The Torchbearer's Burden: A Personal Note on Economics in Science Fiction
Non-fiction - by Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD
“Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”
~ Arthur C. Clarke
“Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins that may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days like a broken man behind a farting camel.”
~ Hafez
First of all let me introduce myself. I’m an academic and journalist turned science fiction
writer, and a proud member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF) that has
published its 8th anthology under the appropriately titled The Economists
(2022). 1 Fortunately in my case I’ve always been into economics and science fiction
from my teens. Looking at demand and supply curves at school, mapping out human
behavior with mathematical precision was a real thrill to me. As luck would have it I
was reading Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation at around the same time where I was
introduced to the wonders of psycho-history, the social scientist’s
dream made real on the plateau of the future, studying human behavior and making
effective generalizations and predictions from such a stupendously large statistical
sample. I was hooked and I knew it.
Of course I’m older and wiser now and not nearly as confident in economics as a
‘science,’ verifiable, experimental, empirical and impartial. Even so, I haven’t lost my
interest in economics or my conviction that science fiction and literature more generally
can contribute to this branch of academia – a fact that is not always recognized in
academic circles. 2 If anything, science fiction is more suited to the task than mainstream
literature, the first quandary I deal with in this essay. But, as always, an account however
detailed and accurate feels incomplete without a compare and contrast, which is why I
deal with Arab SF in the second half of this essay, followed by a quick concluding
section at the end.
Works from the Global South like the masterful Mexican movie Sleep Dealer (2008) 3
have already been dealt with extensively, but I don’t think anyone has compared
economics in Arab SF to the Western standard and so here is my attempt.
The Workingman’s Toolkit
A highly respected economist who used literature extensively to carry out his teaching
duties was Michael Watts, and something he noticed early on was the surprising absence
of economics from modern mainstream literature. 4 (I discussed this same point with a
professor of English and Comparative Literature, who confirmed it for me). The classics
of literature, from Dickens to Conrad, dealt with economics extensively, whether it was
the cruelty of the poorhouses and coalmines and factories of the industrial revolution or
the sheer mania of materialism and slavery and resource wars that colonialism route on
humanity. But what’s happened since then? Economics is still there in some stories,
focusing on particular industries or jobs – stockbroker, foreman, salesman, PR man,
advertiser, farmer, corporate executive – but there are no longer any large-scale
economic critiques of society and how things are run. The focus has become much more
mundane and microscopic, with classics like Glengarry Glen Ross and Death of a
Salesman and more contemporary examples like Halt and Catch Fire, Barbarians at the
Gate and Purpose. All commendable works but nobody is trying to dream up an
alternative economic system anymore by picking apart the injustices and rationale of the
existing system. Capitalism, however bemoaned or condemned, has become part of the
background noise, an accepted fact.
It seems that when Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad were writing – not to forget
Emile Zola, Bernard Shaw and Goethe – capitalism was still fairly new and society was
in a delicate state of transition, from agricultural feudalism to industrial capitalism. This
meant that the system was still not set in people’s minds and authors could dream of a
better and different future, implicitly hinted at while they were busily critiquing the here
and now in meticulous detail. There was always hope for the future, that by
understanding the past and the present – human nature, historical dynamics – the world
could be made better. That was the idea at least but now the focus is too much on the
plight of the working man. That’s a commendable exercise in its own right (see below)
but it’s not nearly as ambitious as speculating about a viable alternative to what’s causing
their woes in the first place.
