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) 

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):

“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.”
“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—”

[like, an hour later] 

“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)

Goder, Beth. 'How to Identify an Alien Shark'

Beth Goder, 'How to Identify an Alien Shark' (2018)

A short, shark shock. Read it at Fireside Fiction. In the background there appears to be a satire of the use of structural adjustment programmes, and neoliberal economics in general, as an instrument of imperialism and colonialism.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Money Tree

Nalo Hopkinson, "Money Tree" (1997), collected in Skin Folk (2002).  "In Jamaica it was the other way around; the costly refined sugar was for guests, and the everyday brown sugar was cheap. Mummy would have been horrified at how expensive Demerara sugar was in Toronto." An unsettling, layered little allegory about value, liquidity, inheritance and family resemblance. There is the relievingly straightforward nugget of allegory if you want it: some people love money more than anything, even life. But though that's definitely there, I think it might have been plopped there for the sake of the twisting, Ovidian ripples it radiates, filled with glimpsables. For other money trees, see Douglas Adams, Adam Roberts, and Clifford D. Simak.

A summary from Gregory E. Rutledge (2006 [2002]):

In “The Money Tree,” Silky finds herself forlorn at the disappearance of her brother, Morgan, whose incessant struggles for income led him to seek out the fabled Golden Table their grandfather had told them about when they were young. Morgan has been absent and presumed dead for months when the story opens. Straddled with nightmares and sinking further into despair, Silky tries to commit suicide by drowning herself in her bathtub. Ironically, this act reconnects her to the maternal in the form of her deceased mother, a mermaid who could never acquaint her children with the love of water, and River Mumma, the ancient water deity who identifies Silky’s mother as a daughter. Free of nightmares, her social life returning, and her body plump like her mother’s, Silky takes a swim at the YMCA. Hopkinson wrenches the story into the fantastic when River Mumma appears and the pool turns into an old Jamaican river where the treasure Morgan sought was supposedly located. As frightened swimmers rush out of the pool, Silky discovers her latent abilities as a mermaid and dives down toward her brother who is still holding on to the table. (17)

(JLW)

Jemisin, N.K. The Fifth Season.

There is economics woven into Jemisin's worldbuilding, although perhaps what's more interesting is the allegorical exploration of cycles and stability, social, economic, and ecological.

The hereditary "use-castes" also offer a somewhat usefully estranging division of labour. It is not always precisely clear whether an attribution is a whole use-caste, or rather a specialism within a use-caste. For example, Strongback, Resistant, Breeder, Innovator, and Leadership are definitely use-castes (the first four mentioned as being among the seven most common), but I'm a bit less sure about Hunter, Knapper, Geomest, and Geneer, and even Guardian and Orogene. Here's

"Those who distinguish themselves may be permitted to bear their mother’s use-caste at comm-naming" -- this is open to interpretation. Is it perhaps describing a limited form of social mobility, whereby by default every child is of their father's caste, but those who demonstrate potential in their mother's caste may switch?

The Broken Earth sequence shows resonance with and/or the influence of political theory around the state of the exception (Agamben, Schmitt, Mouffe, etc.). There are also strong (neo-)Malthussian currents running through it.

Review at Strange Horizons. A few scattered notes at Argh.

(JLW)

Mitchison, Naomi. Not By Bread Alone

Naomi Mitchison, Not By Bread Alone (1983). Mitchison's entry in SFE. Review by Kate Macdonald.

Neeper, Cary. The Archives of Varok

Cary Neeper, The Archives of Varok series (1975-)

From Neeper's website:

Varok has maintained a no-growth economy, a steady state, in dynamic equilibrium over the ages since the Mutilation by following four basic rules:

1. Give top priority to keeping the planet's ecology healthy,
2. Use all renewable resources at or below the rate at which they can regenerate,
3. Use all non-renewable resources, like precious metals, at a rate equal to their recovery rate or replacement by renewable resources, and
4. In all eco-regions, create wastes at a rate no greater than the rate of their natural assimilation.

Varok defines the steady-state as that level of population and resource stocks that provide a good life and an equitable, sustainable standard of living over a long period of time. Throughput of matter and energy is maintained at the lowest possible rate to allow future generations the same quality of life enjoyed by the present generation. Birth and death rates are equalized and kept at the lowest possible levels, but those rates, as well as depletion rates of any resource, are subject to revision by popular vote.

More.

