MONEY

   Love of money, being the root of all evil, has always played a leading part in literature, and sf is no exception: few plots could move without it. Precisely because it is so basic, however, speculative thought has rarely focused on it; it is one of those things that is habitually taken for granted. Money may change its form, and the dollar may be replaced by the CREDIT, but its centrality in human affairs is inviolable.The commonest of all wish-fulfilment fantasies is the sudden acquisition of wealth, and sf has often given form to the wish. As with other such fantasies, however, sf writers have characteristically taken a cynical and slightly disapproving view of the issue, implying that no good can come of it. T.L. SHERRED's "Eye for Iniquity" (1953) is a neat cautionary tale about the problems involved in having a talent for making money out of nothing. The frenzy which can be aroused by the prospect of easy money is exemplified in history by the affair of the South Sea Bubble (1720), and this prompted one of the earliest speculative fictions about speculation, Samuel Brunt's A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727). However, many UTOPIANShad already expressed their distaste for the profit motive and its effects on human affairs. Various romances commenting on the folly of the alchemical quest - of which the most notable is Honore de BALZAC's La recherche de l'absolu (1834; trans under various titles) - took a similar line. The prospect of science making at least the physical part of the alchemist's quest a reality did little to alter this disparaging attitude. Edgar Allan POE's "Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849) suggests thatthe discovery of a way of making gold would simply rob a practically valueless metal of its ridiculous price, and that the world would press on regardless. Arthur Conan DOYLE's successful gold-maker in The Doings of Raffles Haw (1891) is quickly disillusioned with philanthropy and revertshis hoard to the dust whence it came. Henry Richardson CHAMBERLAIN's eponymous 6000 Tons of Gold (1894) nearly precipitates worldwide catastrophe. Only John TAINE's hero in Quayle's Invention (1927) gets much joy out of his instant wealth, and he finds it far from easy. Much more beneficial to humanity, in the eyes of its author, is the wealth-destroying machine in George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight (1916), which frees mankind from the present generation of capitalists.The folly of retaining the gold standard in an era of technological ingenuity is exposed in Frank O'Rourke's SATIRE Instant Gold (1964); it is hardly surprising that the main change in the money system consistently made by sf writers was the replacement of the gold standard by a purely theoretical credit system. Garrett P. SERVISS's The Moon Metal (1900) offers a variant on the gold-making theme, while George O. SMITH's "Pandora's Millions" (1945) concerns the desperate race to find a newsymbolic medium of exchange following the invention of the matter-duplicator, and the title of "The Iron Standard" (1943) by Henry KUTTNER largely speaks for itself. Exotic media of exchange areoccasionally featured in sf, notably the virtue-based credit system of Patrick Wilkins's "Money is the Root of All Good" and the alienexchange-system whereby depression leads to extinction in John BRUNNER's Total Eclipse (1975). Jack VANCE has been particularly ingenious in theinvention of various monetary systems appropriately or ironically adapted to different cultures.One subtheme of note is developed in stories celebrating the wonders of compound interest. Simple mathematics shows that money invested for 1000 years grows quite magnificently even at relatively low interest rates - an observation first made in Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew (1845). SLEEPERS AWAKE from periods of SUSPENDEDANIMATION to find themselves rich in Edmond ABOUT's The Man with the Broken Ear (1861; trans 1867), H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev as The Sleeper Awakes 1910) and Charles Eric MAINE's The Man who Owned the World (1961). Harry Stephen Keeler took the notion to extremes in "John Jones' Dollar" (1915 Black Cat), in which a dollar invested in trustfor John Jones's distant descendants ultimately grows to represent all the wealth in the Universe. More recently, however, we have become all too well aware of what inflation can do to long-term investments, and the hero of Frederik POHL's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1968) awakes from suspended animation to find his "fortune" valueless in terms of real purchasing power. It all goes to prove the old adage that money doesn't grow on trees - except, of course, in Clifford D. SIMAK's "The Money Tree" (1958).

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   See also: ECONOMICS.