Re: Economic meltdowns in SF

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:20:24 -0400, William December Starr wrote:

> In article <slrnftuuko.2do.usenet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Par <usenet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said:
> 
>> I don't think it causes any economic upheavals, but IIRC Jack
>> Vance had the protag that wandered the universe killing the 5(?)
>> bad guys (Star Prince and followups?) figure out how to forge the
>> unforgeable currency by means of running his fingernail along the
>> diagonal line at some specified, easilly guessed distances on a
>> faked bill.

The _The Demon Princes_ pentalogy: _The Star King_, _The Killing Machine_,
_The Palace of Love_, _The Face_ and _The Book of Dreams_.

And the protagonist had a glimpse of a fragment of a document that had the
critical clue in it.
 
> I don't recall that it was easily guessed.  Or even that "Wait a minute
> -- *that's* your currency's security system???"[*1] was easily guessed.
> 
> (What I always wondered about regarding that system was that, iirc,
> currency _verifying_ machines were near-ubiquitous, but apparently
> nobody ever took one apart and reverse-engineered the secret of
> precisely what it verified.)

They self-destructed internally if you opened them or subjected them to
snoopy vibrations or fields or for that matter probably if you just
sneezed.

Good for the "fake-meter" manufacturer(s), anyway.

-- 

Property and life are not incommensurable, when
property is measured in terms of human toil.
Essentially property is life; it is that proportion
of life which an individual has expended to gain the
property.  When a thief steals property, he steals
life.  I am tolerant of human weakness, and I would
not react vigorously to the theft of a day.  I would
resent the theft of a week; I would kill the thief
who stole a year of my life.

< Jack Vance