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)

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. 

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.

Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022).

Here's an extract:

They ran a hand through their hair. They’d never had to explain pebs before. 

“Okay. Anytime you receive anything that involves some sort of craft or work or labor or whatever from someone else, you give them pebs in exchange. So, let’s say you start out with zero pebs.” 

“Which is true, for me.”

“Yes. Let’s also say you go to a farmer and get an apple, and let’s say that’s worth one peb to you.”

“What would I do with an apple?” 

“Just pretend you can eat apples.” 

“All right.” 

“Okay. You take the apple, and you give the farmer one peb.” 

“How?” Mosscap asked. 

“I’ll explain later,” Dex said. “Stick with the farmer for now.” 

“If you say so.” Mosscap’s eyes shifted in thought. “I currently have one hypothetical apple and negative-one hypothetical pebs.” 

“Right. The farmer’s work has benefited you, so now you need to provide something to benefit someone else.” 

“To the farmer, you mean.” 

“No.” Dex tried to explain. “It can be to the farmer, if you provide something the farmer wants. But exchanging pebs isn’t about bartering. It’s about benefit. You are a part of the community, and the farmer doing something for you means that they are, effectively, doing something for the group. So, you’ve got your negative-one-peb balance now. You’ve got to fill that up. Let’s say you’re … I don’t know. A musician. You go play some music in a town square, and five people come to listen. They now give you some pebs. If they each give you two pebs, now you’ve got nine pebs, which you can exchange for other things. Make sense?” 

“I believe so,” Mosscap said. “You’re saying that instead of a system of currency that tracks individual trade, you have one that facilitates exchange through the community. Because … all exchange benefits the community as a whole?” 

“Exactly.” 

“Do people give you pebs for tea?” 

“Yes.” 

“And then you give them pebs for…” 

“Food, or supplies, or whatever.” Mosscap’s head whirred softly. “The farmer feeds the musician, who brings music to the village.” It paused, the whirring growing louder. “The technician who took a break to enjoy the music now has the energy to go fix the communications tower. The communications tower enables the meteorologist to deliver the weather report, which helps the farmer grow more apples. I see.” The robot nodded. “And I’m not penalized for the debt I incurred at the start?” 

“Absolutely not,” Dex said firmly. “We don’t … we don’t do that. Or we don’t do that anymore, I guess.” Gods around, history class was a long time ago. “Nobody should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don’t have the right number next to their name.” As they said this, they thought of their unease back at the hot spring—the feeling that had arisen at the thought they hadn’t earned this. The mismatch between these sentiments itched at them. They nudged it aside to deal with later. 

Mosscap nodded again at their explanation. “But if there’s no penalty for debt, what’s to stop you from taking without giving back?”

“It’s a bad feeling,” Dex said. “Everybody has a negative balance from time to time, for lots of reasons. That’s fine. That’s part of the ebb and flow. But if someone had a huge negative … well, that says they need help. Maybe they’re sick. Or stuck. Maybe they’ve got something going on at home. Or maybe it’s just one of those times when they need other people to carry them for a while. That’s okay. Everybody ends up there sometimes. If I saw a friend’s balance and it was way in the red, I’d make a point of checking in.” 

“You can see other people’s balances?” 

“Yeah, of course. It’s all public.” 

“Does that not get competitive?” 

Dex squinted. “Why would it?” 

Mosscap stared at Dex in silence for a moment, seemingly surprised at this but not elaborating as to why. It shrugged, then pointed at the paper in Dex’s hands. “So, these…” 

“Are the pebs people gave you for helping them out.” Dex handed the paper back. “You got twelve pebs for the door, eight pebs for the bike, and so on. Normally, we do this on a pocket computer—”

Chambers, Becky. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014). A gentle, fluent, very cozy space opera with an ensemble cast of chirpy quasi-millennial misfits, with shades of Firefly, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Redshirts, Karen Lord, Ursula le Guin, and Naomi Mitchison.

