Tag Archive | capitalism

After Atlas

Sep10

This book was given to me by the author. This summer I went on an Arvon course on Science Fiction and Fantasy writing led by Emma Newman and Peter Newman. The week is mornings of workshops, afternoons of working on your project, and evenings of readings. On the first evening the tutors read from their own work and then generously gave us each a copy of one of their novels.

After Atlas by Emma Newman is set in an frighteningly plausible future dominated by corporations where advertising is omnipresent and indentured servitude has made a return. Carlos Moreno is a detective, but he is indentured. He has a contract which he has to work off before he can be free. In this story, Carlos is asked to investigate the murder of the leader of a cult called the Circle, from which Carlos escaped when he was 18. It was this escape that led to his capture and slavery. Returning to the Circle to solve the case stirs up a lot of memories, and the cult is not what he thought it was.

The future imagined in this book is an extrapolation of neo-liberal economics and its impact on democracy and any parts of life that are not economic. It is extremely unequal and highly surveilled. Almost nothing a person does goes unnoticed and privacy is reserved for the very rich. I liked the way it was handled and found it believable. I think the question of the balance of convenience and privacy is interesting. The concept of privacy is really a quite modern one. Centuries ago when people lived and worked in the same place all their lives everyone in the village knew everyone else’s business. Living in cities has given us a sense of anonymity that we’ve grown used to and are reluctant to give up.

The other thing I liked about this book is that it is a diverse cast of characters at all levels. A lot of this was done in a quite subtle way and I was a good way through the book before I realised it.

After Atlas is a science-fiction crime thriller, a genre of which I’m fond. It’s fun, and while it touches on some quite serious and weighty topics, it does so with a very light hand. Emma Newman is a good writer and this is an easy and engaging read. I liked it a lot.

How to Speak Money

Jul16

I forget how this book ended up in my library. Probably picked up while killing time at a train station or airport. That’s where I mostly seem to buy this kind of lightweight non-fiction. My brain is too tired for the imagination required of a novel or the attention required of more in-depth non-fiction.

How to Speak Money by John Lanchester is a dictionary of terms used about money in the media and by the financial services industry. It’s a handy think to have because many of those terms are difficult to grasp and the meaning of them quite technical. Reading this book will give you a better understanding of what people mean by such things as inflation, equities and hedge funds, or downsizing and rent. There’s some historical context given in the entries about Keynes, Friedman and Marx, and a long introduction that describes what’s happened in economics and finance in the last century or so.

What I found interesting was Lanchester’s focus on the amount of reversification used in the language used to talk about money. Reversification is a word coined by Lanchester for when a term is used to describe the opposite of their initial sense, often deliberately in order to obscure what’s really happening. An example is ‘credit’, which really means ‘debt’. We were brought up to believe debt was a bad thing and people don’t want more of it, but if you rename it credit it sounds like a good thing that you want more of.

It’s bit dry. Lanchester’s writing is quite witty and snarky but there’s only so much he can do with the material. But it is informative and enlightening and well worth reading if you want to understand money and economics a bit more.