This is where science fiction comes in. SF is still concerned with economics, on the old
model of classic literature, but with a twist. Its’ still concerned with capitalism and how it
denigrates the soul and turns people into automatons, whether mindless workers or
passive consumers, and how it rapes the soil of its mineral wealth and makes havoc with
the ecosystem and environment. 5 But more than that, it holds out hope for the future and
uses the future to reminisce on the crimes and injustices, and inefficiencies of the past;;
future generations laughing at the folly of past generations, or the same problems
emerging in a new guise and fomenting rebellion and the fielding of alternatives. Two
stellar examples of this are the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, with the resurrection of a
feudal order in his galactic empire leading to the quest for a Messiah-like superhuman to
lead the oppressed out of darkness – however briefly – and a less well-known sci-fi
classic, The Man Who Awoke (1933) by Laurence Manning. A wealthy man is desperate
to see the future and finds a way to freeze his metabolism and wake himself after
thousands of years have gone by. In his first awakening he finds that mankind has
become a single race and lives in the forest, growing their hybridized food without any
effort under the banner of the true science of economics after overcoming the past era of
waste. Sadly, it doesn’t last though as social conflict is rife between the young and the
old, and new technologies (synthetic foods, giant computer brains, dream machines)
unmake the successive social orders and replace them with new ones, till the secret of
immortality is discovered after people learn to live in peace with each other.
Even the more immediate concern of the plight of the common man can be found and
almost from the inception of science fiction, with the optimism of Verne and Wells being
tested early on with Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and then Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927). 6 Even Wells worried about the state of the working man in the
future, reduced to underground barbarism in The Time Machine (1895) as the rich
became decadent and useless. 7 Note also the curious scene in the movie version of his
novel The First Men in the Moon (1964) where the insect-like inhabitants of the moon
cocoon some workers, and one of the human protagonists describes this as an interesting
way to deal with unemployment.
In the world of present-day science fiction you have whole subgenres dedicated to the
interface of economics, technology, the social and the environmental such as solarpunk,
cyberpunk and steampunk. These are the most explicit but there are also the older genres like
space colonization and exploration epics and military SF that are relevant as well. Cyberpunk
classics like Blade Runner and its 2049 sequel and Max Headroom and Johnny
Mnemonic all depict people becoming lifeless drones in a world of urban sprawl and
environmental decay, addicted to information where privacy is a rare commodity. Mortal
Engines exists in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world of scarcity governed by predatory
mobile city-states and the doctrine of Municipal Darwinism. V, Battlestar Galactica,
Battle Los Angeles and Starship Troopers (military SF, alien invasion) all revive the not
too distant past of colonialism, with more subtle references to colonialism being crucial
to the thematic arch of the first two movies in the Alien franchise, hence the very
explicitly Conradian name-set (Nostromo, Narcissus, Sulaco). Alien (1979) deserves
special mention here, replete with other references to Third World exploitation, since the
cargo of the Nostromo is iron ore, explaining the scene where Ripley is calling out to
Antarctica control, saying that their ship is returning from the Solomon’s. There is also
the company (Wayland-Yutani) that is willing to sacrifice the expendable crew to capture
the alien and the undue authority the science officer Ash has over the captain Dallas. 8 The
director’s cut of Aliens (1986) is even more explicit, focusing on the plight of the
common man exemplified by the fact that the poor sod who gets impregnated by the face-
hugger from Hadley’s Hope is Newt’s father. Ripley contains economic themes in her
own right, since she was a single working mom who lost her daughter thanks to her
extended stint in hypersleep. Newt is her salvation, her second chance to become a
mother again, while also being an assertive working woman – warrior woman – who
saves the day. Her working class credentials are paraded throughout the movie, such as
the scene where she is using the power loader in front of the Marines. She complains to
the company execs about how fickle they are, only concerned about profits when the
xenomorphs could end the human race. You see it in the confrontation with Burke when
she reveals how he sent Newt’s parents, prospector types, out to the Derelict vessel with
the egg silo. She also reminds Burke that the alien species is technically better than us
because they don’t screw each other over corporate bonuses and promotions.
You see such blue collar themes with the colonial Marines too, with their captain telling
them that a day in the Marines is like a day on the farm, and the Marines not warming to
their appointed Commander Gorman because he won’t sit with them, lowly grunts that
they are. There is also the motif of cornbread, itself a borrowing from the original Alien.
The whole effect of the economic on the human condition is one of the most basic
concerns of literature, and the same holds true of SF, but with infinitely more possibilities
than in realist literature that focuses only on what has actually happened.
