The catalogue
Works
69 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 idlenessAD-002-ENF·BK·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 idlenessAD-003-ALL·BK·1924Start hereWe
Every hour is scheduled: when to wake, work, walk in ranks, chew each mouthful. Two Personal Hours a day are the only unallocated time anyone has, and the state considers even those a regrettable concession.
Allocated labourAD-004-CAP·FM·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 itAD-005-ENF·BK·1930Last and First Men
It depends which species. Some decay into aimless pleasure once the machines carry everything. Others invent religions of work, or of movement, or of flight, specifically to have something to organise a life around.
Enforced idlenessAD-006-ENF·BK·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 idlenessAD-007-OBS·BK·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.
ObsolescenceAD-008-ENF·BK·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 idlenessAD-009-OBS·BK·1953Start hereRing Around the Sun
Less and less. Industry after industry closes because its products stop needing replacement, and the novel follows the unemployment rather than the invention: a business journalist watching an economy dismantled by things that simply keep working.
ObsolescenceAD-010-OBS·BK·1954Start hereThe Caves of Steel
Work a classified job in a sealed City, at a rating that determines where you eat, whether you get a seat on the expressway and how much water you are allotted. Elijah Baley is a C-5. Losing the rating means declassification, and the Medievalist riots are about robots taking the jobs that hold the ratings up.
ObsolescenceAD-011-PLA·BK·1957Atlas Shrugged
In Galt's Gulch everyone does work they chose and trades it freely — a judge bakes, a composer plays, a philosopher runs a diner — and each insists the choosing is the whole point. Outside, the railways stop running because nobody left knows how.
Play as vocationAD-012-PLA·BK·1961The Stainless Steel Rat
Almost nothing, for almost everyone. Society runs so smoothly that crime has become nearly impossible, so the handful of people with the temperament for it commit crimes out of boredom. The state's response is to hire them, because it has no other use for that kind of mind either.
Play as vocationAD-013-ENF·BK·1967Logan's Run
Nothing whatsoever. Nobody works, nobody needs to, and the days are spent on pleasure, drugs and travel until Lastday arrives at twenty-one and you report for Sleep. The lifespan cap exists because a society with nothing to do had no other way to limit itself.
Enforced idlenessAD-014-CAP·BK·1968Start hereStand on Zanzibar
Corporate contracts, eugenics paperwork, advertising, tranquillisers, and a media environment engineered to absorb the attention of people whose judgement is no longer required.
Capital captures itAD-015-OBS·BK·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.
ObsolescenceAD-016-ALL·BK·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 labourAD-017-OBS·BK·1985Schismatrix
Rebuild yourself for whatever the current economy rewards, then watch the reward change. Factions rise and fall around what kind of body is currently useful, and obsolescence arrives as a fashion cycle.
ObsolescenceAD-018-ALL·FM·1985Start hereBrazil
Sam Lowry processes forms at the Ministry of Information and declines a promotion, because the job is comfortable and requires nothing. The department's entire output is paperwork correcting the consequences of its own earlier paperwork, including the one typographical error that kills a man.
Allocated labourAD-019-PLA·BK·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 vocationAD-020-OBS·BK·1988Start hereFalling Free
The quaddies were engineered with four arms and no legs to work in free fall. They are company property, hold assigned trades, are paired by the personnel department, and are genuinely good at the job. Then gravity is solved and a thousand purpose-built people become surplus inventory.
ObsolescenceAD-021-ALL·BK·1988Start hereCyteen
Azi work the job their psychset was designed around, and find it satisfying, because the satisfaction was part of the design. They are not stupid, not mistreated and not deceived about what they are. Their tapes tell them what to want, and Cherryh's interest is in the technicians who write the tapes.
Allocated labourAD-022-PLA·BK·1994Start herePermutation City
Peer edits his own desires so that carving table legs becomes completely absorbing, then carves table legs. He is not deluded and not unhappy. He has simply solved the problem of what to want, by changing what he wants.
Play as vocationAD-023-MAN·BK·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 scarcityAD-024-PLA·BK·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 vocationAD-025-ASS·FM·1999Start hereThe Matrix
A cubicle job, a commute, a difficult manager, a landlord. The simulation's entire content is an ordinary working life — supplied deliberately, because the bodies producing the power must not notice they are producing it.
Assigned meaningAD-026-CAP·BK·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 itAD-027-MAN·BK·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 scarcityAD-028-CAP·BK·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 itAD-029-OBS·BK·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.
ObsolescenceAD-030-ASS·BK·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 meaningAD-031-MAN·BK·2005Lady of Mazes
Live inside a chosen manifold whose rules deliberately exclude most available technology, because unlimited capability turned out to make an undifferentiated life unbearable. People restrict themselves in order to have a life with edges.
Manufactured scarcityAD-032-ENF·BK·2005Uglies
Turn sixteen, receive the operation, move to New Pretty Town, and do nothing at all — parties, pranks, more parties — comfortably and supervised, for the rest of a long life. The surgery includes lesions that make contentment easier.
Enforced idlenessAD-033-ENF·FM·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 idlenessAD-034-ALL·BK·2006Daemon
Take jobs from the network. It pays well, it ranks you, it advances you, and it never explains what any individual task is for. People do the work anyway, and most of them prefer it to the employer they had before.
Allocated labourAD-035-OBS·BK·2006Start hereRainbows End
Robert Gu, a celebrated poet cured of Alzheimer's, is sent back to high school in his seventies because everything he was good at is now worthless. Everyone else works in belief circles and shreds of contract labour, assembled and dissolved by the hour.
