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Vector Future Economics No. 288 Fall 2018 Contents 1 BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION VECTOR Was founded in 1958 and is a non-profitmaking organisation entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers. Future Economics Registered in England. Limited by guarantee. Company No. 921500 VECTOR Editors: Torque Control Surveillance Capitalism and the Jo Lindsay Walton Vector Editors 2 Data/Flesh Worker in Malka Older’s Polina Levontin Infomocracy [email protected] Esko Suoranta 54 Digital Humanity: Collaborative THE BSFA REVIEW Capital Resistance in Cory 61 Editor: Doctorow’s Walkaway Vector at Nine Worlds Susan Oke Kirsten Bussière 5 [email protected] Vector Recommends Anthony Nanson 63 FOCUS Lunar Labour: A Review of Moon Editor: FOR MORE FEATURES VISIT OUR (2009) Dave M. Roberts 64 Benjamin Franz 12 Dev Agarwal NEWLY RELAUNCHED WEBSITE: [email protected] The “B” in “BSFA Awards” Economic Science Fictions reviewed: 66 BSFA AWARDS WWW.VECTOR-BSFA.COM Clare Boothby Administrator: Speculate to innovate Madeleine Chalmers 17 Clare Boothby Kincaid in Short [email protected] Paul Kincaid 67 JOIN OR RENEW YOUR ANNUAL Rapparitions PRESIDENT MEMBERSHIP VIA WWW.BSFA.CO.UK AUDINT (Toby Heys) 20 Stephen Baxter Foundation Favourites Andy Sawyer 71 CHAIR UK £29 Living on Borrowed Time Donna Scott Erin Horáková 24 [email protected] UK STUDENTS/UNWAGED £20 Resonances OUTSIDE UK £45 Stephen Baxter 74 TREASURER Science Friction Martin Potts LIFE MEMBERSHIP £500 Robert Kiely and Sean O’Brien 34 [email protected] MEMBERSHIP SERVICES Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren: Mapping Your BSFA membership number is on the Dave Lally economic landscapes in science envelope this magazine came in. Please [email protected] fiction note it down now and use it in all BSFA Josephine Wideman 42 communications regarding membership and Published by the BSFA Ltd © 2018 renewals. If using PayPal to renew, please ISSN 05050448 use the Comments/Notes box to quote your Universal Basic Income All opinions expressed are those of the individual membership number because this helps us a lot. contributors and not BSFA Ltd except where expressly Vector Editors 52 stated. Copyright of individual articles remains with the Thank you! author. Editorial 3 institutions, merely reinforce and amplify existing power imbalances and existential threats. And while it is thrilling that theorists from beyond Science Fiction Studies now champion the power of SF to disrupt the default capitalist worldview, it Torque Control feels faintly fishy that they have their own naming convention – ‘science fictions’ plural? – perhaps suggesting they’re perched on the edge of SF, Vector Editors rather than immersed in its midst. Is there a risk that they’re romanticising the potential of SF – maybe even because their own fields are bereft of answers? But regardless of whether SF has any role to play in it, economic reality looks set for mega metamorphoses in the not-too-far future. Deadlines demand Deed Lions. With or without An Inquiry into the Nature and a map, we are going someplace new. Ostrom’s Law posits that if a resource arrangement works Causes of the Wealth of Notions in practice, it should be able to work in theory. Unimaginable does not mean impossible. omeone once said, “It is easier to imagine the Found Farewells Send of the world, than the end of capitalism.” But it’s 2018 now, and there are signs that maybe – just maybe – things are starting to change. As well as our special themed feature on economics, we bring you all our regular features It’s the ten-year anniversary of the last … and this issue will be alas the last to carry Andy major financial crisis. Like a vanguard of spring meter sea-change. More and more SF seems Sawyer’s Foundation Favourites column, as Andy daffodils, ancient plagues wriggle free from the to be incorporating explicitly economic themes: retires from his role as Librarian of the Science thawing permafrost. Science has moved from labour and automation; AI and smart cities; exotic Fiction Foundation Collection at the University mere ‘consensus’ to ‘complex choral polyphonic forms of finance; post-scarcity utopias, dystopias, of Liverpool. Foundation Favourites began in harmonization’: yes, we’ve been way too slow wtf-topias. When it comes to forecasting the Matrix in 2003, and found a home in Vector on climate change, and these floods and future, SF is notoriously hit-and-miss. But that #255 during the great shake-up of 2008, which famines, heatwaves and hurricanes are only the hasn’t stopped society from turning to SF to saw Matrix move online. Andy’s first Foundation beginning. Meanwhile, economic inequality is as help us understand what we’re headed for, and Favourite for Vector was R.C. Churchill’s A Short brutal as ever. But the decade gone by has also what we can build with it. The working title of History of the Future (1955), a book whose seen digital monsters like Amazon, Facebook, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway – discussed just over “central joke” is that “all fictional accounts of the Airbnb and Uber rummaging around in the the page by Kirsten Bussière – was Utopia. It’s future are as ‘true’ as accounts of the past”; the global economy’s roots, rewiring capitalism in fitting that title changed: utopia isalways a work next two columns highlighted Arthur C. Clarke’s ways which hint that bigger and better changes in progress. first-ish novel Prelude to Space (1951/1953) and are possible. Teens aged 13 to infinity are Then again … what if this is all just a load of then the first issue of some magazine called sharing mystery memes about fully automated squee, hooey, and theorybabble? What if there’s Vector (1958). Over the years, Andy’s column luxury gay space communism. Economics a speculative bubble in speculative thought- has been a firm foundation for Vector: bouncy, students are demanding new pluralist, bubbles? What if, the more SF you read, the insightful, humane, and always exceedingly good relevant, open and inclusive curricula. Diverse It seems like, for once, there is widespread less convinced you are that it contains any of the company. In this column, Andy places two very economic experiments are proliferating – start- will to seriously try radically new economic answers that we crave to the pressing social and appropriate cherries on the fifteen-year tall cake: ups, co-operatives, apps, fads, communities, models, and a real appetite for fresh economic economic problems of the future? In this issue, The Sandman, annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, and art projects, the uncategorizable – offering ideas. Science fiction – as a literature of ideas, Robert Kiely and Sean O’Brien’s article ‘Science the extensive archive of SF convention material theoretical and practical challenges to the of technology, and of the future – is playing a Friction’ is more interested in SF in which new donated by Pete Weston. dominance of capitalism. part of this quantum LARP, this projected six- technologies, and new social and economic Bussière 5 the speculative economist’s scrapbook Digital Humanity: “This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: Collaborative Capital most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, Resistance in Cory but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which Doctorow’s Walkaway was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Kirsten Bussière Guide to the Galaxy (1979) “Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the ince the 2008 global financial crisis, social a powerful movement for change. Plenty of motion of society turned into a kind of movements which once pursued scattered cyberactivism isn’t even that overtly political, but zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl S causes are increasingly united against a common nevertheless strikes a blow against capitalism by in which objects and people blurred enemy: capitalism. In his recent article “The de-commodifying capitalist products through together till the objects were half alive New Combinations: Revolt of the Global Value- “piracy; open source and free software initiatives; and the people were half dead. Stock- Subjects,” Nick Dyer-Witherford recounts how peer-to-peer production; and gift economy market prices acted back upon the world the “landscapes of globalized capital” are riven practices” (Dyer-Witherford 175-180). as if they were independent powers, by scenes of political unrest. We have witnessed requiring factories to be opened or closed, Building on the longstanding tradition of a decade crossed with an “ascending arc of real human beings to work or rest, hurry social science fiction, the 2017 novel Walkaway struggles”: demonstrations across different cities or dawdle; and they, having given the by Cory Doctorow explores the extension “mark the convergence of a range of campaigns transfusion that made the stock prices of the digital community beyond the realms and activisms,” while coalitions of political groups come alive, felt their flesh go cold and of cyberspace and into the physical world. It “often exceed single issues and specific identities,” impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for imagines a symbiotic post-digital relationship and find means to converge on shared anti- chunking out the man-hours.” between humans and machines. The communal capitalist perspectives – pushing back against a Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010) nature of producing digitally rendered objects society built on purposeful scarcity, a society that “‘Are digital currencies used in the non-digital world provides a technotopian predicates the wealth of the few on the poverty by people, as well as by solution to the anti-utopian capitalist regime – things?’ of the many (Dyer-Witherford 156-158).