Even at a more basic level just constructing a future world demands economics, since it
involves a myriad of questions that simply need to be answered. 9 What is work like in this
future world? Do people work at home, do robots do everything for them, are working
conditions better or worse than the world today? What are labour relations like? How are
people paid? What is the standard monetary unit? Do people get paid in credits? Does
paper money still exist? Will humanity degenerate and go back to a barter economy?
What is the ultimate commodity in the future, money, raw materials or immortality? 10
Will the future still be dependent on fossil fuels or will we break the carbon cycle once
and for all, and, if so, how? Will future fuels allow us to travel faster than light? If we
encounter alien races will this be good for us, bringing us new commodities and
materials we don’t already have, or will cheap alien labour unemploy us and make us
more destitute than we already are? Can we incorporate alien labour into our societies in
a way beneficial to all? What if mass cloning became possible, would people become
commodities to be harvested for organs? In the process you find yourself inadvertently
wondering, out loud, if you can create a world where inflation doesn’t exist or where the
internet is provided as a public service or where hunger is a thing of the past.
SF itself is a giant thought-experiment allowing you to test theories, after all, whether real
world policies or your own more radical ideas. The classic example of that, cited by
economists themselves, is the ‘Shoe Event Horizon’ in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy series. 11 A planet produces too many shoes and this reduces the
quality as too many shops compete, cutting costs to win customers from rivals, and in the
process more and more money and manpower and resources go into the sector to try
and improve the quality of shoes to the point that the planetary economy goes bust – a
classic bubble economy. (Go to downtown Cairo to try and buy a decent pair of shoes,
you will find Douglas Adams’s predictions playing themselves out in real-time, and in a
country once known for the quality of its leather goods).
Economics, in short, is second-nature to science fiction. It pops up almost everywhere
you look, and with that comes even deeper philosophical speculations about the why of
economics – how we measure progress and what we mean by the good life and what are
the consequences of our lifestyle on others, however efficient. (The poor, the planet, the
environment, our families and personal life, etc.) Not to mention attempts to find
alternative systems where we can avoid these eventualities through the whole dream of
Utopia. All of these themes emerge in the very flesh of sci-fi stories, even when the story
itself is not necessarily about economics. You can see this in Ursula Le Guin’s beautiful
The Lathe of Heaven when George Orr dreams up aliens that come to earth, first in war
then in peace, and become hardworking shopkeepers and entrepreneurs benefiting
humanity, almost on the model of the Chinese in American history. (Note the closing
scene in the 1980 movie version where you see an alien running an ice cream stand, a
common image of foreign labourers in American pop culture, in a world of racial equality
exemplified by the very blond Orr and the very African American Heather Lelache). Le
Guin’s novel is Utopian, true enough, posing questions about the price of perfection.
George Orr’s attempt to cure world hunger results in most of humanity dying out from
plague, with basic things never getting fixed (a good cup of coffee) no matter how good
things get. A more subversive example of such questionings however can be found in
Philip K. Dick, probably the most economically conscious of all modern SF writers; he
worked in a record store most of his life and transposed these real-life concerns into his
stories and novels. In “Nanny” you have robotic nannies that are programmed to fight
each other, forcing parents to either keep spending money on repairs or buying the newer
(and stronger) model, something they do even when they realize they are being conned
by the manufacturers. This is planned obsolescence in modern day economic
terminology. “Paycheck” has an engineer sacrificing tremendous wealth for a handful of
household objects that have no intrinsic value of their own but nonetheless save his life
on more than one occasion – would all the money in the world do you any good if you
were dying of thirst in the desert? “The Mold of Yancy” has an otherwise democratic
planetoid being turned into a totalitarian community through the clever usage of a made-
up TV personality that comes off as everybody’s grandfather that people trust
unquestioningly; this was a reference to President Eisenhower, a point explicitly made in
PKD’s Cold War thriller The Penultimate Truth. In his novel The Zap Gun you have a
weapons scientist who dreams up designs with the help of drugs only for them to be
turned instead into household appliances, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the military-
industrial complex. In The Man in the High Castle you have jewelers Frank Frink and Ed
McCarthy curing their country’s addiction to past memorabilia – fake replicas and other
tourist trash – and rebuild their confidence in their own creativity in the face of the
overwhelming force of the Japanese occupation.
