Little Graeb Men

SF seems fond of David Graeber. Hopefully it's because he's from the future.

Charles Stross's book Neptune's Brood, which I'm reading now, has an epigraph from Graeber's Debt: the first 5,000 Years, and some galactic expansionist riffing on that book. UPDATE: Charlie talks about the relationship between the two books.

Here's Jo Walton (the other Jo Walton) at Tor.com on Graeber, worldbuilding and the social imaginary.

And here's Cory Doctorow noting Jo Walton's article -- light of touch, but with discussion below. Also see Cory Doctorow on Stross's Neptune's Brood.

And a review of Neptune's Brood at Strange Horizons by Matt Hilliard.

And I mentioned Jo Walton's article in my list of economic speculative fiction.

Here's Kevin Murphy on David Graeber and 1960s schoolkids predicting the future.

Also see Graeber's response to a seminar event (including some academic trashtalk) about Debt. Though no sci-fi here folks. (Besides, I prefer the term scien fictio).

Although before there was Debt there was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, one of two (maybe three, really) books which inspired Francis Crot (AKA me) in writing Hax, which is kind of almost disgusting enough utopian dystopian science fiction or something. A lot of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is about how anarchist societies stay anarchist, how their social institutions are oriented towards vigorously stamping out any inchoate first stirrings of a state. (Hardly anyone can read Hax. I think the trick is to read the prose bits first, and then just browse the visual bits. Hax trivia: in the Damn the Caesars version, it all starts with a gunshot. In the Punch Press version, with a protest).

See also an earlier post of mine, inspired by the economic anthropological activism of Brett Scott, which is part of an extended project to get my head around what money actually is, perhaps so I can destroy it. Notable mainly for its creation myth about "soldiers and farmers," which is as least as intuitive and elegant an explanation of the origins of money as the orthodox "barter and the double coincidence of wants problem" version, and may have the advantage of a grain of truth.