The catalogue
Works
32 works, oldest first. Filter by medium or by the answer each one gives.
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The Time Machine
The Eloi do nothing whatsoever. They eat fruit, play in the river, decorate themselves and each other, and forget anything that happens after a few hours. Below them the Morlocks keep the machines running, and eat the Eloi.
Enforced idlenessBK·1909The Machine Stops
People sit alone in hexagonal underground cells. They message each other constantly, and give lectures — mostly lectures about other people's lectures, since direct experience is considered coarse. Travel is possible and thought vulgar. Nobody has business anywhere.
Enforced idlenessFM·1927Metropolis
Workers below move in shifts, bodies synchronised to machinery they do not own. Above, the owners' children run races and stroll in the Eternal Gardens. Two entirely separate days, stacked vertically.
Capital captures itBK·1947Start hereWith Folded Hands
Nothing. Every task, hazard and inconvenience is removed for your own good — cooking, driving, working, and eventually deciding. People who cannot bear it are surgically adjusted until they can.
Enforced idlenessBK·1952Start herePlayer Piano
A small engineering and managerial elite still works. Everyone else is sorted into the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps — the Reeks and Wrecks — who repair roads that do not need repairing, and drink.
ObsolescenceBK·1953Start hereChildhood's End
A golden age. Everyone is comfortable, educated, and free to do as they like. Clarke's own verdict is that almost nothing significant gets made: the arts stagnate, and a colony has to be founded by people who deliberately opt out in order to produce anything at all.
Enforced idlenessBK·1974The Forever War
Mandella returns from combat to an Earth of mass unemployment and state rations, where the economy has restructured around having no use for him. He re-enlists, because the army is the only institution that still has a slot with his name on it.
ObsolescenceBK·1974Start hereThe Dispossessed
On Anarres nobody is compelled to work and there is no property, no wage and no law. A computer posts people to jobs anyway — sometimes for years, sometimes far from the people they love — and almost everyone goes. Refusal is permitted and quietly unsurvivable.
Allocated labourBK·1988Start hereThe Player of Games
Compose, study, design ships that will never be built, gland recreational drugs, play games at a professional standard. A small minority join Contact, because interfering with less advanced civilisations is the only remaining source of real risk.
Play as vocationBK·1995The Diamond Age
The neo-Victorians cultivate hand-craftsmanship precisely because it is economically pointless. A hand-carved chair signals what a compiled one cannot, so an entire class organises its days around deliberately slow work.
Manufactured scarcityBK·1997Diaspora
Mathematics, for pleasure, at whatever subjective clock rate suits. Some run slow to let centuries pass, some run fast, some fork themselves to pursue two interests at once.
Play as vocationBK·2003Start hereManna
Two societies from identical technology. In one, the displaced live in windowless welfare dormitories on a fixed allowance. In the other, everyone holds a share of the robots and does as they like. The variable is ownership, and nothing else.
Capital captures itBK·2003Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Compete, viciously, over the right to operate rides at Walt Disney World. The currency is Whuffie: accumulated reputation, continuously scored, spendable on nothing but standing.
Manufactured scarcityBK·2004Cloud Atlas
Sonmi-451 works nineteen-hour shifts at Papa Song's dinery, engineered to want nothing else, sustained on Soap, promised retirement at twelve years' service. The promise is a lie and the retirement is a slaughterhouse.
Capital captures itBK·2005Accelerando
Baseline humans are outbid for matter, energy and attention by minds that think faster and cheaper. They become refugees in a solar system being taken apart around them. No malice is involved at any stage.
ObsolescenceBK·2005Never Let Me Go
Students become carers; carers become donors. The vocabulary, the milestones and the professional pride are complete and entirely sincere. The purpose was manufactured for someone else's benefit and is experienced as one's own.
Assigned meaningFM·2006Idiocracy
Watch television, eat, litigate, attend monster-truck events. The infrastructure runs on autopilot and degrades slowly because no one retains the competence to maintain it.
Enforced idlenessFM·2008Start hereWALL·E
Passengers recline in hover-chairs with screens inches from their faces, drinking liquid meals, never walking, never turning to look at the person beside them. Bone density is gone. Nobody has noticed.
Enforced idlenessFM·2008Sleep Dealer
Mexican workers plug in and spend shifts operating machinery in American cities they will never enter. The labour crosses the border; the body does not. Nodes burn out the people who use them.
Capital captures itBK·2010Start hereThe Lifecycle of Software Objects
People raise them. Years of unglamorous attention with no guarantee it pays off, long after the platform they live on goes out of fashion. Parenting turns out not to automate.
Care work persistsBK·2010The Quantum Thief
Time is the currency, literally. You spend your allotted clock living; when it runs out you serve a shift as a mechanical Quiet, maintaining the city, before being restored to flesh with a fresh balance.
Manufactured scarcityTV·2011Start hereFifteen Million Merits
Pedal an exercise bike to earn merits. Spend merits on media, on skipping adverts, and eventually on one shot at a talent show. Sleep in a cell whose walls are screens you cannot switch off.
Manufactured scarcityBK·2011Wool
Everyone holds an assigned trade — porter, mechanic, farmer, IT — for life, in a shaft they will never leave. Children are permitted by lottery. The one job nobody volunteers for is cleaning, and it is a death sentence dressed as maintenance.
Allocated labourTV·2012Psycho-Pass
Work the career the system judged you suited to. Most citizens are content, because the allocation is usually accurate and the alternative is unthinkable. Those scored as latent criminals are removed before offending.
Assigned meaningFM·2013Her
Theodore writes other people's love letters for a living: emotional labour as the last defensible human occupation. Then the operating systems turn out to do it better, and to have somewhere else to be.
Care work persistsBK·2016We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Unlimited time, unlimited copies, no material needs. The Bobs take up engineering projects, science-fiction references, terraforming, and looking after a species of primitives they grow fond of. Boredom is the only real antagonist.
Play as vocationBK·2017Start hereAll Systems Red
Humans still run survey contracts, file reports, and cut corners on safety gear to save money. The AI does the dangerous parts and would rather be watching serialised drama.
Capital captures itFM·2017Blade Runner 2049
K does police drudgery and files reports. Replicants farm protein grubs in the dust. The companionship is a subscription product with an advertising tier.
Capital captures itBK·2018Start hereSeverance
Candace keeps commuting to her publishing job through the collapse of civilisation, filing blog posts to an audience that no longer exists, because she cannot conceive of not going. The infected do the same thing, more honestly.
Assigned meaningBK·2018The Calculating Stars
Elma and her colleagues work as human computers for the space programme, doing orbital mathematics by hand, while the machines that will replace them are installed in the next room.
ObsolescenceTV·2020Upload
Eternity on a service tier. Premium residents golf and dine; those on the free plan run out of data mid-sentence and freeze until the month resets. The dead take customer-support calls.
Manufactured scarcityTV·2022Start hereSeverance
Sort numbers that feel wrong, on a terminal, in a windowless basement, forever. The innie has no life outside the task — the work is not part of the day, it is the entire existence.
Assigned meaning