Here's a snippet about shopping:

“I’ll take it.” Kizzy handed the Harmagian the soap. He took hold of it with two of his smaller tentacles, each covered in a sheath-like glove to protect his delicate skin. He zipped behind the counter and busied himself with foil and ribbon.
   “There you go, dear guest,” said the Harmagian, handing her the attractively wrapped bundle. “Just chip off a little piece of it at a time, it’ll last longer that way.”
Kizzy stuck her nose to the wrapper again. “Mmph, that smells good. Check it out, Rosemary.”
    Rosemary couldn’t help but inhale as Kizzy shoved the block of soap into her face. The scent was thickly sweet and sugary, like a cake. She imagined using it would be like bathing in a meringue.
    “That’s eight hundred sixty credits, if you please, thank you,” the Harmagian said. Kizzy stuck out her hand to Rosemary.
    “Can I have the chip?”
    Rosemary blinked, not sure if she had understood. “You want the company chip?”
    “Yeah, it’s soap,” Kizzy said. “Soap is cool, right?”
    Rosemary cleared her throat and looked down at her scrib. No, soap wasn’t cool, not fancy soap, but how could she tell Kizzy that? She had come onto Kizzy’s ship, been welcomed by Kizzy with open arms, let Kizzy buy her too many drinks, had vastly less experience than Kizzy in things like tunneling and shopping in neutral ports. But even so —
    “I’m sorry, Kizzy, but, um, we can only use the chip for common-use soap. If you want special soap, you have to get it yourself.” She felt the words come out of her mouth, and she hated them. She sounded like a killjoy.
    “But —” Kizzy started. Without a word, Sissix grabbed Kizzy’s wrist and pressed it to the merchant’s scanner. There was a corresponding chirp, indicating her account had been accepted.
    “Hey!” Kizzy said.
    “You can afford it,” Sissix said.

And here's one about getting space-mugged by pirates:

Captain Big tapped xyr chin within xyr mech suit. “If we take ten barrels, will you have enough to reach your next destination?”
    Rosemary asked Corbin the question. He nodded sullenly. “Yes, ten barrels will not be a problem,” she said.
    The conversation had gone from frightening to bizarre. The inflections that Captain Big was using didn’t have a parallel in Klip, but in Hanto, they were downright polite. She would expect to hear this kind of talk in a shop or a restaurant, not while standing at gunpoint. It was as if the Akaraks thought of her as a merchant, with the threat of violence serving as currency.
    “We will require technical supplies as well,” Captain Big said. “Our engines are in need of repair.”

(JLW)

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) 

Chapman, Stepan. How Alex Became a Machine

Stepan Chapman, "How Alex Became a Machine" (1996?).

Here's a brief mention by Tobias Carroll.

Cisco, Michael. Animal Money.

Michael Cisco, Animal Money (2016).

Animal Money at the ISFDB.
Reviewed by Tobias Carroll.

De Abaitua, Matthew. If Then

Matthew De Abaitua, If Then (2015).

An algorithm called The Process makes all economic decisions (although this also means that there is no well-defined "economic" realm). It does so supposedly in pursuit of "fairness." Here is a short snippet from early in the book.

He walked the orderly line of repairmen with individual placards detailing skills offered and services required. This was residual behaviour, rendered unnecessary by the Process. Their skills and availability would be sorted algorithmically and bartered accordingly with other townspeople and their labour; that was how the Process generated the core work schedule for the town, and gave meaning to labour that had become meaningless. But the market had a role to play that was more than trade. It was a social occasion, a chance to get out, to see and be seen. The metrics of happiness required old rituals, old ways of doing things, and so time was set aside within the work schedule for the townspeople to make their own trades.

Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton.

Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976). 

Many utopias, particularly the 'classic' utopias that flourished in the late nineteenth century, use the device of a visitor to expedite exposition. The fish-out-of-water character can mention things that to the inhabitants of utopia are too obvious ever to mention. Then the visitor can listen, bewildered and amazed, to lengthy explanations. Bron in Delany's Trouble on Triton is a bit of an outsider: from Mars, and not entirely comfortable in Triton society. 

