The Novums of Fiscalmancy: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction in Ian McDonald's The Dervish House

Abstract

What happens to speculative fiction (sf) under a perpetual winter of financial crisis? If, as John Rieder (2008) and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2003) have argued, sf’s advent is coterminous with and ideologically pinned to the rise of imperialism, its development also takes place from within the regime of productive, Fordist capitalism. Sf’s technological novums—from the Nautilus to the time machine, faster than light engines to robots, quantum computing to nanotechnology—bare this imprint of production’s dominance. But what happens to sf as the mode of production shifts from the material to the immaterial, from the dominance of the commodity form to the dominance of