Fafnir (Jun 2017)
Not long before the end? SF and the economics of resource scarcity
Abstract
The commodity price booms of the early 1970s and of 2006–2014 were both associated with predictions of devastating scarcity of key natural resources, in popular media as well as in science fiction. However, both price booms ended within a few years for largely similar reasons, linked to the economic incentives that high commodity prices create. Given the economic forces that ensure that spells of resource scarcity usually do not last, writers of science fiction set in scarcity futures, especially fiction of the “if this goes on…” type, need to provide plausible reasons why those forces might stop working. This paper examines how authors describing resource-scarce future Earths have attempted to offer such reasons, and how those reasons have evolved over time.
