Roberts, Adam. New Model Army

See the Lara Buckerton review of this book, along with Antoine Bousquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare. Originally in Vector.

Roberts, Adam. By the Pricking of Her Thumb

 Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb (2018).

“For thousands of years money has been a way of parsing scarcity—a way of allocating scarce resources. What happens to money when scarcity is no longer a thing?” By the Pricking of Her Thumb is about capital striving to reinvent itself in the early days of a post-scarcity utopia. Most people spend their days in relative delight in a simulated reality called the Shine. But four ultra-rich rivals are seeking to introduce scarcity to the Shine. Some new form of money is bound to arise soon, they all reason, and whoever defines it first may well find themselves ruling the world. 

Each of the Four has their own ingenious idea about some “resource” that they think is fundamentally, existentially scarce. Each of the Four hopes to use this “resource” as the basis for a radically new kind of money. In this way, they are trying to piece together the Shine-dwellers’ innumerable little heavens into a sensible, hard-nosed cosmology with a heaven on top and a hell below, and no such thing as a free launch. (I won't say what their ideas are, since it would be fairly spoilerish).

Some reviews: by Ian Mond; by Antony Jones; by Blue Book Balloon.

This novel helped me to reflect a little more on the relationship between money and scarcity. One thing we should remember is that, in economic terms, scarce very seldom means “finite.” The opposite of scarce should not be “infinite.” The opposite of scarce should be “enough.” Post-scarcity is not about having infinite resources, but about having enough resources. 

Roberts, Adam. Stone

Adam Roberts, Stone (2002). The protagonist of Stone, on a visit to the world Rain, discovers a currency of leaves. The unspoken joke is that on Rain, money does grow on trees! Trees and their leaves are also abundant: a local explains that because of this shrewd choice of currency, everyone on Rain is rich! But the Rain-dwellers do take their currency very seriously: when the protagonist finds themself curiously leaf-bereft, they really cannot buy anything. The episode has a satirical, proto-sf "traveler's tale" type feel to it. But at the same time, it feels possible to reconstruct a kind of economic system that makes almost perfect sense.

Rain is part of a broadly post-scarcity and utopian civilization. In this civilization, the puzzles of resource allocation are probably not the big ones we're used to nowadays -- posers like, "healthcare or nuclear deterrents?" -- but rather, masses and masses of infinitesimal puzzles. They are infinitesimal puzzles about the most efficient and fair way to enjoy peace and luxury together which, a bit like Stone's ubiquitous swarming nanotech, might accumulate into something fairly formidable. On a world where there's always enough to go around, should it go around clockwise or what? (You could call it "lowered stakes scarcity," or "estranged scarcity" or something).

Gathering leaves introduces a modicum of inconvenience, and you might plan your activities between bouts of leaf-gathering. Leaf currency, we may imagine, allows the Rain-dwellers to sustain a smidge of the quantifying and calculative rationality of homo economicus. Thrift is comprehensible to them. In the rainy climate, leaves probably turn to soggy sludge pretty quickly, so there's also a kind of Gesellian Freigeld aspect to their leaf currency -- a dampening of liquidity preference, if you will -- so nobody would bother hoarding leaves. And nobody bothers trying to lend leaves at interest, or allows themselves to be exploited to get some leaves. They just go get some leaves.  Nobody's opinions are given more weight just because they have a lot of leaves. Leaf-getting does not lend itself to Sisyphean graft nor entrepreneurial genius. If somebody has a lot of leaves, they're just somebody who has gone and got lots of leaves.

For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Clifford D. Simak, and Douglas Adams. Adams's proto-humans are strict quantity theorists with a match and a mission to control the money supply. That's what's clever about Rain, you see. It's always raining.

(JLW)