Afterword
The idea for "The Prize Beyond Gold" arose when I watched the Olympics and noticed how often the TV pictures showed the current competitors' times against the world record for the event. Today, we see records being broken all the time; it's not even very newsworthy. However, it's obvious that this process can't continue indefinitely. In any discipline, there must be a limit to what's physically possible. Eventually, as the world record approaches this limit, it will become harder and harder to break. New records will happen less and less often.
And so I decided to write a story in the traditional SF mode of extrapolating a trend to its limit. I focused on the 100-metre sprint, partly because it's the most iconic event in athletics, and also because of its purity and simplicity. There's no special equipment, or team tactics, or lengthy time-span — it's just a person running, for a few seconds.
One of the story's themes arose from my hypothesis that, as the record became ever harder to break, anyone challenging the record would have to approach ever closer to an "optimum" performance: the Platonic ideal of the perfect sprint. For the sprinter, this would probably feel rather mechanistic, as if they were a machine following a script. There would be no room for deviation or improvisation, because that would be sub-optimal. Over time, the script for the optimum performance would become ever more detailed, encompassing all aspects of the athlete's life: training, nutrition, relaxation... ultimately every single waking moment.
The athlete would need a coach whose role was to determine the script for the optimum performance, in all its ever-expanding detail, and then persuade the sprinter to follow it. And since the coach effectively specifies every aspect of the athlete's life, the coach-athlete relationship struck me as analogous to the author-character relationship. After all, when writing a story, the author specifies every aspect of a character's existence.
So I added this analogy as a subsidiary theme: the protagonist's rigidly scripted existence stems not only from being an athlete striving to break a record, but also from being a character in an author's story. Some of the text therefore has a double meaning. For example, the "script" refers to both the training regime, and the story text itself; and the "finishing line" — beyond which lies freedom — refers to both the end of the race, and the final line of the story. However, because metafictional gimmicks can easily become tiresome, I tried to present this subsidiary theme in a subtle, understated fashion: it's an optional way of interpreting the text, but the story functions perfectly well without it.
A more obvious theme within the story is the nature of fair competition. As of March 2010, the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibited a total of 192 performance-enhancing substances and methods. My tale would necessarily be set a long way into the future, to allow time for the world records to approach their theoretical limits. If there are already 192 dubious techniques, it's clear that this number will explode over the course of a few decades or centuries. What are the likely consequences? Either the ban on performance-enhancing techniques will disappear, so that competition becomes a free-for-all; or the ban will continue, but abiding by it becomes ever more onerous. I chose the latter option, partly because it felt more realistic, and also because it resonated with the earlier theme of my protagonist chafing under the restrictions of his tightly defined regime.
The world of the story is therefore divided into Standard humans, such as my protagonist; and Enhanced humans, with a whole range of modifications including augmented intelligence and resculpted bodies. For example, wings are one popular Enhancement. Flight is a symbol of freedom: in the story it represents the myriad options available to the protagonist if he rejects his career as a Standard athlete.
As for what might happen if performance-boosting techniques are permitted, and competition becomes a free-for-all, I reserved that idea for another story....
"The Prize Beyond Gold" is one of the stories included in my collection Maps of the Edge. If you enjoyed this story, you may be interested in reading the whole collection. Full details are available at https://www.iancreasey.com/info/maps_of_the_edge.htm.
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About the Author
Ian Creasey was born in 1969 and lives in Yorkshire, England. He began writing when rock and roll stardom failed to return his calls. His first story was published in 1999, and since then he has made numerous sales to various magazines and anthologies.
His story "Erosion" featured on the 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List, and was reprinted in three Year's Best anthologies. "Erosion" is the lead story in his collection Maps of the Edge, alongside sixteen other SF tales.
Ian's spare time interests include hiking, gardening, and environmental conservation work... anything to get him outdoors and away from the computer screen.
For more information, please visit his website — https://www.iancreasey.com — which contains a complete bibliography, together with audio downloads of several stories.
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