PKD’s short story “Stability” questions whether history is progress since this future
world won’t allow new inventions, committing itself to the status quo after seeing that the
rate of inventions is declining. “Some Kinds of Life” is probably his best economic story.
It has a military man arguing with his wife that he has to go to war with this or that alien
race to maintain their incredible standard of living, only for him to die, then his wife and
son recruited into more wars for alien raw materials and the human race going extinct,
with all the wonderful suburban pleasures being enjoyed by no one. “Sales Pitch” has a
working man dreaming of escaping a world full of adverts to go to a far off colony, like
the pioneers, only to have a robot advertising itself following him to this new world after
invading his apartment. “Strange Eden” has a man wanting to turn an untouched planet
into a tourist attraction, only for him to turn into an animal (his true nature) when he
encounters a beautiful exotic alien bride he hopes to possess, just like the planet and its
riches. “War Game” has a team of experts checking alien games for safety purposes and
they approve a board game, very much like monopoly, not realizing that it is supposed to
indoctrinate kids into giving up their possessions. This is a prelude to an alien invasion,
making sure humans won’t defend what belongs to them, the earth.
Can’t get much better than PKD with his uncanny ability to turn abstract philosophical
themes into everyday objects, most famously in his novel Ubik where a spray can
prevents things from regressing into older forms in the world that the dead inhabit, half-
life. The only catch is that the spray can itself can (ironically) regress if you let your
guard down. There were other political satirists and philosophically bent SF authors out
there – Harlan Ellison’s in “Jeffty is Five” and Larry Niven’s “The Cloak of Anarchy” –
but nobody could turn concepts into concrete objects like PKD, and marketable products
at that, governed by sound economic logic.
Even a real-life engineer and businessman like Robert Heinlein couldn’t compete and he
wrote The Door into Summer, the novel which anticipated the personal
computer; (please watch the documentary The Commodore Story (2018).
But what of science fiction beyond its birthplace in the Western world?
I have good news on that front, the topic I move to next.
New Frontiers: Arabic SF
Needless to say, the world of Arabic SF is very different from the above economic
examples. That is to be expected given how new SF is to Arab literature, modern import
that it is. 12 That does not mean, however, that economics is not present or that it is not
accelerating and making up for lost time. To cite an essay in The Economists authored by
literary critic Khaled Gouda Ahmed, economics in general is a rarity in Arabic and
Egyptian literature. 13 Despite the overwhelming obsession with realism in Arabic
literature, exemplified of course by Naguib Mahfouz, there was little to no appreciation
of economic theory. The plight of the common man was certainly in there, the peasant
farmer or civil servant or small tradesman, but no accounts of how free trade and the
international economy works, no attempt to make sense of inflation or how banks work,
let alone the stock market – the specific example Khaled Gouda zeros in on. The stock
market, in so far as it emerges in Egyptian literature, is dealt with moralistically or as a
symbol for people marketing themselves (pp. 271). The actual economics and importance
of the stock exchange is hardly ever dealt with.
This is in marked contrast, of course, to classic movies in the West like Wall Street,
Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street, Other People’s Money and Trading Places. I can
add that while economic exploitation by foreign powers, the heritage of colonialism, was
dealt with in modern Egyptian literature but since then such things as multinational
corporations and economic globalization are generally not tackled. As sociologist Reem
Saad documents, most Egyptians understand the business of running the economy to be
akin to managing a farm or a shop and are willing to excuse their leaders for political U-
turns in an effort to save more and spend less or pay off old debts. 14 Economics as an
academic discipline was imported into the Arab-speaking world as readily as the modern
novel and genre literature.
