Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. [...] but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.(JLW)
Atwood, Margaret. MadAddam Trilogy
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). A novel which doggedly accumulates clever choices, and touches quite a lot on the reduction of humans to economic values. That there is a lot to nitpick over and call out is, in this case, a sign of what an excellent novel it is. Two clever choices pertinent to economics are: (a) the choice of an overdetermined apocalypse -- brought about through individual agency and economic crisis and ecological crisis and technological crisis, and if it hadn't been this particular apocalypse, it probably would have been a different apocalypse; (b) the decision to largely float the whole "reduction of humans to economic values" thing as a mansplainer (who has consumed his share of child pornography, sort-of-ironically of course) explaining to a woman the tragedy of her objectification. She is not convinced:
Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)
Non-fiction. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city between October and November 2008. Adapted into a film in 2012:
I found the book entertaining and commendably sprawling but also weirdly elusive. For more on debt see David Graeber and Charles Stross. (Atwood's Debt is one I really must come back to though, perhaps in an actual proper book).
Talking point:
Non-fiction. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city between October and November 2008. Adapted into a film in 2012:
I found the book entertaining and commendably sprawling but also weirdly elusive. For more on debt see David Graeber and Charles Stross. (Atwood's Debt is one I really must come back to though, perhaps in an actual proper book).
Talking point:
- Why do we have bankruptcy law? In what ways might bankruptcy law ameliorate and/or exacerbate economic injustice? (Also discuss limited liability).
Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009).
Biopunk SF set in the 23rd century. It is a world in which everyone is very attuned to the calorific significance of everything that is going on around them, although the calorie hasn't quite taken over money's unit of account function.
Here is a snippet:
(JLW)
Biopunk SF set in the 23rd century. It is a world in which everyone is very attuned to the calorific significance of everything that is going on around them, although the calorie hasn't quite taken over money's unit of account function.
Here is a snippet:
Chaiyanuchit remembered the beginning of the plagues. Not many could claim that. And when Jaidee was just a young draftee, he was lucky enough to work in the man’s office, bringing dispatches.Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl (p. 120).
Chaiyanuchit understood what was at stake, and what had to be done. When the borders needed closing, when ministries needed isolating, when Phuket and Chiang Mai needed razing, he did not hesitate. When jungle blooms exploded in the north, he burned and burned and burned, and when he took to the sky in His Majesty the King’s dirigible, Jaidee was blessed to ride with him.
By then, they were only mopping up. AgriGen and PurCal and the rest were shipping their plague-resistant seeds and demanding exorbitant profits, and patriotic generippers were already working to crack the code of the calorie companies’ products, fighting to keep the Kingdom fed as Burma and the Vietnamese and the Khmers all fell. AgriGen and its ilk were threatening embargo over intellectual property infringement, but the Thai Kingdom was still alive. Against all odds, they were alive. As others were crushed under the calorie companies’ heels, the Kingdom stood strong.
(JLW)
Bajwa, Sim. HR Confidential
Sim Bajwa, 'HR Confidential' (2018)
An epistolary-in-the-broad-sense fiction comprising HR's notes and transcripts on a troublesome employee. In Shoreline of Infinity.
Elsewhere:
An epistolary-in-the-broad-sense fiction comprising HR's notes and transcripts on a troublesome employee. In Shoreline of Infinity.
Elsewhere:
Banks, Iain M. The Culture series
Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Notable for its post-scarcity civilisation: anyone can have pretty much any good or service they want. Nobody has to work unless they want to. Work has more to do with self-expression, self-fulfillment and relaxation than with toil, coercion, duty and necessity. Banks outlines the Culture's democratically planned economy in "A Few Notes on the Culture" (1994). See also Gene Roddenberry.
Here's one interesting snippet: in Banks's Look to Windward (2000), a highly desirable ticketed music event leads to a "partial" reinvention of "money."
Here's one interesting snippet: in Banks's Look to Windward (2000), a highly desirable ticketed music event leads to a "partial" reinvention of "money."
“Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert [...] People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together — good grief — even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping! [...] People have traded sexual favors, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets [...] And they have indeed [...] come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money” (p.276).I wrote about this a little bit in the reflective part of my PhD. I said:
"This episode suggests a technologically privileged and sexually liberal version of commodity theory, with the same progression from inconvenient, illiquid, spot-trade barters to more conveniently liquid transactions. The tenacity of money in the Culture series, flourishing inside its homines economici like gut microbiomes [...] suggests a failure to fully erase money."(JLW)
Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist
Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist (2005). Not part of Banks's Culture sequence, although it's a space opera which overlaps in various ways with the Culture universe. In terms of economics, it's notable for its reputation currency kudos (used by the Dwellers). Here's a snippet:
Also see Abigail Nussbaum's review.
