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."

“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)

Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World.

Margaret Cavendish. The Description of a New World, called The Blazing-World (1668).

None was allowed to use or wear Gold but those of the Imperial Race, which were the onely Nobles of the State; nor durst any one wear Jewels but the Emperor, the Empress and their Eldest Son; notwithstanding that they had an infinite quantity both of Gold and precious Stones in that World; for they had larger extents of Gold, then our Arabian Sands; their precious Stones were Rocks, and their Diamonds of several Colours; they used no Coyn, but all their Traffick was by exchange of several Commodities.

Full text.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). Not strictly speculative fiction, but a representative of all that "the truth is stranger (albeit less rigorously extrapolated) than fiction" anthropology out there.

Jo Walton remarks in her review ("The Best Science Fiction Ideas in Any Non-Fiction Ever: David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years") that a problem with writing SF and fantasy "is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions." Cory Doctorow says he found it thought-provoking but frustrating, and names it in the acknowledgements to Walkaway. Charles Stross draws the epigraph of Neptune's Brood from it.

Graeber's book is also a great reminder that many well-known facts (such as the fact that  money was invented as an improvement over barter, solving the double coincidence of wants problem) are liable to reveal themselves as rather wild and far-fetched speculative fiction. You can also check out Graeber's 2009 article for Mute which condenses a few of his book's major arguments. And also see Graeber's On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, which talks about something that several speculative fiction writers have noticed (Douglas Adams is one of them).

Still the best book about money I've read.

(JLW)

Pratchett, Terry. Making Money

Terry Pratchett, Making Money (2007). 2007, you'll notice. Not 2009. Pratchett has really done his research, and in the course of a bristling, highly readable comic fantasy, he does a pretty good job of lampooning the commodity theory of money, especially in its more goldbuggish incarnations.

In part, Making Money is inspired by the founding of the Bank of England (though the differences are instructive). It's a bit unfortunate that Pratchett so cozily aligns the interests of state and the commoners against the interests of the parasitic aristos. That means that his rival understanding of what money is -- not a commodity, but a network of credit, backed by state power -- isn't really tested as thoroughly as it should be. But the bulk of the novel is amusing and educational, and by the end, things get more weird in a magical kind of way, until finally there's a really interesting thought experiment about value as it relates to banks, money, automation, "intrinsically" precious materials and (especially) labour. I've written a fair bit about this book, which will see light of day eventually.

(JLW)