pay for things is one of the biggest rivers One of the things I’ve been doing more recently is using these world-building skills on the real world. It’s so hard to get out of our bubble without jumping into someone else’s that may be even more bizarre. Deconstructing the world in the same way you can construct a fake world is a way to pop the bubble, at least for a few seconds. What a society is willing to pay for collectively, to tax, and what it insists is an individual … [Read more...] about How do you Tax a Made up World?