Future Fluctuations: Economy, Exchange, and Subjectivity in Recent English-Language Speculative Fiction

Abstract

C H A R L E S S T R O S S ’ S N O V E L N E P T U N E ’ S B R O O D ( 2 0 1 3 ) P R O J E C T S ideas from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2014) into a distant future where debt has become a law as unbreakable as the speed of light. Neptune’s Brood extrapolates current financial and market constructs to literalize the way that those constructs colonize and control not only markets but also people’s lives and subjectivities. This relationship between economics and speculative fiction (sf), at the forefront of Stross’s novel, has a long history. In 1759, for example, Adam Smith penned a short sf story as a way to illustrate his Theory of Moral Sentiments (DeLong 2016), and Marx’s