(JLW)
Bribing creatures who found the concept of money merely amusing tended to tax even the most enterprising and talented arbitrageur. The Dwellers clove to a system in which power was distributed, well, more or less randomly, it sometimes seemed, and authority and influence depended almost entirely on one's age; little leverage there.
Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered - independently, amazingly often - did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to themselves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.And another:
The problem was that to the Dwellers all professions were in effect hobbies, all posts and positions sinecures. This tailor that Y'sul and the City Administrator were babbling on about would have had no real need to be a tailor, he was just somebody who'd found he possessed an aptitude for the pastime (or, more likely, for the gossiping and fussing generally associated with it). He would take on clients to increase his kudos, the level of which would increase proportionally the more powerful were the people he tailored for, so that somebody in a position of civil power would constitute a favoured client, even if that position of power had come about through a lottery, some arcanely complicated rota system or plain old coercive voting - jobs like that of City Administrator were subject to all those regimes and more, depending on the band or zone concerned, or just which city was involved. The City Administrator, in return, would be able to drop casually into just the right conversations the fact she had such a well-known, high-kudos tailor. Obviously Y'sul had had sufficient kudos of his own to be able to engage the services of this alpha-outfitter too. People further down the pecking order would have employed less well-connected tailors, or just got their clothes from Common, which was Dweller for, in this particular case, off-the-peg, and in general just meant mass-produced, kudos-free, available-as-a-matter-of-right-just-because you're-a-Dweller . . . well, pretty much anything, up to and including spaceships.Kudos makes for some interesting comparisons with Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Karen Lord's social credit, and the trust "currency" of Michael Swanwick's millies.
Also see Abigail Nussbaum's review.
(JLW)
Beckbessinger, Sam. Undercurrency
Sam Beckbessinger, 'Undercurrency' (2021).
Part of a whole collection of financial futures. The story relates to a futuristic biofuel kelp farm pilot, located beyond the shallows with the help of drones that drag the kelp up to soak up the sun in the day, down to the sea bed to soak up nutrients in the night. In this new environment, a new subspecies of giant sea snail is thriving. The story explores the economics of environmental management, and in particular conflicts between decarbonisation and preserving biodiversity.
She believes in the market. How its invisible hand can solve the most complex problems, as long as everything has been priced in. Carbon tax treaties. Pollution fines. The costs your business doesn’t have to bear, the benefits they didn’t have to pay for. Her economics professor back in business school called them “externalities”. Her Ouma used to call it “leaving your mess for the fairies to pick up”.
Wole Talabi comments:
A brilliant story focused on climate change, energy transition and sustainable investment, “Undercurrency” follows a South African woman’s attempt to build her company, growing underwater kelp for biofuel on the coast while falling in love and learning about the complexity of doing the right thing in a world of complex and competing drivers. The voice in the story is strong, the description of the romance, while quick, feels natural and the descriptions of the science and the diving are vivid, accurate and wonderful. Full disclosure: I am an engineer in the energy industry and an avid diver, therefore naturally biased or as we say in Nigeria, I am the story’s target market. Consider me sold. Highly Recommended.
The choice of a giant sea snail offers a faint echo of the landmark snail darter conservation case of the 1970s. The Endangered Species Act is an intriguing mix of anthropocentric and ecocentric motivations. Kaitlin Bakken suggests: "If it were not for the human interest in protecting the land, the snail darter fish would not have been considered. [...] Conversely, where human interests are superior, wildlife species are generally unprotected."
The story is able to wrap up quickly and satisfyingly (in a way) with carbon credits as the deus ex machina. Instead of harvesting the kelp as biofuel, the fields are sold to the fossil fuel industry to offset carbon emissions. It works narratively, but it relies on a catastrophically rosy picture of how carbon credit trading has worked in practice.
“Prop up the oil companies?”
“That’s one way to see it.”
That is pretty much the correct way to see it.
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). Bellamy's utopian novel-- it's the old-fashioned kind you might charitably call "heavy on worldbuilding" -- deals extensively with economics. Bellamy advocates an egalitarian command economy, with everyone taking an equal share of non-transferable credit. The individual spends their credit to claim their share of the national product. The rations are so generous, however, that individuals often find they have credits left over at the end of the year; these are then spent on public goods (such as making everywhere look beautiful).