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)

Raven, Paul Graham. Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (The Pirates of the Plastic Sea)

Paul Graham Raven, "Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (The Pirates of the Plastic Sea)"  (2014). Collected in Twelve Tomorrows (2014), ed. Bruce Sterling, it bears comparison with another story in the same volume, Cory Doctorow's "Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts."

Two tales, very different in flavour and mood, but thematically complementary. Both explore the tensions and contradictions between what you could call capitalist ideology and entrepreneurial ideology (or "entrepreneurial-engineering stance," perhaps); both ferociously snuffle at the blurred line between market forces and the forces which shape markets (& here's PGR on infrastructure fiction).

Both stories are also interested in the way dynamics which pop up with an anti-capitalist belligerence, or at a tangent to capitalism, can get recuperated by capital. Including, perhaps, the appropriation of the ideology of "disrupting" itself: the last thing you'd expect of Doctorow's and Raven's arch market-disruptors Sergey and Niceday is any pinko sass.

Doctorow's title invites us to think of his Sergey as an extrapolation of the same logic embodied by his hero Lukasz; petard is a reference to the expression "hoisted on your own petard" (it's from Hamlet: "For tis the sport to haue the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar"), so there's a sense of Lukasz, in many ways a classic Doctorowian activist everyhacker, getting beaten at his own game, or gulping down a taste of his own medicine. (More specifically, the idiom is about being blown up by your own grenade. So perhaps it's a story about knowing just the right moment to let go of something?)

Both Doctorow's and Raven's story also contains more-or-less the same line, as nemesis (Sergey / Cedric) offers protagonist (Luckasz / Hope) the opportunity to join a thrilling and intellectually fulfilling, but morally dubious cutting-edge economic enterprise.

That line is: "I'll think about it."

(JLW)

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.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Mars Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993). Worthy, solid, hard sf-ish epic which speaks very directly to speculative fiction's utopian tradition. Reasonably good at avoiding the worst pitfalls of hard sf by making time for social science and political theory, and by creating dialogues and controversies that aren't decisively settled one way or the other. It edges on cringe-worthy ethnic caricature, though at least it has an inclusive and cosmopolitan instinct. Perhaps I need to think about that a bit more.

One particularly interesting section, as regards economics, is Arkady's conversation with Boon in Part 5, Chapter 8: "So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel." Arkady imagines the colonists as "scientist primitives" who have carved out an island utopia which appears free from the workings of global (stellar) capitalism, but is not really. Another is Marina and Vlad's eco-economics in Part 5, Chapter 6: "Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology." As an attempt to rationalize economic value, Marina and Vlad's calorie-based proposals could probably stand to learn from historical experiments with time-based currencies (e.g. LETS), as well as the late 19Cth subjectivist critique (Menger et al.) of labor theories of value and cost-of-production theories of value. Marina and Vlad also propose a version of the Bullshit Jobs thesis (cf. e.g. Adams, Bellamy, Morris), that "there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting." But it is probably a good rule of thumb to think of economics as a "deformed offshoot" of ecology that is "like astrology." Marina and Vlad's eco-economics is soon compared with -- though it surely very different from -- the Sufis' aspiration for a "reverent economics" inspired by gift exchange. "We have studied the old cultures, before your global market netted everything, and in those ages there existed many different forms of exchange. Some of them were based on the giving of gifts." Mars's awkward and often ambiguous status at the edge of the Terran economy may offer some interesting comparisons, perhaps, with Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood. I am interested to see what happens in the next two books, and suspect the economics of longevity treatment may play a bit of a role?

Red Mars, by the way, is another of those books that actually does many of the things science fiction is assumed as a matter of critical cliche to do: it imagines the future, it reasons extrapolatively, it respects science but also wiggles it a bit, it inspires, it cautions, it tries to invoke sensawunda. It does these things in a way which feels fairly straightforward, almost prosaically literal, if you have been spending your time trying to read, oh I don't know, Dune or Trouble on Triton or Neuromancer or Children of Men or The Hunger Games or Jack Glass or something through that lens. You can kind of make it work, and actually using slightly the wrong tool turns out to be pretty damn fruitful once you give it some oomph ... but then when you turn to Red Mars and the critical apparatus and the text slot together so neatly, you feel a bit nonplussed.

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994).

A snippet:

"Our credits function like money, but they’re not backed by gold or silver. They’re backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally too expensive to think about [...]"

See more here.