Thankfully, Arabic science fiction has already made a brave and early attempt to fill in
this conceptual-literary gap, even when it comes to the stock market. Khaled Gouda gives
the interesting, and funny, example of Messages from the Future by Fayez Halawa where
an eight year old boy in the year 2490 AD emails a person in the present day world to get
data for his history paper on the end of the fossil fuel era in the 21 st century (pp. 276-77).
To prove himself the future time traveler gives the hero a list of stock prices in his day
and age and the narrator, seeing a golden opportunity, asks for information about ‘insider
dealing’ in the stock exchange only to learn how the executives of a particular brokers is
planning to merge with a major foreign entity (pp. 279).
You’ll notice here the conspiratorial overtones of Messages from the Future. Business
conspiracies in SF are not unusual. The energy industry is a culprit in Chocky (1968),
deliberately trying to stop the dream of limitless energy to keep their fossil fuel profits
up. Robert Heinlein’s Friday (1982) is replete with espionage and corporate plots, and
Philip K. Dick was known for his paranoia about surveillance, corporations and the war
on drugs, exemplified so perfectly in the movie version of A Scanner Darkly (2006).
Even so, economic conspiracies are more potent in Arabic science fiction and often take
on apocalyptic tones. The novel Al-Kayan [The Entity] (2019), for instance, has a cabal
of people pushing the world to the brink of environmental collapse to force the sea levels
to rise, pulling business elites everywhere into their machinations through the information
technology revolution at first. (Later you learn that the conspirators are Atlantian). Cliques
of businessmen dominating sectors in Egypt and inflating prices or flooding
the market with imported goods is an everyday reality Egyptians face and the novel is a
clear indictment of globalization.
Mahmoud’s brother, Wael, also has a short story in The Economists anthology where the
earth is being vacated by the rich. The planet ends up being left to the poor, to the point
that the technology and lifestyle they have far in the future is identical to the half-modern,
half-traditional world of Egyptian society today. Several stories in the anthology have
financial plots to rule the world involving secret vaults in Switzerland and references to
the anti-Christ. Even before this anthology contest began there was a sci-fi TV series in
2020, Al-Nihaya [The End], set in a post-apocalyptic future where the anti-Christ (again)
is planning a new global war after gathering together the world’s elites to a secret city,
only to kill them off all in one go so he doesn’t have to share power with anyone else.
Not to forget that corruption rigging prices and creating energy shortages is in there too.
All this speaks to the insecurities that Arabs feel, expressed in their literature, with their
countries being at the mercy of players beyond their control – foreign or domestic. It’s
not all doom and gloom however. One of the stories in The Economists has a young
businessman perplexed that his family’s company is going to be bought out by a galactic
consortium but the boy turns the merger to his advantage in the end. Another story has an
overpopulated earth besieged by cosmic viruses and bacteria and fighting off a group of
human rebels blocking supplies from the moon. Earth had solved its energy and food
security problems thanks to certain raw materials unique to the moon and the heroes, by
the end of the story, come up with a list of recommendations on how to make the earth
less dependent on imports, a clear allusion to breaking the cycle of Third World
dependency.
We should add here that Arab dystopian SF takes on very explicit economic overtones
but also with surprising results at times. The focus isn’t so much on poverty, but wealth at
times, with material pleasures being used to buy people off. Moataz Hassanein’s novella
2063 (2018) has Egypt under foreign occupation but the population is surprisingly
content and happy because it is well provisioned in terms of essential goods, with
rationing in addition to dependable lifetime jobs. The protagonist of the story is haunted
by the memory of his father killing himself, an old Arab Spring revolutionary, while also
bragging about how the current generation are is in charge of their lives compared to his
dad’s day. 15 The occupation regime is so concerned with keeping people happy, in fact,
that they give them compulsory ‘satisfaction’ tests; drop down to 95% or lower
satisfaction and they put you to sleep, however. Even one of the earliest Arab dystopian
novels, The Master from the Spinach Fields (1987) by Sabri Musa, also talks about the
stock market and modern food market logistics, to cite Khaled Gouda again (pp. 281-
282). That novel is replete with material wealth but at the expense of privacy and people
leading meaningful lives. There is poverty and desperation in Arab dystopian literature
but not on the Orwellian scale accustomed to in the West in part driven by our historical
experiences as Arabs and Muslims. Decadent pleasures like hashish and belly dancing
and banquets and multiple holidays were used in the past to keep the people passive and
when desperation makes its’ way into Arab SF it's usually through the backdoor, by
getting people to fight each other to curry favour with the government. That was the
punchline to Basma Abd Al-Aziz’s critically acclaimed novel The Queue (2013) where
people have to queue daily up in front of a robotic booth to solve their bureaucratic
problems. The long queues we all endure as Egyptians (in front of government agencies,
banks, bread lines) is the motif of choice for this novel, with people taking their pent up
aggression out on each other as they try to wrestle their way to the booth that can solve all
their problems.