Although everybody's "wages" are fixed at the same level by a ferocious egalitarian principle, there is something which sounds rather a lot like market mechanisms -- or at least, like a command economy simulating market mechanisms -- mediatized not by money, but by leisure time. You could look at it like this: workers are (in a way) paid different hourly rates, but hours that they work are carefully regulated to ensure that all total incomes are equal:
Although everybody's "wages" are fixed at the same level by a ferocious egalitarian principle, there is something which sounds rather a lot like market mechanisms -- or at least, like a command economy simulating market mechanisms -- mediatized not by money, but by leisure time. You could look at it like this: workers are (in a way) paid different hourly rates, but hours that they work are carefully regulated to ensure that all total incomes are equal:
"The supply of volunteers is always expected to fully equal the demand," replied Dr. Leete. "It is the business of the administration to see that this is the case. The rate of volunteering for each trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably greater excess of volunteers over men needed in any trade, it is inferred that the trade offers greater attractions than others. On the other hand, if the number of volunteers for a trade tends to drop below the demand, it is inferred that it is thought more arduous. It is the business of the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the trades, so far as the conditions of labor in them are concerned, so that all trades shall be equally attractive to persons having natural tastes for them. This is done by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ according to their arduousness. The lighter trades, prosecuted under the most agreeable circumstances, have in this way the longest hours, while an arduous trade, such as mining, has very short hours. There is no theory, no a priori rule, by which the respective attractiveness of industries is determined. The administration, in taking burdens off one class of workers and adding them to other classes, simply follows the fluctuations of opinion among the workers themselves as indicated by the rate of volunteering [...]"
Beukes, Lauren. Moxyland
Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008). Review originally appeared on Aargh and doesn't just focus on the economic aspects.
If you are going to write an archetypically bursting-at-the-seams first novel, then cyberpunk is an excellent genre in which (and bursting slightly out of which) to write it.
We get four narrators: Kendra, a Z-list schleb photographer, interested in the aesthetics of both obsolete and prototype technologies; Toby, a vile trustafarian with a magic vlogcaster suit; Tendeka, a slightly naïve community organizer and political activist; and Lerato, an AIDS orphan done good as a hacker with a snazzy corporate day-job. They roll around, exemplifying themselves and their world, occasionally explicitly brushing against each other, occasionally suggesting some more obscure, behind-the-scenes connections, until a horrific police crack-down on a rather intricate scene of civil disorder draws their four narratives together for the final act.
One of them melts.
Bogdanov, Alexander. Red Star
Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star (1908).
As well as co-founding the Bolsheviks with Lenin, Bogdanov wrote this Martian utopia (and its prequel, Engineer Menni). It was published in 1908, shortly before Bogdanov's expulsion; translated into German in 1923, Esperanto in 1929, and English 1982.
This snippet of Red Star explains the division and allocation of productive labour. It anticipates themes of Bogdanov's Tektology: Universal Organization Science (1912-1917) and later the social and organizational cybernetics and systems theory of people like Stafford Beer, Margaret Mead, Niklas Luhmann.
As well as co-founding the Bolsheviks with Lenin, Bogdanov wrote this Martian utopia (and its prequel, Engineer Menni). It was published in 1908, shortly before Bogdanov's expulsion; translated into German in 1923, Esperanto in 1929, and English 1982.
This snippet of Red Star explains the division and allocation of productive labour. It anticipates themes of Bogdanov's Tektology: Universal Organization Science (1912-1917) and later the social and organizational cybernetics and systems theory of people like Stafford Beer, Margaret Mead, Niklas Luhmann.
Borenstein, Greg. @SpeculativeCash
Automatic text generation has been around since c.forever, and so has recombinant artwork. But both these things have turned a corner with the rise of Twitter bots. The critical language and tools for understanding Twitter bots, who are both poets and poems, both cultural producers and cultural products, is still pretty incipient. Nevertheless, if anything deserves entry to a database of economic speculative fiction, it's Greg Borenstein's @speculativecash bot. Borenstein's bot does one thing, constantly: invents new forms of money.
Disempowerment Wage— Speculative Currency (@speculativecash) October 2, 2016
A digital currency based on the act of disempowering
Brunner, John. Total Eclipse
John Brunner, Total Eclipse (1974). Mess with eugenics and capitalism-like structures merged into one institution, y'all might wind up dead.
Here's the relevant bit (big spoiler alert):
(JLW)
Here's the relevant bit (big spoiler alert):
“But that’s absurd,” Lucas said after a pause. “Going bankrupt— well, it could bring down a civilisation, but it couldn’t wipe out an entire species.”[like, an hour later]
“It could!” Ian insisted. “Look, it occurred to us to wonder whether the Draconians traded among themselves, and we decided yes, they must have, but it never occurred to any of us to ask what kind of currency they employed.”
