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:

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) 

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.

Chambers, Becky. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014). A gentle, fluent, very cozy space opera with an ensemble cast of chirpy quasi-millennial misfits, with shades of Firefly, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Redshirts, Karen Lord, Ursula le Guin, and Naomi Mitchison.

Here's a snippet about shopping:

“I’ll take it.” Kizzy handed the Harmagian the soap. He took hold of it with two of his smaller tentacles, each covered in a sheath-like glove to protect his delicate skin. He zipped behind the counter and busied himself with foil and ribbon.
   “There you go, dear guest,” said the Harmagian, handing her the attractively wrapped bundle. “Just chip off a little piece of it at a time, it’ll last longer that way.”
Kizzy stuck her nose to the wrapper again. “Mmph, that smells good. Check it out, Rosemary.”
    Rosemary couldn’t help but inhale as Kizzy shoved the block of soap into her face. The scent was thickly sweet and sugary, like a cake. She imagined using it would be like bathing in a meringue.
    “That’s eight hundred sixty credits, if you please, thank you,” the Harmagian said. Kizzy stuck out her hand to Rosemary.
    “Can I have the chip?”
    Rosemary blinked, not sure if she had understood. “You want the company chip?”
    “Yeah, it’s soap,” Kizzy said. “Soap is cool, right?”
    Rosemary cleared her throat and looked down at her scrib. No, soap wasn’t cool, not fancy soap, but how could she tell Kizzy that? She had come onto Kizzy’s ship, been welcomed by Kizzy with open arms, let Kizzy buy her too many drinks, had vastly less experience than Kizzy in things like tunneling and shopping in neutral ports. But even so —
    “I’m sorry, Kizzy, but, um, we can only use the chip for common-use soap. If you want special soap, you have to get it yourself.” She felt the words come out of her mouth, and she hated them. She sounded like a killjoy.
    “But —” Kizzy started. Without a word, Sissix grabbed Kizzy’s wrist and pressed it to the merchant’s scanner. There was a corresponding chirp, indicating her account had been accepted.
    “Hey!” Kizzy said.
    “You can afford it,” Sissix said.

And here's one about getting space-mugged by pirates:

Captain Big tapped xyr chin within xyr mech suit. “If we take ten barrels, will you have enough to reach your next destination?”
    Rosemary asked Corbin the question. He nodded sullenly. “Yes, ten barrels will not be a problem,” she said.
    The conversation had gone from frightening to bizarre. The inflections that Captain Big was using didn’t have a parallel in Klip, but in Hanto, they were downright polite. She would expect to hear this kind of talk in a shop or a restaurant, not while standing at gunpoint. It was as if the Akaraks thought of her as a merchant, with the threat of violence serving as currency.
    “We will require technical supplies as well,” Captain Big said. “Our engines are in need of repair.”

(JLW)

Maughan, Tim. Special Economic Zone

Tim Maughan, "Special Economic Zone" (2015). Not strictly science fiction. Not strictly not. About working in quality assurance for GPS tracking and vehicle monitoring units for retrofitting buses for smart cities. There is something stylistically clever about this story, something which becomes obvious early on in the story, as do the reasons for it. That leads to a choice, for the reader, about how they should read, and if they should read at all. However, part of its cleverness is that it resists being admired as clever, and part of what makes the choice difficult is that it's impossible to think of it as important. On Medium.com.

(JLW)

Newman, Peter. The Vagrant

Peter Newman's dark science fantasy The Vagrant (2015) takes place in a sort of war-torn, post-apocalyptic dystopia. A development economist might say: there is no banking infrastructure, governance structures are weak, and life is corrupted by demon magic.

So it is the kind of setting where you would not be surprised to find the typical crapsack economics of scavenging and primitive accumulation, and a "reversion to barter" (about this phrase, and about some common misconceptions around barter, see David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years).

That is more-or-less what we get, but there is some intriguing nuance. First, bodies (and selves) are fairly permeable and porous in the world of The Vagrant, so there is a sense that words like "scavenging / looting" and "recycling / reusing / repurposing / upcycling" don't quite capture the micro, macro, and necroeconomics of it all:

Stick-like people and bloated flies gather in the twilight, both drawn to the still warm corpse of the Dogspawn. By morning they have picked the bones clean. By afternoon half of the people have died, their stomachs unable to accept the rich meat. By evening their skeletons are bartered over by Necrotraders. 

In New Horizon nothing is wasted.

Second there is apparently, on a literal level, a coin money economy functioning alongside ad hoc spot trades and what-have-you. The representation of this money is quite intriguing. People always seem at least a little amazed, and maybe even a bit mesmerized, when the Vagrant brandishes his coinage. Psychologically speaking, perhaps that's just because: what's this ragtag hobo doing flashing that kind of cash?

