Swanwick, Michael. From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled...

Michael Swanwick, "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled..." (2008). Features a civilization, the millies, who use trust as currency. It is a maddenly subtle choice of buck. On the one hand, this could be a cosmetic alteration to our own economic system. Money is, after all, typically without intrinsic use value, and only functions as money insofar as it is trusted as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. So perhaps these "millie-on-airs" unmask and demystify what goes on around us every day. On the other hand, trust is so deeply and intricately implicated in what money is, that it's not clear it could fulfill the role of money (at least, not in the ways we're used to). You can put your trust in shells or brass rods, but can you put your trust in trust itself? Story online at Clarkesworld.

Tomaras, Joseph. The Libidinal Economy of the Suburbs

Joseph Tomaras, "The Libidinal Economy of the Suburbs" (2016). Very tenuously about economics and not really speculative fiction. A brief exchange in a cafe is minutely explicated, except, of course, that it becomes more ambiguous rather than less. Is that really what "I'm just trying to drive my kids crazy" meant? Story online at Flapperhouse.

The phrase "fuck your brains out" is kind of intriguing in the context of the theme of the libidinal economy. Compare "fuck the shit out of me." Also compare Lyotard maybe:

"Now, here comes the question of symbolic exchange: this fear [of impotence, of things going nowhere, of nothing happening] is not, as we have thought, the fear of no longer being able to give. The category of the gift is a theatrical idea, it belongs to semiology, it presupposes a subject, a limit of his proper body and his property, and the generous transgression of this property. When Lacan says: to love is to give what one has not, he means: to forget that one is castrated. It should mean: one never has anything, there is no subject, and so there is nothing but love; not only is there never anything to give because one has nothing, but there is no-one to give, or to receive. It is in the theory of signs that donatory exchange (or the gift as the primitive form of exchange) may be represented as the attribution of devolution of an object charged with affects to someone who at the beginning of the cycle didn't have it: for the sign is just something which replaces something else, hides and manifests something else, for someone, for the addressee (and also for the sender). This problematic, coming from Jakobson to Lacan, that is to say the theory of communication, carries with it the entire philosophy of the subject, the philosophy of a body haunted by self-appropriation and property since the theory of communication is obviously just as much a piece of economic theory. Mauss must not be read as the discovery of a 'precapitalist', or at least a mercantilist, economy, but as the invention and the perfecting, in the heart of this economy, of its indespensable complement of anteriority-exteriority. Replace the gift with symbolic exchange and you remain in the same sphere, for exchange also takes place amongst unitary bodies or those destined to be unitary, even if they are prevented for ever (by the 'bar of the signifier') from bringing this unity about, and even if they are always driven by their splitting in two, by the Entzweiung, as Hegel used to say, to exchange something, even if only pieces of themselves; the exchangists remain perforated, like poles or ideas of (mercantilist) reason rather than as existants, it remains that exchange requires this polarization, this encephalization, and an in-and-out movement, a cycle of flows, the circle of a market and its central balance. Whether or not one exchanges affects does not modify this configuration, it simply dramatizes it. [...] Exchange is no less 'humanist' than production [...] Circulation is no less suspect than production, it is only, as Marx well knew, a particular case of production taken it the broad sense. Let's rather place oursilves in the sense of this production in the broad sense, which is the general metamorphosis of everything which takes place on bodies and inscribes itself into the social body, haunted by the idea of a ceaseless general metamorphosis, or of a general production without inscription, which is nothing other than the great skin; we wonder instead what are the characteristics of the figure which makes the passage from this latter to inscribed production, the characteristics of the dispostif of inscription which constitutes social voluminosity." 

He goes on to talk about a urinal.

(JLW)

Van Zant, Loren. Mutiny on the Mohawk

Loren Van Zant, Mutiny on the Mohawk (2016). Space opera with wampum currency. "Sinister crouched down into a cocorinha, a squatting escape maneuver, and the holographic Yoruba god curled back upon himself in a spiraling whir. There was another surging roar and this time Sinister could distinguish individual bets being shouted out in wampum denominations." (loc. 740-743).

(JLW)

Vance, Jack. The Moon Moth

Jack Vance, "The Moon Moth" (1961). Online. I'm not as convinced that strakh is as currency-like as people sometimes say. That sentence about medium-of-exchange is taken a bit too literally, perhaps. (Strakh also appears, by the way, to be Niven's Kzin's word for an honor, which also ambiguously takes the place of currency).