Cathy jumped to her feet. “The printed crystals!” she burst out. “Those can’t have been money!”
Karen shouted. “You’d find money all over everywhere, not concentrated in great big storehouses—”
“Am I being obtuse?” Karen said. “Or have you not yet explained how going bankrupt killed them off?”
“I was just coming to the details of that. I think I already said— excuse me, but my head is buzzing insanely with all the implications— I think I said I started asking what an individual could accumulate by way of reward, or payment.”
There was a brief hush. Nadine ventured, “Promises that when he became she, there would be outstanding genetic lines reserved to— uh— to her?”
“That’s it. That’s what killed them.” Igor leapt to his feet and started pacing back and forth, thumping fist into palm. “I’ve almost got it,” he said. “You mean that without realising what they were doing, they restricted their genetic pool until it became dangerous, and then it was too late. Like fortunes being concentrated in the hands of a few ultra-powerful families? A sort of genetic capitalism?”
(JLW)
Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower.
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)
Entry at the ISFDB.
Entry at the ISFDB.
A snippet from my chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Economics and Literature:
Nonetheless, speculative fiction often generates knowledge or exercises agency in much more intricate and indirect ways as well, operating through satire, allegory, metaphor, and estrangement. Octavia Butler’s duology The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998) make an excellent case study. Butler’s narrative opens in California in 2024, in the midst of interconnected ecological and economic crises. Despite their relative affluence, Lauren Oya Olamina’s family live precarious and hardscrabble lives in a gated community. Lauren knows the slow and unevenly distributed apocalypse will find her eventually, and when it does, she is as prepared as she can reasonably be. In the context of loss and trauma, Lauren sets out on a perilous journey and lifelong project of world-making, intent on founding of a kind of secular religion, Earthseed, that is more rational and robust than the political and economic systems whose disintegration she is enduring. God, according to Earthseed, is Change: indifferent to you, but potentially something you can shape. In such a context, Butler’s representation of cash may feel rather curious. Yes, there are hints in Parable of the Sower of hyperinflation. But for the most part, cash is sought after with a special fervor. This reliability of money in this free-for-all world of cannibals and pyromaniac drug addicts could be interpreted as just another small but significant failure of the science-fictional imagination: another example of money’s curious tenacity through the downfall of capitalism and beyond.Then again, Butler’s representation of money is inseparable from her exploration of slavery. For Butler, the cycle of acquiring and using money may imply autonomy, but she is crystal-clear that it doesn’t always imply this. The company town is a repeated motif: “[Emery Mora] had been a debt slave. [...] The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter, so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt.” With this in mind, perhaps the duology does not ‘transcendentalize’ money as an unchanging and compulsory feature of any possible future economy. Nor does it advocate for any particular future form or forms for money. Rather, it articulates a sense of money’s immanence in history as a particular distribution of tools and traps.For Lauren, any given bundle of cash is just another locus of ‘Change,’ one with its own distinct features, and one that is often versatile, unpredictable, and—on the long time-scale Lauren thinks on—ephemeral. When Lauren hides and then retrieves caches of money, her acts suggest Matthew 25:14–30, ‘The Parable of the Talents,’ about a rich man and the stewards of his estate. In this parable, two stewards please their master by trading actively and growing his wealth, while the third angers him by merely burying then retrieving the money. The lessons of doing what you can with what you are given, and of thinking long-term—the Kingdom of Heaven may take a while!—are clearly relevant. But Butler also complicates, and even resists such lessons. Significantly, debt slavery was a pervasive condition in the Ancient Near East, and the word often translated as ‘servants’ in ‘The Parable of the Talents’ is probably better translated as ‘slaves.’ Butler pairs the figure of God as one who “reaps where he has not sown” with the figure in Matthew 13:1–23, ‘The Parable of the Sower,’ who sows (at least some seeds) where he cannot reap. So should this composite Sower be understood in a broadly anti-theodician manner, as a representation of the unfathomable nature of God’s goodness? Possibly, although Butler tends to deploy religious discourse in service of a more secular idea of justice. Both Lauren and the disfavored slave confront God as something entirely without mercy. Whereas the two slaves who have traded actively are rewarded by being ‘set over’ a large part of his estate, the slave who perhaps quite reasonably refuses to risk increasing his debt to such a master is rebuked and ‘cast into the outer darkness’—an image which takes on a more ambiguous resonance in a narrative which is, ultimately, about yearning to travel to space.
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