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.

Chamisso, Adelbert von. Peter Schlemihl

Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso (1814). Peter Schlemihl exchanges his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus, which produces everlasting riches. But he finds himself shunned by society and unable to marry the woman he loves. The Devil offers to return him his shadow in exchange for his soul but Schlemihl chooses to go shadowless.

Some snippets (trans. Leopold von Lowenstein-Wertheim):

"I only crave for your permission to lift up your noble shadow right here and to put it into my pocket; how I do it is my own affair. In return, and as a token of my profound gratitude to the gentleman, I will leave him to make his choice among all the treasures which I carry in my pocket. The genuine mandrake root, magic pennies, robber's ducat, the magic napkin of Roland's Knights, the gallows mandrake; but all this may not be of sufficient interest to you. I have something much better: Fortunatus' wishing cap restored as new and also a lucky purse exactly like the one he possessed."

And:

As soon as I found myself alone in the cab, I burst into tears. It was already beginning to dawn on me that even as gold on this earth is more highly esteemed than merit and virtue, so the shadow might be more highly esteemed than gold; and that as I had previously held my conscience higher than wealth, I had now given up my shadow for the sake of gold [...]

And:

I dismissed the driver with gold, selected the best front room and shut myself up in it immediately.
     And what do you think I did? Oh, my dear Chamisso, it makes me blush to confess it even to you. I pulled out the cursed purse from underneath my coat and in a kind of frenzy, which burned me up like a conflagration, I extracted gold from it; more and more gold, which I scattered over the floor. I trampled on it, making it tinkle and feasting my senses on its glitter and sound; I piled gold upon gold till I sank exhausted onto my luxurious bed, wallowing in a yellow flood. Thus the day went by and the evening. I did not open my door, and when night finally came, I fell asleep embedded in gold.

And:

"It seems to me rather a weighty matter to give my soul in exchange for my shadow."
"Weighty!" he repeated after me and burst out laughing. "And what, may I ask, do you imagine your soul is? Have you ever seen it? And what do you intend doing with it once you are dead? Thank you stars that you have found a collector sufficiently interested to wish to buy, even during your lifetime, the reversion of this quantity X, this galvanic force, this polarized potential, or whatever we may like to call this illusive something.; and to be willing to pay for it with something really tangible -- your very own shadow, which will give you the hand of your sweetheart and the fulfilment of everything you want. Or would you rather hand over the innocent young girl to that despicable schemer, Mr Rascal? [...]"

And:

"[...] But enough of this -- you possess me while you possess my gold. [...]"

And:

Remember, my friend, while you live in the world to treasure first your shadow and then your money.

(JLW) 

Doctorow, Cory. Chicken Little

Cory Doctorow, 'Chicken Little' (2010). A novella originally appearing in Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull, an anthology inspired by Frederik Pohl, and now pretty widely available.

Leon works for Ate, a corporation whose opulent fortunes are entirely based on one previous sale, and are now looking to make their second. Nobody at Ate knows what they sold last time. It's a well-kept secret. Better than well-kept: deliberately lost, forever. They do have a general idea of the type of customer they sold it to:

The normal megarich got offered experiences [...] The people in the vat had done plenty of those things before they’d ended up in the vats. Now they were metastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling solution of a hundred vast machines that laboriously kept them alive amid their cancer blooms and myriad failures. Somewhere in that tangle of hoses and wires was something that was technically a person, and also technically a corporation, and, in many cases, technically a sovereign state. (p.535)