Bajwa, Sim. HR Confidential

Sim Bajwa, 'HR Confidential' (2018)

An epistolary-in-the-broad-sense fiction comprising HR's notes and transcripts on a troublesome employee. In Shoreline of Infinity.

Elsewhere:

• Amazon patent 'haptic feedback' tracker wristbands for warehouse workers
• The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp
• 7 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Reinventing Human Resources
• 'Sole and Despotic Dominion' by Cory Doctorow
• 'Science Friction' by Rob Kiely and Sean O'Brien

Butler, Octavia. The Parable of the Sower.

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)

Entry at the ISFDB.

A snippet from my chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Economics and Literature:

Nonetheless, speculative fiction often generates knowledge or exercises agency in much more intricate and indirect ways as well, operating through satire, allegory, metaphor, and estrangement. Octavia Butler’s duology The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998) make an excellent case study. Butler’s narrative opens in California in 2024, in the midst of interconnected ecological and economic crises. Despite their relative affluence, Lauren Oya Olamina’s family live precarious and hardscrabble lives in a gated community. Lauren knows the slow and unevenly distributed apocalypse will find her eventually, and when it does, she is as prepared as she can reasonably be. In the context of loss and trauma, Lauren sets out on a perilous journey and lifelong project of world-making, intent on founding of a kind of secular religion, Earthseed, that is more rational and robust than the political and economic systems whose disintegration she is enduring. God, according to Earthseed, is Change: indifferent to you, but potentially something you can shape. In such a context, Butler’s representation of cash may feel rather curious. Yes, there are hints in Parable of the Sower of hyperinflation. But for the most part, cash is sought after with a special fervor. This reliability of money in this free-for-all world of cannibals and pyromaniac drug addicts could be interpreted as just another small but significant failure of the science-fictional imagination: another example of money’s curious tenacity through the downfall of capitalism and beyond. 

Then again, Butler’s representation of money is inseparable from her exploration of slavery. For Butler, the cycle of acquiring and using money may imply autonomy, but she is crystal-clear that it doesn’t always imply this. The company town is a repeated motif: “[Emery Mora] had been a debt slave. [...] The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter, so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt.” With this in mind, perhaps the duology does not ‘transcendentalize’ money as an unchanging and compulsory feature of any possible future economy. Nor does it advocate for any particular future form or forms for money. Rather, it articulates a sense of money’s immanence in history as a particular distribution of tools and traps. 

For Lauren, any given bundle of cash is just another locus of ‘Change,’ one with its own distinct features, and one that is often versatile, unpredictable, and—on the long time-scale Lauren thinks on—ephemeral. When Lauren hides and then retrieves caches of money, her acts suggest Matthew 25:14–30, ‘The Parable of the Talents,’ about a rich man and the stewards of his estate. In this parable, two stewards please their master by trading actively and growing his wealth, while the third angers him by merely burying then retrieving the money. The lessons of doing what you can with what you are given, and of thinking long-term—the Kingdom of Heaven may take a while!—are clearly relevant. But Butler also complicates, and even resists such lessons. Significantly, debt slavery was a pervasive condition in the Ancient Near East, and the word often translated as ‘servants’ in ‘The Parable of the Talents’ is probably better translated as ‘slaves.’ Butler pairs the figure of God as one who “reaps where he has not sown” with the figure in Matthew 13:1–23, ‘The Parable of the Sower,’ who sows (at least some seeds) where he cannot reap. So should this composite Sower be understood in a broadly anti-theodician manner, as a representation of the unfathomable nature of God’s goodness? Possibly, although Butler tends to deploy religious discourse in service of a more secular idea of justice. Both Lauren and the disfavored slave confront God as something entirely without mercy. Whereas the two slaves who have traded actively are rewarded by being ‘set over’ a large part of his estate, the slave who perhaps quite reasonably refuses to risk increasing his debt to such a master is rebuked and ‘cast into the outer darkness’—an image which takes on a more ambiguous resonance in a narrative which is, ultimately, about yearning to travel to space. 

Newitz, Annalee. Autonomous

A smart, rich, immersive cyberpunk thriller, which manages to make some quite fantastical and potentially space operatic worldbuilding feel plausible, grounded, and perhaps not even that far off. The novel is faintly pervaded by economic themes, in particular:

• Intellectual Property law, especially pharmaceutical patents, and especially as it pertains to corporate power;
• the blurred and ductile line between state power and the power of large multinationals (a perennial cyberpunk theme);
• the work ethic, the experience of work, and the ways in which work can shape and degrade the worker's body and soul; and
• slavery -- a key premise in the novel is that the rise of artificial sapient nonhumans (bots) has, along with other factors, led to a degradation of the legal status of the human, so that both bots and humans are vulnerable to legalised indenture.

