Fantasy and economics
Underlying our fears of robots stealing our jobs are more basic anxieties about money. We're using fantasy to confront fears
Sci-Fi has become a measure to assess what's happening in the real world to see if we should be concerned. It doesn't take us away from our problems but allows us to identify what's wrong.
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- The Hunger Games gave us a neo-Depression dystopia where media-obsessed elites torment the starving lower classes.
- The Expanse is about class warfare.
- The 1950 Foundation series was partly about saving the galaxy with sound economic programs.
- The 2012 novel Three Parts Dead, was a mythical reimagining of the 2008 financial crisis. The author, Max Gladstone, said you couldn't tell a story like the financial crisis with realism. You need fantasy to explain it.
The âdarkâ kind of science fiction deals with the foundation of economics, which is scarcity. There is a fear that poverty will come faster as automation continues to devalue human labor.
People are experiencing scarcity or are afraid of it on a regular basis. Writers are turning to economists to make their financial worlds more plausible.
By incorporating ideas of economists, science fiction can explore a future of automation.
For example, how easy it would be to slide backward into the savagery of a slave economy. By incorporating ideas of a working economist, readers can be offered a believable thought experiment about real-life dangers.
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Is a new method for designing technology that explores the futures that ordinary people would prefer. Design fictions are provocative and engage people, encouraging them to envision, explain and raise questions about the direction of future technology and society.
Design fictions are now being used in sectors ranging from health to defence tech forecasting, and even policy making. In this way, science fiction can be used as a tool to help design future societies and technologies, giving the public a say on it too.
... which is based on George R.R. Martinâs book series "A Song Of Ice And Fire", addresses a range of diverse political issues.
Most of the people hungry for power are showcased as maniacs and reflect on the wrongdoings of global political elites and career politicians.
- In the late 50s, Frank Herbert, a freelance writer, was roaming the desert landscapes of Florence, Oregon, researching sand dunes.
- His classic Dune got rejected by about 20 publishing houses, and soon after getting published by a magazine company, built up a huge fan base in the coming two decades.
- Fifty years later, it is considered the greatest novel of the science fiction genre.