William Davies Economic Science Fictions

613 BOOKS IN REVIEW are poor, honor killings are not common in all Arab societies, especially against rape victims and in Morocco where the novel takes places. Utilizing this inaccurate stereotype therefore undermines Campbell’s analysis of the protagonist’s behavior; this in turn undermines evidence that the novel estranges patriarchy within the Arab intellectual elite. While these issues weaken various claims in the book, I do not think that they nullify the presence of double estrangement in many ASF works. Nevertheless, the book’s overall argument could have been more compelling had the author avoided these pitfalls, acknowledged limitations, and avoided stereotypes about Arabs and Arab cultures. After all, Arabs are diverse and ASF is a subgenre that encompasses many trends, themes, and plots. Nonetheless, Arabic Science Fiction remains a significant pioneering work. It contains many interesting analyses and genuinely insightful arguments. Along with earlier research, it definitely sets the stage for further engagement in the field. And for this reason, I think it should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the topic.—Musab Bajaber, King Saud University Speculative Markets. William Davies, ed. Economic Science Fictions. London: Goldsmiths, 2018. xv+383 pp. £24.95 hc, £15.99 pbk. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies brings together economists, sf scholars, architects, designers, artists, and poets to examine the intersections between economics and science fiction. The result is an engaging, eclectic, and wide-ranging volume which addresses itself to a wide popular audience, “anyone who believes the economy is too important to be left to the economists” (cover blurb). As a result, sf scholars coming into the volume will encounter the minor annoyances common to both cross-disciplinary and popular writing about our field (over-reliance on a small number of big theorists to represent the field as a whole, reinventions of various theoretical wheels, calls for exploration in areas where great work exists already, etc). Yet Economic Science Fictions also combines the virtues of interdisciplinary and popular projects: the pieces Davies assembles here are clearly and engagingly written, approach old problems from interesting new angles, and clarify the cultural and political stakes of their theoretical interventions. Economic Science Fictions offers valuable insights not just for those of us who are interested in the interaction of economic systems and the speculative imagination, but for any sf scholar seeking to address their scholarship to a popular left-political audience. The scholarly essays in the volume are excellent, well worth the price of admission. Davies’s introductory chapter opens the volume with a sophisticated analysis of the “socialist calculation debate” within twentieth-century economic theory, lucidly unpacking the ways in which foundational neoliberal thinkers Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek draw on distinctly science-fictional modes of futurity, utopianism, and technocratic progress to articulate the transformative powers they attribute to markets and market forces. Davies argues that this sf foundation to neoliberalism helps account for some of its most confounding and paradoxical aspects: the way it functions as a utopia even as it 614 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) claims to abolish utopia, the way it appropriates narratives of progress as it both annexes and forecloses future possibilities. The rest of the volume’s critical essays are (mostly) grouped into two of its four sections. The first, “The Science and Fictions of the Economy,” focuses on the science-fictionality of core concepts and assumptions in orthodox economic theory. Two pieces stand out here. Laura Horn’s “Future Incorporated?” examines the ways that corporate power is represented in recent science fiction, arguing that while dystopian representations of futures “dominated by megacorporations , determining every facet of production, consumption, and social interaction” may “seem to question corporate power, [they] actually reinforce a discourse that prevents imagining alternatives” (41-42). While this is not a new claim in sf criticism, Horn lays it out with exceptional clarity. Even better, Horn provides an equally clear argument for the kinds of productive alternative visions corporate dystopias are obscuring. She combines an extended reading of cooperative and collective forms of economic organization in Kim Stanley Robinson’s work to an incisive overview of the theory and practice of workerowned collective enterprises in the economy today

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