Abigail Nussbaum writes:

As Newitz repeatedly makes clear, the effect of creating a sentient underclass who can perform labor is to erase the distinction between people and machines. Not only are sentient beings enslaved under the justification of being machines, but humans are expected to behave in ways that are more machine-like if they want to compete.

Nussbaum, 'A Political History of the Future: Autonomous by Analee Newitz'

Novik, Naomi. Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver (2018).

Many of the entries in this database have a few passages with economic themes, or some interesting worldbuilding with intriguing economic implications. Novik's Spinning Silver is different. The entire novel is a sustained meditation on value, debt, and exchange, also touching on themes of debt peonage, honour and gift-giving, justice and mercy, economic antisemitism and pogroms, sexual division of labour, bridewealth and dowry, affective labour, the objectification and commodification of women and girls, domestic violence, and sisterhood and solidarity. 

The book is filled with instances of expansive and transformative magic, from the everyday metamorphoses of the market, to gowns that are made more splendid by dearly-bought sorcery: all these moments speak of Novik's method of spinning this rich adventure from her slight source material, the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Or perhaps more accurately, from the cluster of Rumpelstiltskinesque fairytales called 'Name of the Helper' stories. Here is one, for instance, that features an elf kingdom:

One time a beautiful peasant girl was gored by a steer. She screamed aloud and called for help. The friendly elf came immediately, comforted her, and promised to help and rescue her, if she would marry him and go with him to the elf kingdom. She had no choice but to say yes, and upon her agreement the elf rescued her.

The episodes in the cottage at the edge of the Staryk kingdom, with its glitching domestic space and invisibilised labour, offers another subtle link: a rumpelstilt is a sort of poltergeist or goblin. These episodes might equally suggest 'The Elves and the Shoemaker', just as the magic mirror and abduction to a wintry kingdom might suggest 'The Snow Queen.'

So what is the deal with Staryk society? It has strong elements of a heroic, honour-based society, except that these elves also seem ... kind of libertarian? Any gift obliges you to the giver in complex ways (cf. Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Strathern, etc.), but for the Staryk these obligations have a magical, binding quality. They therefore shun gifts (even in the sense of simple instinctive acts of kindness and care) and try to turn everything into explicit exchange.

The story opens with young Miryem, uninvited, taking over her soft-hearted moneylender father's business. As I interpret the story, it is partly about Miryem encountering, in the Staryk, the preposterousness of her own chilly and indignant ideas of fair dealing, writ large. Debts, whether formal or informal, are not necessarily bad, exactly, but ... the equal moral worth of contracting parties should never be confused for equal power or freedom. What actions count as gifts, which obligations need to be repaid, what should count as repaying them? The answers are always matters of power, circumstances, feelings, perceptions, and imagination, much more than they are the kind of thing that can be carefully written down in a ledger. 

But does Miryem actually ever learn this, or anything like it? Miryem has a kind of fairytale comeuppance, and she does grow and change in various ways (making a boast and stepping into the shape she has made), but in all the excitement I'm not sure she ever really does revisit her early mercilessness. Perhaps it is the limitations of a critique of commercial society (nascent capitalism) that is rooted in feudal ideals (hospitality, the abundant table, the honourable household where hard work and loyalty are rewarded). I'm not completely sure, but I think that -- although I kind of love this book -- its politics are pretty abhorrent to me. 

Further reading:

• Carol Jones, Women's Worth: A Western Misconception
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews
• Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
• Amanda Mandzik, Once Upon an Economics Course: Using Fairy Tales to Teach Economics
• Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Onwualu, Chinelo. 'The Fine Print.'

 Chinelo Onwualu, 'The Fine Print' (2019).

Reprinted online 2021 in Apex.

A story that explores notions of contract, consent, debt, slavery, consumerism, socially reproductive labor, and interactions between powerful corporate bureaucracies and their stakeholders.

The spell frowned and looked through the sheaf of papers again. “The terms of the contract indicate that you are to yield your first-born child in payment for your bride. Normally, I would be able to offer you some compensation, but you have not placed enough wishes to qualify for any of our promotions or rewards. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.” 

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)