Science fiction based on political science and economics?

I know there must be more new SF like this out there, but it's hard to find! I mean stories (short fiction or novels) that speculate about coming changes in politics, social organization, the international system, business, markets and such. Preferably stuff with a solid academic grounding, just as much as the PhD physicians and mathematicians who write hard SF. What are your recommendations in this area?

With the main point of the thread stated, to ramble about what I mean, Charles Stross mentioned something interesting at a convention last night. To paraphrase, he talked about the many social changes that older SF never attempted to predict, and how they make old plots incomprehensible from modern perspectives. For example, how cellphones make it so phones connect people, not places...making tons of old horror movies illogical since, "Why don't they just use their cellphone?" And the fact that fighting for national territory doesn't make much sense in space, so a lot of old SF imperialist space warfare stories are anachronistic. He said the novel he's working on now is about the changes in how we police criminal activity, but also in how we define what's criminal and isn't. That's the sort of stuff I'm thinking about...and there are lots of other interesting political/social/economic issues out there. How we define public education standards in a post-Google era, how State-less terrorist enemies changes international diplomacy, etc...all the important questions that SF can tackle.

The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling, is an excellent book set in a world of failed nation-states.

Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End has some interesting things to say about longevity and the labor market.

A good novel involving economics and politics is The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin.

4: It is, but if einhorn303 is looking for books that speculate based on contemporary economic issues, it's probably not one I would recommend.

#5

I thought that "The Dispossessed" had a lot of ideas that do not date so readily, and are quite relevant today.

I might recommend the David Webeter series Safehold starting with Off Armageddon Reef. Though it explores what happens when goverment interferes too much into protecting its people.

Among friends I have jokingly called this micro-genre PolySciFi.

I would count many science fiction authors as contributors to PolySciFi, including Isaac Asimov (Foundation Trilogy), Robert Heinlein (esp. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), Ken MacLeod (esp. Fall Revolution Series), Vernor Vinge (nearly every novel, such as Across Realtime), Charles Stross (Merchant Princes Series) and Greg Egan (numerous short stories and novels like Distress). However, none to my knowledge have advanced degrees in economics or political science. Nonetheless, these authors offer-up communitarian futures, post-scarcity economies, libertarian island nations, frontier cultures seeking independence (insert obvious references to American Revolution), a balkanized future US, economies driven by spontaneously ordered individual worker "affiliances" and much more.

Personally, I view fully-fleshed alien worlds and future scenarios as being inevitably expressed in social, economic, and political, as well as technological terms that push our current or historical understanding of each subject. Indeed, this is what makes for some great science fiction.

Good book hunting.
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EDIT: See the comments on this NYT post, Economic science fiction, by economist Paul Krugman for many excellent examples.

Makers, Cory Doctorow- corporations, law, and underground economies.

Daemon, Daniel Suarez- networks, botnets, and mirrored gaming economics.

Science in the Capital series, Kim Stanley Robinson- Bureaucratic politics, dueling government agencies, rigging elections, full employment, living off the grid.

@8
Definitely agree about Ken MacLeod. I'd add his The Execution Channel and The Night Sessions also. And the chapbook The Highway Men.

Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Ian MacDonald are the three best writers for extrapolating socio-economic-tech trends. I just finished Tomorrow Now, a non-fiction by Sterling that was excellent. Gerontology tech is wonderfully explored in Sterlings' Holy Fire.

Freehold by Michael Williamson shows two totally different government styles and 1984

Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

12:

I really hated Mike Williamsons cowritten novel with John Ringo, Hero. It sucked.

I hope his stand alone is better.

No one has mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson - the Mars trilogy is not just about the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. It's also about the politics and economics involved, especially when a longevity treatment is discovered.

I haven't read his climate change trilogy, but a friend who has says that, once again, it's the political, economic and social ramifications which really interest him.

I actually just dug out this thread to add that same suggestion, although I was going to say that Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy gradually devolved into political fiction, to the point that I lost interest and didn't finish the third book.

KSR's California trilogy - The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge - probably count too.

And yes, his Science in the Capitol trilogy are very definitely political. They're also very good.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash might do some of what you are interested in. The Diamond Age spins out political implications of a technological innovation he sees coming, though I'm sure not expecting it in the short term.

C.J. Cherryh has a couple of series with heavy political & economic underpinnings; particularly her Alliance-Union and Foreigner series.

I don't know how LT is about resurrecting old threads, but I came across this one and thought of a couple of notable omissions, so I'm adding them in.

Firstly a trilogy of books by John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider.

All are concerned with exploring some aspect of socio-political change. Zanzibar is on population explosion, The Sheep about pollution and Shockwave about the impact of ever-faster social changes itslef (based on Alvin Toffler's Future Shock

I'll confess to failing to get anywhere with vols 1 & 2 which were just too bleak for me, but Shockwave Rider is a favourite to which I return.

Someone else mentioned Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, but most of LeGuin's fiction is heavily influenced either by her own brand of feminism, or by her parents' anthropological background, or both. Certainly The Left Hand of Darkness is a novel of politics, as well as gender - and a fine, moving story as well.

If you read Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books, they too come under the heading of "anthropological SF", she said that she was always careful to keep the Darkover books as a form of SF, which is one reason why she maintained for so long that she only wrote about those bits of the Darkovan story which involved contact with offworlders. A couple of late Darkover novels are really just fantasy (Hawkmistress comes to mind, but most of the earlier ones are real Science Fiction, but where the sciences are the social sciences.

Another candidate must surely be The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Though the politics is not to everyone's liking, it does try to look at how biology influences the shape(s) of civilisation.

Charles Stross series called The Merchant Princes starting with Family Trade bills itself as a fantasy series but, to me, it is really a SF series about alternate universes and economics.

There's a great book called David's Sling by Marc Stiegler that covers telecommuting, Internet grass-roots power and the philosophical/social differences between the Electronic Era and the Information Age.

Any fan of Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End would enjoy it, IMO.

I guess my favourite in this genre is Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment.
It all about a court case (albiet alien court) and implied consent. Its probably the book that I re-read the most.