Sunday, July 23, 2017

CfP: Science Fiction and Economics

Vector is pleased to invite proposals for short articles (2,000-4,000 words) exploring science fiction and economics. CfP can be found here. Some ideas for topics include:
  • The economics and political economy of utopias and dystopias
  • Imagined systems of economic thought
  • The role of speculation about the future across SF and financial markets
  • Property and its alternatives in SF
  • Imagined collapses of and alternatives to capitalism
  • Near future SF and the socio-economic impacts of emergent technology
  • The idea of “rigor” in science fiction and the social sciences
  • Picturing and pitching the future: futurism, entrepreneurship, design fiction, and diegetic prototyping
  • Economic extrapolations of the novum
  • Fintech, cryptocurrency, blockchain
  • Debt in SF, e.g. Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth meets the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood
  • Adhocracy, commoning, and self-governance, e.g. Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) meets Elinor Ostrom
  • “Adam Smith’s invisible great clomping foot of nerdism”: the economic dimension of worldbuilding
  • Science fictional demoi and publics
  • Scarcity, post-scarcity, “alt scarcity”
  • Automation
  • Matter replicators
  • Latinum, Melange, Adamantium: precious science fictional commodities
  • Capitalism, communism, third ways, fourth ways, fifth ways ... nth ways
  • The corporation in cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and other SF
  • Malthus and immortality
  • Markets, data science, and algorithmic governance
  • Complexity economics and chaos, complexity, and non-linear dynamics in SF
  • Algorithmic governance and the socialist calculation debates
  • Commensurable and non-commensurable value, e.g. Viviana Zelizer meets Karl Schroeder’s Permanence (2012)
  • Economic models as science fiction; readings of the thought experiments and pedagogic narratives within political economy texts as science fiction, e.g. Georg Simmel meets Ruth Levitas
  • AI and economic decision-making. How should economic agency be understood when it is dispersed through digital constructs – including Intelligent Personal Assistants and financial investment robo-advisors – whose algorithmic ‘reasoning’ is intrinsically opaque?
  • Communism and alternate reality SF
  • SF and capitalist realism
  • Science fictional experience; SF as lived experience
  • Science fictional estrangements of markets and money
  • Alienation, reification, commodification, and estrangement
  • Unreal estate
  • Economics without economies, economies without economics
  • Subjective theories of value and the Quantified Self
  • Neural interfaces, affective computing, and the formation of economic demand and political will
  • Homo economicus, “xeno economicus”, and economic rationality in SF
  • Prisoners’ Dilemma and other game theory in SF
  • Platform capitalism and SF, e.g. Tim Maughan’s ‘Zero Hours’
  • SF and platform co-operativism: imagining just, democratic, and sustainable digitally-mediated labour relations
  • Division of labour in SF
  • Affective labour and technologies of quantification
  • Barter in SF
  • Interstellar trade
  • Money and the trees it grows on, e.g. Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Money Tree’, Clifford D. Simak’s ‘The Money Tree’
  • SF and ecological economics
  • Quantifying, representing, and/or marketising the unquantifiable
  • Markets as computation, computation as markets
  • SF’s non-capitalist markets
  • Class in SF, e.g. Samuel R. Delaney’s Nova (1968)
  • Secular trends, e.g. Rosa Luxemburg meets Michael Swanwick’s ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled...’ (2008)
  • Social credit and financial credit in Karen Lord’s Galaxy Game (2015)
  • Gift economies and other non-market exchanges in SF, e.g. Erik Frank Russell’s ‘And Then There Were None’ (1953)
  • Economics and deep time, economics and galactic scale, economics of terraforming, economics of megaengineering
  • Markets and states on interstellar scale, e.g. Susan Strange meets Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood (2013)
  • Estranging money
  • Energy and value, e.g. Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1993)
  • SF in relation to time banking: e.g. LETS, ECHO, time-based currencies, Falk Lee’s ‘Time is Money’ (1975)

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