(JLW)

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky

Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky (1999).

Discussed in Noah Smith's "SF for Economists" list.

Walton, Jo Lindsay. I Have Seen You In Forever

I Have Seen You In Forever is a sort of unpublished novel, maybe, that might be published one day, maybe. See excerpts / early drafts: "The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You" in Twelve Tomorrows 2016 (as well as Pokemoney, there's something buried in that weird bit at the end which isn't totally dissimilar to Wilkins's conceit), and "Froggy Goes Piggy."

(JLW)

Weinersmith, Zach. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Zach Weinersmith's SMBC web comic frequently goes into a kind of speculative mode, sometimes with a hell-for-leather extrapolative velocity, enabled by his keen ear for rational-sounding sophistry. He also sometimes touches on economics. And just occasionally, both at once.

Whedon, Joss. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Series, 1996-2003)

John Elledge muses at The New Statesman:

3. What would happen if a Slayer were to withdraw her labour? Obviously Buffy isn’t going to form a union with herself – I mean, what would be the point – but she doesn’t have to. She can just stop slaying until she is offered better pay and conditions. Clearly this hasn’t happened. Why?  

4. Since the Watchers’ Council is based in the UK, is it covered by Ofsted? If so, why has the regulator never intervened to prevent the ritual where the Watchers deliberately poison Slayers on their 18th birthday?

Perhaps Buffy can be read as a kind of allegory of the naturalization of socially reproductive labour? One could imagine that were Buffy to withhold her labour, the Watchers would do some frantic searching in those big grimoires of theirs and some alternative systems of vampire control would soon surface.

Some of Elledge's concerns are partly answered in the finale, in which the Slaying labour market is significantly expanded, while there is also reason to anticipate a sharp decline in the supply of infernal horrors.

On another note, is there a bit in the Buffy canon where she stakes a vampire and the necro-ash sprinkles Xander, and Willow goes, 'Hey! Slay it don't spray it?' I really hope so.

See also: Buffy the Anarcho-Syndicalist: Capitalism Bites.

Wilkins, Patrick. Money is the Root of All Good

Patrick Wilkins, "Money is the Root of All Good" (1954). This is really interesting, although pretty straightforward pulpy in its execution. It's interesting as well to remember that finance and stock markets in 1954 were not what they are today (the professionalization of stock analysis and the scientization of finance as an academic discipline pretty much took place in the 1960s and 70s). PDF in Archive.org. Here's an extended quotation:

"This sect maintained that an individual should not be paid on the basis of the work he did, but for the good deeds, or good thoughts he had. A small stipend was paid for actual work or production, to establish a workable basic economy and trade. This stipend was enough to cover all the basic wants of the individual. To procure luxuries, a citizen had to use the money he received for his good deeds or thoughts. Every time a man helped an old lady across the street, or came up with a bit of philosophical wisdom, he could record it with a central office and receive his luxury pay from the government. The purpose of the system was to make people emphasize virtue and quality in their lives. Instead of concentrating on profit for profit's sake, they would have to consider the inherent rightness and beauty of what they were doing.

"In such a system," Roald asked, "how could such a thing as a stock market possibly develop?"  

"Very simple, sir. This luxury pay, issued in a different currency than the commodity pay, could be used in any way a person saw fit. Some people naturally developed the idea of investing stock in a particularly virtuous or intelligent person. Every time that person did a good deed, the stockholders received a dividend from his luxury pay. All of the scientists and philosophers, therefore, became corporations in themselves, with as many as five thousand people holding stock in one man."  

"Sorry, Kim, but I don't get it. How could these incorporated individuals get any luxury pay for themselves if they had to hand it out to their stockholders?" 

"The administration would allow for that. A person received luxury pay in proportion to the number of stockholders that he claimed. The government had to do this since they indirectly were investing in these corporation men -- but I'll explain that later. The corporation-man lived off the original investments of stockholders, with some of the stock solvent for sales. In this way, the individual would profit from 'good doing' by receiving many new investments."  

"What is the social makeup of this Lyranc? It seems to me it would be a lunatic fringe de luxe, with every hack writer, thaumaturgist, or evangelist climbing aboard the gravy train."

(JLW)