Economists, politicians and business leaders, it seems, have given up on trying to imagine completely different economic systems. But we have not. And neither has a small group of brainy, visionary science fiction authors. We organize a meeting of minds where we can learn from each other what future economies might look like. And maybe even how we can help them be born.
Authors discussed include Cory Doctorow (peer production and abundance in Walkaway), Bruce Sterling (nomads + cheap open source technology + reputation servers in Distraction), Neal Stephenson (phyla in The Diamond Age), Peter Watts (tons of insights from biology in the Rifters trilogy), and others.
Selected threads in this category
- Designer economies. How much freedom do we really have when imagining believable economic systems? . Text and visuals of @alberto’s lecture at the Space Economy Camp in 2023.
- What David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" has in common with sci-fi economics. On the mission of Sci-FI economics: getting unstuck from “There Is No Alternative”.
- The economics of Cory Doctorow's Walkaway. A detailed economic analysis of the popular novel by Cory Doctorow. There are several other similar analyses of the economics underpinning the worlds of verious sci-fi novels.
- The Great Retrofit world: start here. The Great Retrofit world is perhaps the best structured output ever to come from a single event organized by the Sci-Fi Economics Lab.
Other categories
- Witness, the category hosting the content on the floating megacity of Witness, an open source world created by the Lab as a economically credible (if still unfamiliar!) background to science fiction work. Includes some sci-fi short stories set in Witness.
- Building Witness is the subcategory dedicated to the meta-discussion on organizing witness.
- SciFi Economics Residency is the subcategory dedicated to the 2024 residency organized in Messina.
Websites
- https://scifieconomicslab.net/
- Explore the future megacity of Witness, where several “alien” economic systems coexist side by side: https://witness.scifieconomicslab.net/. Witness is not result of a single event, but of a slow burn Recommended in particular: the pages on Aethnography and The Covenant.