Then there’s modern Arabic steampunk to contend with. Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi’s post-
apocalyptic novel Malaz: City of Resurrection (2017) 16 has Egypt divided into city-states
with a warrior caste ruling the citizens of Malaz (‘haven’ in Arabic) in the north, with a
harsh feudal system where the poor have to work in quarries and fields to feed their brutal
rulers. People are certainly poor and oppressed but there’s no religious restrictions on
food, drink and sex in Malaz, again, in an effort to placate the masses. The powerhouse of
the south, Byblos, is a whole other kettle of fish, worshipping the gods of the ancients’
with clean streets and regular donations made to the temples and clergy, the only people
who control the secret weapons of the past. The north and the south have trade missions
and currency systems and skilled artisans and brilliant architecture and medical sciences
so the society and economy are fully functional, however unjustly. This is at variance
with movies like The Postman or The Road Warrior in Western SF where civilization is
completely collapsed and people live in isolation; dysfunctional societies governed by
archaic norms, as people were in the past. We perceive the past differently in Arabic
countries and so going back to the Middle Ages or antiquity isn’t necessarily a bad thing,
economically or otherwise.
The hero from Malaz, Qasim, is himself a scavenger and smalltime inventor and is tasked
with reviving the ancient technologies of the past to stave off the imperial ambitions of
the prince of Abydos who has also brought back these old weapons. Also note that this
future world resulted from a nuclear apocalypse caused by an energy war. Economics yet
again.
A Final Comparison
Economics in Western SF and in Western literary and cinematic history in general is far
more detailed and in-depth than that found in Arab SF. The themes and content and
literary techniques and devices that are used are different. Nonetheless, there is a distinct
flavor and unique contribution that Arabic SF makes here. We don’t construct our future
worlds from political and economic theories outlined in textbooks but from our history
and so we can recognize things – this or that coercive or conciliatory policy – when we
see them. We may be a bit behind the times when it comes to stock markets and free
trade and mergers and acquisitions but we’re going up the learning curve, thanks
more to SF than mainstream Arabic literature, while contributing things from our past
along the way in the form of dystopia and steampunk and conspiracy thrillers.
To illustrate just how fast Arabs are making up for lost time, I have the example of a
short story by Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi with a future world where social justice is
achieved through upward mobility since the poor can choose to become rich, under the
sponsorship of the state after filling out an application form. The only catch is they are
only allowed to live for a limited lifespan, whereas the poor and destitute masses can live
as long as they like. Then it turns out to be a sham and the rich live out their full lives,
just in secret. Reading the story I told Ahmed this was close to the plot of “The Totally
Rich” by John Brunner (see endnote 10), a story he’d never even heard of before.
Mainstream SF from the West, already doing a great job on the economic front, is going
to get a new contingent added to it from a new, budding part of the literary scene from
the Global South. The sky is quite literally the limit!
1 The book was the brainchild of the director and founder of the ESSF, Dr. Hosam Elzembely, and I did
quite a lot of arguing with the ESSF members to get the project accepted. One example I used to prove the
adequacy of SF to economics was Bob Shaw’s satirical story “Deflation 2001” (1972). I’ve used SF stories
extensively in my teaching, as readings and for homework assignments and with thrilling results. For a
summary of my experience using SF to teach economics and sociology please see Emad El-Din Aysha,
Zahra Jannessari-Ladani and Jörg Matthias Determann, “MULOSIGE Syllabus: Science, Literature and
Development in the MENA Region”, http://mulosige.soas.ac.uk/mulosige-syllabus-science-literature-
development/.