Trouble on Triton is somewhat unusual in imagining a relatively strong and pervasive state along with greater social, economic, and political freedoms, both formal and substantive. Triton is an unusual democracy: everyone is governed by the candidate they vote for. Living arrangements are various and often communal. Society appears fairly heavily surveilled, although it may be that the majority of the data is never used. Delany also imagines an intellectual discipline, ‘metalogic,’ which expands the realm of the calculable; a metalogician is likely to work in something called a ‘computer hegemony.’ 

There are some indications that money may have been abolished (outside of a pretentious restaurant or two, where it is used as an archaic affectation), but whether this is really the case depends on how you interpret the credit system, and its relationship with the welfare state:

Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here. [...] Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.

The gist of it seems to be: basic universal services (food, shelter, transport) on a UBI-like system, plus the opportunity to earn more credits by working for non-essential purchases. But the details are ambiguous and intriguing. It sounds like if you were to buy some groceries, with labour credit in your account, that's what would be depleted; if you haven't got enough, then instead the state pays for the groceries. There would be a curious incentive structure: don't buy essentials when your labour credit balance is low. Then there are these "tokens" denominated in franqs:

He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.

He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain.

And:

Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.)

And:

“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to— kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—” 

“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm. 

“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate. Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service. 

Are tokens always 'returned,' so that they're really something like lots of little contactless debit cards? If something costs ten franqs, can you use the same one-franq token over and over again to buy it? One of the main features of cash is its relative anyonymity, so cash linked to government databases is a curious hybrid. Yet this wouldn't necessarily be silly: we could speculate around the advantages of preserving some of the materiality of cash. For example, losing a two-franq token would have different implications to losing a fifty-franq token (or a debit card). 

Or does the returning have something to do with the nonrefusability of basic services? Do tokens sometimes circulate (I think not, but I'm not 100% sure).

Dick, Philip K. Ubik

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

A snippet:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." 

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. 

"I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." 

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." 

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. 

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

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)

Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003).

If you're doing an economics and science fiction reading list, this should be pretty near the top.

I talked a bit about this book and its quasi-magical reputation currency, Whuffie, in my review of Doctorow's Pirate Cinema.

The TL;DR version is: maybe it's interesting to compare Whuffie and DRM (or at least, the things DRM would imagine itself doing in the best of all possible worlds). Why quasi-magical? Nowadays it's difficult not to see Whuffie through the lens of algorithmic governmentality, Uber, platform capitalism, Peeple, etc. But it may also be worth drilling down to the conceit that underlies Whuffie: a  system that can evaluate feelings and work out exactly what they're about and the ways in which they're good or bad (hence 'reality'-based currency).

Also see this interview at the Adjacent Possible, toward the end. Also see under Paul Graham Raven below. For other exotic currencies that are perhaps made out of trust or reputation, see entries for Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Michael Swanwick.

(JLW)

Doctorow, Cory. Makers

Cory Doctorow, Makers (2009).

Alberto Cottica writes in a blog post on the economics of Makers:

Perry and Lester’s ability to combine technological building blocks is greatly enhanced by the fact that anything important to them can be performed by open source technologies. This enables them to develop working prototypes from off-the-shelf equipment and software and put them into a manufacturing pipeline without worrying about licensing issues. This has two consequences: first, in the world of Makers ecosystems develop preferably around open source technology, because people like Perry and Lester have every incentive to route around proprietary technology; second, that the speed of the creative destruction cycle is greatly increased.

