Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). How easy is it to distinguish socially useful labour from activities which are pointless, parasitic, counterproductive, or downright violent? 

Perhaps not that easy. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), David Graeber offers an elegant approach to distinguishing "bullshit jobs." Does the person doing the job believe it has any social value? Graeber acknowledges this  approach isn't perfect -- for instance, sometimes tasks are broken up and distributed in ways which disguise what they are really about. But it's probably good enough. The person doing the job probably is in the best position of anyone to know. Nobody has really worked out a convincing way to measure the social value of work (as opposed to the mere market value), so what else do we have to go on?

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe contains a sort of cautionary tale about bullshit jobs. Long ago, on a distant planet, a plan was devised to get rid of all the pointless jobs ... as well as the people who performed them. Oddly enough, this plan involved a poet, who told a tale of the coming apocalypse. The people with the pointless jobs -- mostly management types, although also some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- were packed off to colonize a backwater planet. "We'll be right behind you," everybody else shouted into space, and of course they weren't. Ha ha ha! There was no apocalypse coming after all! ... or was there?

Perhaps you can guess which planet was colonized? That's right, prehistoric Earth. And yes, we humans are the descendants of the pointless jobs people. This is demonstrated not so much by shared genetics, so much as by shared attitudes and agendas.

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)

Gladstone, Max. The Craft Sequence

Series notable in particular for its soulstuff economy. Some excerpts from a Reddit AMA on Tor.com.

Excerpt from the excerpts:

Mundanername: Most of the wealth we see in the novels comes from complex investment schemes. If creative action grows the soul does that mean some occupations in the world do not just pay the workers a salary but the very act of performing the job generates wealth for the workers? 

MG: Depends—most employment contracts are structured so that added value goes to the Concern. It’d be a very special (and possibly doomed) Concern that didn’t work this way.  

Mundanername: Do people actually spend themselves to death in this world? 

MG: Yep. Though “death” is a bit of a misnomer—most of the time what happens is people spend themselves into zombiehood, and end up shambling about at the mercy of their creditors (depending on the structure of the debt). If they accumulate enough soulstuff by the terms of their contract they can come back to life, but apperception’s broken, and the psychological damage lasts a long time. Crafty folk are “better” at expending their soul—they can straight up spend themselves to dust if they’re not careful.

See also a post by Max Gladstone about writing Last First Snow.

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)

Levine, David D. Tk'tk'tk

David D. Levine, Tk'tk'tk (2005).

David D. Levine’s Hugo-winning short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.

Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.

Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.

That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture, 1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).

We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.

Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.

Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.

This was originally part of a blog post that was also about Cory Doctorow's 'Chicken Little.' The two stories are both about making sales, and they both appear in Hartwell and Hayden's 21st Century Science Fiction anthology.

(JLW)

Qiufan, Chen. Debtless

Chen Qiufan, Debtless (2020).

Available here. Snippet:

“Don’t worry about Anan’s part. Her operation is already taken care of.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“All costs will be added to your debt, encrypted in the blockchain embedded in your genes. No one can tamper with it.”

“A life of debt.”

“Look around you. Everyone’s eager to borrow. Borrowing represents confidence in one’s future and in one’s self. And why not? Debt defines a person’s value. Such a debt quota is available to few people on Earth. Which is the only reason I’m standing here now.”

“Of course, Ms. Mei Li’ai, although your time is not as expensive as your father Mr. Mei Feng’s. But let’s talk it through. It’s a debt worth several lifetimes of an ordinary person’s toil.”

Roberts, Adam. Stone

Adam Roberts, Stone (2002). The protagonist of Stone, on a visit to the world Rain, discovers a currency of leaves. The unspoken joke is that on Rain, money does grow on trees! Trees and their leaves are also abundant: a local explains that because of this shrewd choice of currency, everyone on Rain is rich! But the Rain-dwellers do take their currency very seriously: when the protagonist finds themself curiously leaf-bereft, they really cannot buy anything. The episode has a satirical, proto-sf "traveler's tale" type feel to it. But at the same time, it feels possible to reconstruct a kind of economic system that makes almost perfect sense.

Rain is part of a broadly post-scarcity and utopian civilization. In this civilization, the puzzles of resource allocation are probably not the big ones we're used to nowadays -- posers like, "healthcare or nuclear deterrents?" -- but rather, masses and masses of infinitesimal puzzles. They are infinitesimal puzzles about the most efficient and fair way to enjoy peace and luxury together which, a bit like Stone's ubiquitous swarming nanotech, might accumulate into something fairly formidable. On a world where there's always enough to go around, should it go around clockwise or what? (You could call it "lowered stakes scarcity," or "estranged scarcity" or something).

Gathering leaves introduces a modicum of inconvenience, and you might plan your activities between bouts of leaf-gathering. Leaf currency, we may imagine, allows the Rain-dwellers to sustain a smidge of the quantifying and calculative rationality of homo economicus. Thrift is comprehensible to them. In the rainy climate, leaves probably turn to soggy sludge pretty quickly, so there's also a kind of Gesellian Freigeld aspect to their leaf currency -- a dampening of liquidity preference, if you will -- so nobody would bother hoarding leaves. And nobody bothers trying to lend leaves at interest, or allows themselves to be exploited to get some leaves. They just go get some leaves.  Nobody's opinions are given more weight just because they have a lot of leaves. Leaf-getting does not lend itself to Sisyphean graft nor entrepreneurial genius. If somebody has a lot of leaves, they're just somebody who has gone and got lots of leaves.

For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Clifford D. Simak, and Douglas Adams. Adams's proto-humans are strict quantity theorists with a match and a mission to control the money supply. That's what's clever about Rain, you see. It's always raining.

(JLW)

Simak, Clifford D. The Money Tree

Clifford D. Simak, 'The Money Tree' (1958).

'Why, Chuck, it's a twenty-dollar bill!'
'Look at that thing on the corner of it.'
She did, with some puzzlement.
'Why, it's a stem,' she cried. 'Just like an apple stem. And it's fastened to the bill.'

Winds up as a kind of cautionary satire about the profit motive / fetishistic miserly greed. For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Adam Roberts, and Douglas Adams.