In the article Can the Future Do Without Economic Logic?, Tim Swanson and Isaac Bergman examine the how, despite the ability of science fiction writers to foresee the future, they fail to fully understand economic law. Excerpts are pulled from Accelerando by Charles Stross.

Ever the second-hander intellectual mountebank, Stross manages to mangle a bevy of technical and economic gobbledygook and shoehorn it into an exponentially spiraling plotline.

However, Stross for all his valiant efforts falls short of delivering a futurist economics that is not subject to the economic principles we know today.

Meanwhile, Andart’s Anders Sandberg responds to the piece and asks an interesting question: Should Economics be Part of Hard SF?

Is it just me, or are the demands of hard sf rising? Once you just had to get the physics right, you could assume nearly any weird biology. Gradually sf authors have begun to build ecologies more conscientiously and make sure their aliens could have evolved. These days software is slowly getting more plausible. And maybe hard sf is starting to integrate more real economics too. Maybe a true hard sf author in 2020 will have to master not just physics, biology, computer science, economics, sociology, psychology – and write well, of course. We better invent brain enhancements quickly if we are to get anybody with that kind of expertise.

Related posts:

  1. The Economics of Pirating Books
  2. The “New” Science Fiction
  3. An Open Letter to Science Fiction Anthologists
  4. Categorizing Science Fiction
  5. Has Science Ruined Science Fiction?

Filed under: Books

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