I think this may be the most important intuition Makers has to offer. Just think: we increasingly buy in ecosystem (Mac-iPhone-iPad-MobileMe, or Google-Android-Google Apps, or Linux-Apache-IBM’s proprietary web solutions); ecosystems grow faster if they can build on open source building blocks, so that the open source ones tend to outcompete the proprietary ones in the long run; but innovations in open source ecosystems are almost impossible to protect, and that lowers their average margin as the highly profitable grace period gets shorter. The solution, as Tjan suggests (see above) and most policy makers worldwides agree, is to increase the pace of innovation. This, however, raises the question of just how fast consumers can wrap their head around innovation: every heavy web user is familiar with the sensation that companies are putting out new services faster than we can absorb them, and sometimes we just have no time for them, no matter how cool they are. Google Wave, anyone? So, it could be that the destruction side of creative destruction prevails, landing the economy of Makers into a state of low margins and low growth, as more inventions fail to turn into more successful products on the market.

Anil Menon writes in a review of Makers for Strange Horizons:

[...] His fragments on how litigation venture funding works, on how the iced-coffee cans Sammy likes to chug contain embedded CO2 canisters, on the structure of "New Work," on what the ride is about, on how roomware will change how people live together, on whether great groups are hard to put together because flaws are multiplicative while virtues are additive, etc. etc. constitute the book's brilliant mind. These fragments are not infodumps because their purpose is not to reveal essential, tedious information. They are futuristic riffs in the best tradition of speculative thinking. I think the fragments are the real reason why Doctorow wrote the book. His ability to think up these fragments is the reason people love his blog articles, the reason why Boing Boing is such a major watering hole and the reason why this book will be read, despite its literary shortcomings.  

It is unfair to criticize a book for what it does not try to be. In this case however, I will, because it points to the possibility of a new kind of writing. I think Makers would have worked better as speculative non-fiction. Ideally, speculation in a SF novel should be a means to an end, but when it becomes the end itself, then it is time to jettison the novel format. We've begun to see some early signs of such ejections. Emerging disciplines like "speculative economics" and "speculative biology" encourage speculative ideas to be worked out carefully, even elegantly, without having to invoke the clumsy paraphernalia of fiction. Is Schrödinger's "What Is Life" any less literary because it doesn't have family drama and existential angst? If an economist wants to discuss how interstellar trade would work, does she really need a space opera? If a finance theorist wishes to explore whether the theory of interest rates rules out time travel does he need to bring in a Romantic Love Interest to spoon feed us the speculation? No. Modern readers have no need of such semantic sugar. Aldous Huxley called for a fictional form that would be "a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay, a novel in which one can put all one's ideas, a novel like a hold-all." Perhaps it's possible. Speculation is independent of fiction though, and this work illustrates both positively and negatively why it's an independence worth encouraging. Sometimes the best representation of a pipe is the pipe itself.

Doctorow, Cory. Walkaway.

Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (2017).

Doctorow's Walkaway is a book centrally concerned with political economy. It deserves places on pretty much any reading list of economic SF, and many a list of utopian/dystopian SF, alongside classics such as Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Juliet E. McKenna offers an excellent summary in Interzone #270:

In this near-future, the rich have got much, much richer while those further down the social order desperately cling to exploitative jobs, fearful of becoming a surplus labour unit. Elites ensure this default state of affairs for the blinkered majority by controlling the only meaningful careers left: financial engineering, and politics.  

[...] 

When computer access is ubiquitous, survival knowledge is free for the taking. Ultimately, people can simply walk away from a society they’re no longer invested in. So Hubert, Seth and Natalie head north into the Canadian wilderness where Limpopo and like-minded folk have set up a community where everyone can have what they want or need without even having to contribute from their own means. Limpopo isn’t the leader because there’s no such role. There is no obligation to even work for the common good unless one chooses to. 

[...] 

Some are always determined to keep score. Some demand a pecking order. What happens when they turn up and try to remake this community to suit themselves? Walking away from conventional society means walking away from its protections, in a world where anyone can arm themselves with an AK-3DP gun. Conflict is the essence of drama, right? Not so much, as it turns out, when Limpopo and the others simply walk away again. 

[...] 

Walkaway philosophy says the only way to win is not to play. But what if the other side insists? Well, then it’s time to change the rules of the game, more than once if you need to, and always trying to stay one move ahead.