2 The British Science Fiction Association was very courageous to dedicate a whole issue of Vector
magazine to “Future Economics” (#288, https://vectoreditors.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/vector288.pdf).
To my knowledge the only academic book dealing with the topic is Economic Science Fictions, William
Davies ed., (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018).
3 Mark Engler and John Feffer, “Science Fiction From Below,”, Foreign Policy In Focus, May 13, 2009,
https://fpif.org/science_fiction_from_below/. See also Anwuli Okeke, “Looking Forward Through the
Imagination of Africa,”, Vector, September 8, 2019, https://vector-bsfa.com/2019/09/08/looking-forward-
through-the-imagination-of-africa/.
4 Please see his academic article “How Economists Use Literature and Drama,”, The Journal of Economic
Education, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 377-386, and his older article with Robert F. Smith,
“Economics in Literature and Drama,”, The Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer,
1989), pp. 291-307.
5 You can find this in a fantasy story about magic by Larry Niven, “Not Long Before the End” (1969).
6 Similar themes abound in “The Tunnel Under the World” (1955) by Frederik Pohl, where a small-town community
is subjected to endless commercial experiments, only for the hero to discover
that he and everyone is living on borrowed time. They all died in an industrial accident and their memories
have been inserted into automatons.
7 Similar classist themes emerge on Mars with P. Schuyler Miller’s “The Titan” (1952).
8 Please see Matthew Waller, “Unionism and Separatism: Politics in Nostromo”, Nostromo Online, 2002,
for an account of Conrad’s colonial themes, http://www.nostromoonline.com/StandalonePages/Essay_Politics.htm.
9 For a quick intro to the economics of world-building please see C. M. Alongi, “How to Worldbuild an
Economy & Currency in Science Fiction and Fantasy”, February 20, 2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvZ4-xNejd0&t=2s.
10 I’m getting this from Jupiter Ascending (2015). There are similar parallels in John Brunner’s short story
“The Totally Rich” (1963), where a scientist is hired by a secret cabal of the superrich to find a way to
regenerate the dead. But there isn’t enough time to save a rapidly aging woman who wants to resurrect her
lover; love is the only thing that gives her life of limitless wealth meaning, something the scientist himself
learns the hard way.
11 Please see John R. Bryson, “Chapter 11: Reading manufacturing firms and new research agendas: scalar-
plasticity, valuerisk and the emergence of Jenga Capitalism” in John R. Bryson, Chloe Billing, William
Graves, and Godfrey Yeung, ed.s, A Research Agenda for Manufacturing Industries in the Global
Economy, (Cheltenham: Edward Algar Publishing, 2022), pp. 232-233.
12 Nesrine Malik, “What happened to Arab science fiction?”, The Guardian, July 30, 2009,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jul/30/arab-world-science-fiction.
13 “‘The Stock Market’ between Arab Realist Literature and Science Fiction”, in Hosam Elzembely, ed.,
The Economists: A Collection of Stories, (Cairo: Dar Al-Kinzy, 2020), pp. 251-287.[Arabic]
14 Reem Saad, “War in the Social Memory of Egyptian Peasants”, in Steven Heydemann, ed., War,
Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, (Berkley: U of California P, 2000), pp. 240-257, also
available at https://www.academia.edu/28856050/War_in_the_Social_Memory_of_Egyptian_Peasants.
15 Please see the frequent references to 2063 in Barbara Bakker, “Egyptian Dystopias of the 21st Century: a
New Literary Trend?”, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 21 (2021): 79-94,
https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/9151/7711.
16 An English translation of the novel can be purchased here, https://www.amazon.com/Malaz-
Resurrection-Ahmed-Salah-Al-Mahdi/dp/B093WMPR1K.