Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower.

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)

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. 

Chapman, Stepan. How Alex Became a Machine

Stepan Chapman, "How Alex Became a Machine" (1996?).

Here's a brief mention by Tobias Carroll.

Cisco, Michael. Animal Money.

Michael Cisco, Animal Money (2016).

Animal Money at the ISFDB.
Reviewed by Tobias Carroll.

De Abaitua, Matthew. If Then

Matthew De Abaitua, If Then (2015).

An algorithm called The Process makes all economic decisions (although this also means that there is no well-defined "economic" realm). It does so supposedly in pursuit of "fairness." Here is a short snippet from early in the book.

He walked the orderly line of repairmen with individual placards detailing skills offered and services required. This was residual behaviour, rendered unnecessary by the Process. Their skills and availability would be sorted algorithmically and bartered accordingly with other townspeople and their labour; that was how the Process generated the core work schedule for the town, and gave meaning to labour that had become meaningless. But the market had a role to play that was more than trade. It was a social occasion, a chance to get out, to see and be seen. The metrics of happiness required old rituals, old ways of doing things, and so time was set aside within the work schedule for the townspeople to make their own trades.

Dick, Philip K. Ubik

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

A snippet:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." 

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. 

"I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." 

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." 

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. 

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring.

Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). Entry at ISFDB. Nalo Hopkinson's entry at SFE.

Review by Dan Hartland at Strange Horizons.

Macleod, Ken. The Star Fraction.

Ken Macleod, The Star Fraction (1995). Entry at ISFDB. Macleod at SFE.

Moon, Elizabeth. Once A Hero

Elizabeth Moon, Once A Hero (1997). Entry in ISFDB. Elizabeth Moon's entry in SFE.

Review by Kate Macdonald.

Older, Malka. The Centenal Cycle

Malka Older, The Centenal Cycle (2016-).

Centenal Cycle at ISFDB.

From Esko Suoranta's 'Surveillance Capitalism and the Data/Flesh Worker in Malka Older’s Infomocracy' (Vector 288):

[...] Older conjures a world of somewhat curtailed surveillance capitalism, speculative democratic institutions, and continued worker precarity. Her protagonists navigate this world as information workers whose skill in gathering, managing, and understanding data makes them effective professionals in a variety of contexts. [...] Infomocracy emerges as a thought-experiment for the transition from Big Brother to Big Other and describes key tensions caused by the rise of surveillance capitalism. Nation states have relinquished their monopoly on surveillance and corporations have displaced them as legislators and democratic subjects, but both become subsumed in the near-hegemonic Information. In Older’s interpretation, it is possible to deflect the dystopian future that surveillance capitalism seems to be leading to, but that optimistic project appears to hinge on the abolition of nationalist politics and of surveillance capitalist monopolies like Google and Facebook.

Elsewhere: Abigail Nussbaum on the whole trilogy.

Onwualu, Chinelo. What the Dead Man Said.

Chinelo Onwualu, 'What the Dead Man Said' (2019).

Extract:

As they grew feeble, the burden of caring for them and maintaining the world they’d built fell to us. My agemates, those I kept in touch with after I moved, tell me I was lucky to get out when I did. Leaving New Biafra when I was only 12 meant that I was too young to be tied down by the weight of its social obligations. They complained of having to work long hours to preserve family businesses passed down by aging parents and grandparents. They spoke wistfully of the massive payouts the government awarded to those who could birth three or more children, but few of them could carve out the time needed to cultivate such large families. Though my own life—a spacious apartment in the hills of Highland Crescent, an easygoing art research consultancy—was very different from theirs, I’m not sure I did escape. One cannot cut the invisible threads of familial indebtedness by simply running off to a distant land.

Full story here.

Palmer, Ada. Terra Ignota

Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota series (2016-2018).

Set in a future where the nation-state formation has disappeared, to be replaced by Hives and a limited form of global government.

Terra Ignota at the ISFDB.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017).