But it's also a little more numinous than that. The coins have the depth of Tolkienian artefacts, fragments from a lost epoch. It is almost as if, instead of the passage of time sapping the coins of their purchasing power as we'd expect -- you try paying for your Wispa in Nisa with a Roman antoninianus coin, it is hard -- the longevity of this medium-of-exchange is testament to the cunning and wisdom of their artificers.

Ancient forces stir, ancient presences awake. It is almost as if each coin emanates a little enchanted bubble of civil society and a liberal social order, sustaining itself against reason within the brutal Hobbesian state of nature:

The Hammer leans over him. ‘More?’
He nods.
The coin dances three times, then stops.
The Hammer’s small eyes narrow. ‘More?’
He beckons her closer. She comes.
He points to her coin. Puzzled, she lifts her hand to him, open, disc shining on her outstretched fingers. He nods and taps his own coin against it.
Reunited, the silver sisters sing. The duet haunts the ears, stirring regrets and things lost.
When it ends the Vagrant puts his coin into her other hand.
Her eyes glisten, water growing at their edges. ‘Mine?’
The Vagrant nods.

Perhaps it's also worth briefly noting the most distinctive thing about The Vagrant: it doesn't really give us a lone badass and his entourage, or a party of badasses, so much as a badass nuclear family. Of course the hard military power and the economic power are concentrated in the Vagrant himself, but the baby and the goat -- and Harm and (mild spoiler!) the Hammer -- exercise significant agency whenever they're present.

And just because I mentioned Tolkien: might it be interesting to think about the relationship of the baby figure and the figure of Bilbo Baggins? Bilbo is in part a surrogate for a young reader of The Hobbit, rosy-cheeked and beardless among the oppressively bearded endeavours of the adult world. Bilbo is also someone who is rather unaccountably allowed to participate in a dangerous and crucial and highly technical project, and discovers to their delight that they're more than able to prove their worth. There is usually a smug elusiveness about what makes hobbits so important, which reminds me more than a little of the smug elusiveness about the value added by the "enterprise" factor of production, a value which is significant enough that a top CEO totally deserves 200 times the salary of a machinist. We could think of Bilbo, perhaps, as the young nephew of Gandalf the CEO -- or, more subtly, as someone who is pliable to the interests of capital, whatever the specifics of their sociological class background -- whom the dwarves have to be nice to ("yes yes, you're uh, the Ringbearer ... no we totally can't see you at all, sir ... I mean Bilbo. Sir") because he'll be their boss one day.

And of course, he'll get to write the history of it. (I can just see There And Back Again on the rack in the airport next to The 10% Adventurer: How to Fulfill the Ancient Legends WITHOUT Quitting Your Day Job! or The Seven Dwarves of Highly Effective People or the latest in NLP from Ed Wormtongue or whatever).

Of course, that's probably putting it a bit strongly. But it is nice for a change to see a kid in a tale of high adventure who is just pretty much in practical terms a hassle and a risk.

One more snippet:

The Vagrant stares at the coins in his hand, each with the power to buy and sell life. Only five remain now. They have been spent on necessities such as food and medicine as well as indulgences, acts of charity that do little to pay off the debt of conscience. 

The last few coins have bought a boy’s freedom, a goat and a modicum of privacy for the journey. Of the three, only the goat can be classed as a necessity.

Pohl, Frederik. The Midas Plague

Frederik Pohl, "The Midas Plague" (1954). Online. A topsy-turvy world satire with a lot of very intriguing material in it. A great story for thinking about the fact that scarce, as a technical term of economics, is not the same as limited. Rather, scarce means limited in relation to demand (or desire), and "The Midas Plague" plays with the idea of of manipulating not only the production of resources, but the demand for them (via those eleven psychologists, and of course the bit at the end). Pohl doesn't r-e-a-l-l-y rationalize the initial conceit very rigorously, but perhaps in 2016, with the benefit of CAP surplus foodscapes, with the New Public Management of the 1980s onward and the attendant financialization (and therefore consumer-ification) of public and civic life, the case might be easier to make. Also see "The Waging of the Peace" (1959).

Mild spoiler: in the future, the rich have the luxury of living modest lifestyles, while the "poor" have to constantly consume.

(JLW)

Ryman, Geoff. Air

Geoff Ryman, "Air." (Later expanded into a novel). Mae is a fashion consultant in a small and fairly isolated village, who makes a living (and a life) by trading information. Very beautifully scuffs out the boundaries between the social and the economic. I feel like the whole story is wrapped around a kind of tacit pun on "richness" and/or "impoverished."

(JLW)