The Subprimes: a novel of the Piketty/Klein apocalypse

[doctorow]

[Read the post]

[anon73629133]

@doctorow

Science fiction is a marketplace of ideas. The stories that writers spin represent a normal distribution of all the futures we might experience. But these stories are winnowed by a fitness-function that selects the ones that chime with the popular imagination. A world in which technology has produced incredible productivity gains, but in which all of those gains have accrued to the people who own the machines and not the people who operate them or are displaced by them, is one in which futuristic tales of humans being surplus to society’s requirements have a delicious and terrible plausibility.

Killer graf, especially the first half.

[lava]

Isn’t that cute that the WSJ would have you to review a book that teases and pokes sticks at the conscience of its plutocratic readership. For them is the science a fiction, or is the idea we have a problem here the fiction?

[Israel_B]

What if like every other apocalypse this one doesn’t happen?

In any case, millennialist/doomsday stories are so passé.

[shaddack]

What if the apocalypse happened and nobody noticed?

[miasm]

What isn’t so passé? Even pointing out that particular trends are so passé is so passé. Godamnit, even this question about what isn’t so passé in response to a declaration that a trend is so passé is so passé.