This novel deals extensively with economic themes, particularly finance and the relationship between environment and economy. Here's an excerpt from the opening pages:

    [...] “This I know. It’s why we live in a tent on a roof.”
    “Right, and now people are even worried about food.”
    “As they should. That’s the real value, food in your belly. Because you can’t eat money.”
    “That’s what I’m saying!”
    “I thought you said the real value was code. Something a coder would say, may I point out.”
    “Mutt, hang with me. Follow what I’m saying. We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.”
    “Okay, I get that. We’re broke and I get that.”
    “So good, keep hanging with me. We live by buying things with money, in a market that sets all the prices.”
    “The invisible hand.”
    “Right. Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It’s crowdsourced, it’s democratic, it’s capitalism, it’s the market.”
    “It’s the way of the world.”
    “Right. And it’s always, always wrong.”
    “What do you mean wrong?”
    “The prices are always too low, and so the world is fucked. We’re in a mass extinction event, sea level rise, climate change, food panics, everything you’re not reading in the news.”
    “All because of the market.”
    “Exactly! It’s not just that there are market failures. It’s that the market is a failure.”
    “How so?”
    “Things are sold for less than it costs to make them.”
    “That sounds like the road to bankruptcy.”
    “Yes, and lots of businesses do go bankrupt. But the ones that don’t haven’t actually sold their thing for more than it cost to make. They’ve just ignored some of their costs. They’re under huge pressure to sell as low as they can, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever it is. So they shove some of their production costs off their books.”
    “Can’t they just pay their labor less?”
    “They already did that! That was easy. That’s why we’re all broke except the plutocrats.”
    “I always see the Disney dog when you say that.”
    “They’ve squeezed us till we’re bleeding from the eyes. I can’t stand it anymore.”

From Paul Kincaid's review in Interzone #270:

Robinson is at pains to make clear that capitalism itself is to blame for the environmental failures. But capitalism is remarkably resilient: even among the ashes, the hedge funds make money. The intertidal zone, that flooded portion of Manhattan where tower blocks like the old Metropolitan Life building on Madison Square now house thousands of people in their own little islands, is disputed territory, its legal status now unknown. But life here has settled down since the last pulse, which means it is ripe for the money men to move in. One of Robinson’s characters has even devised an index that records the tidal movement of populations, the collapse of old towers, that provides a guide for hedge funds on when to invest, when to sell.

New York 2140 entry at ISFDB.

Shriver, Lionel. The Mandibles

Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles (2016).

To its credit, The Mandibles does actually try to imagine in some detail what it would mean for US sovereign debt to reach a crisis level. The plausibility of the account is, of course, food for debate.

Constance Grady reviews The Mandibles on Vox.com:

In the near future of The Mandibles, Keynesian economics is revealed to be nothing more than “dodgy hocus-pocus” that has massively devalued the dollar. America’s national character has been diluted by the enormous political power of Latino immigrants who have, tellingly, changed the automated phone systems so that you have to dial one for Spanish and two for English.

You can’t trust anyone in power. University economics departments are filled with socialists who will tell you that “morally, your money does belong to everybody.” The president who defaults on the national debt was born in Oaxaca, and he only speaks Spanish at press conferences — so really, you can hardly be surprised when he confiscates the personal property of good, hardworking middle-class (and, it’s implied, white) Americans. The government has become a police state, and you can tell this not through its monopoly on sanctioned violence, but through its monopoly on gold.

Full review here.

See also my review at Goodreads, Ken Kalfus review at The Washington Post, and a blog post by Foz Meadows.

JLW

Smith, George O. Pandora's Millions

George O. Smith, 'Pandora's Millions' (1945). Entry in ISFDB. Smith's entry in SFE.

Stross, Charles. Accelerando

Charles Stross, Accelerando (2005). Entry in ISFDB. Stross's entry in the SFE.

Review by Paul Kincaid at Vector.

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky

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

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