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)