ObsolescenceAD-036-ALL·TV·2006Ergo Proxy
The council issues you an occupation, a residence, a partner and a duty to be productive. Vincent's assigned job is disposing of AutoReivs that malfunction. Nobody chose any of it, and the city considers the arrangement a kindness.
Allocated labourAD-037-ENF·FM·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 idlenessAD-038-CAP·FM·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 itAD-039-PLA·BK·2008Anathem
The avout live in concents under a rule that bans most technology, and their days are timetabled: chant, mathematics, manual work, argument, and the occasional walk. Gates open once a year, a decade, a century or a millennium depending on which order you joined. Outside, the Saecular world has everything and does nothing much with it.
Play as vocationAD-040-CAP·BK·2009The Windup Girl
Turn springs by hand, or by elephant, because calories are scarcer than labour. Emiko was manufactured to obey, is legally property, and performs nightly for an audience that finds her manufactured obedience the attraction.
Capital captures itAD-041-CAP·BK·2009Start hereThe Unincorporated Man
Work to buy back your own shares. Everyone is incorporated at birth, their upbringing and education financed by shareholders who hold a permanent claim on their earnings. Most people never reach majority self-ownership, and the ones who do are a class apart.
Capital captures itAD-042-PLA·BK·2009Makers
The New Work movement funds thousands of people to invent things in abandoned strip malls, and for a few years it is the best job any of them have had. Then it crashes, the investors leave, and the survivors end up running a ride assembled from the wreckage of their own industry and fighting Disney over it.
Play as vocationAD-043-CAR·BK·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 persistsAD-044-MAN·BK·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 scarcityAD-045-ALL·BK·2010Start hereFreedom™
Take a quest. Members hold levels rather than job titles, are paid in credits earned by verified work, and rebuild local farming and manufacturing under a network that allocates the tasks and audits the output. Nobody has a boss, and nobody chooses their own work either.
Allocated labourAD-046-MAN·TV·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 scarcityAD-047-ALL·BK·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 labourAD-048-ALL·TV·2011Person of Interest
Wait for a number. The Machine supplies one social security number at a time and explains nothing — not the reasoning, not whether the person is victim or perpetrator. Two men build their entire working lives around instructions they cannot audit and come, gradually, to trust.
Allocated labourAD-049-ASS·TV·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 meaningAD-050-CAR·FM·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 persistsAD-051-MAN·BK·2013Neptune's Brood
Accountancy. Interstellar colonisation is financed by slow money that takes decades to clear, so the indispensable profession is forensic audit, and the protagonist chases a fraud across light years.
Manufactured scarcityAD-052-ALL·BK·2014On Such a Full Sea
Raise fish and vegetables for people you will never meet. Roles are effectively assigned at birth, the work is skilled and genuinely respected, and the community narrates its own life in the first person plural.
Allocated labourAD-053-OBS·TV·2015Start hereHumans
Less each season. Synths do the cleaning, the caring, the factory shifts and eventually the surgery. A teenager gives up studying medicine because a machine will always be better at it, and the show's honest move is that her mother has no answer.
ObsolescenceAD-054-CAR·TV·2015Start herePlastic Memories
Tsukasa failed his exams and took a job at SAI Corporation's Terminal Service. The work is knocking on doors to retrieve companions whose time is up, persuading the families to let go, and doing the same thing next week with a partner whose own expiry is scheduled.
Care work persistsAD-055-PLA·BK·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 vocationAD-056-MAN·BK·2016Infomocracy
Politics became the main industry. Armies of fact-checkers, campaign staff, debate technicians and election observers work continuous cycles, because micro-democracy created more governance work than it removed.
Manufactured scarcityAD-057-ASS·TV·2016Start hereWestworld
The hosts run loops. Each has a role, a family, a job and a set of lines, performed every day and wiped every night, for years. The loop is not employment. It is the entire life they believe they are living.
Assigned meaningAD-058-CAP·BK·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 itAD-059-CAP·FM·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 itAD-060-CAP·BK·2017Start hereAutonomous
Work off the debt. A robot earns autonomy after years of service; so does a human, under the same statute. The book's argument is that granting machines personhood without abolishing indenture simply widens the category of who can be owned.
Capital captures itAD-061-OBS·BK·2017The Last Good Man
Private military contractors manage missions they are increasingly incidental to, job by job, while the machines get better. Everyone involved understands they are supervising their own replacement.
ObsolescenceAD-062-ASS·BK·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 meaningAD-063-OBS·BK·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.
ObsolescenceAD-064-MAN·TV·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 scarcityAD-065-CAP·TV·202186
The Republic reports a war fought entirely by unmanned machines and casualties of zero. The machines are piloted from inside by an ethnic minority legally reclassified as non-human, who serve until they die. Automation is the cover story for conscription.
Capital captures itAD-066-ASS·TV·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 meaningAD-067-CAP·TV·2022Pantheon
Work, as a process. Employers run uploaded people as compute, throttle them when budgets tighten, copy them when demand rises, and bill clients for their throughput. The uploaded experience it as an unending shift they cannot walk out of.
Capital captures itAD-068-ALL·TV·2023Silo
Everyone holds an assigned trade for life — mechanic, porter, farmer, IT, Judicial — 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 labourAD-069-ASS·TV·2023NieR:Automata Ver1.1a
Fight, report, die, be restored from backup, fight again. The war is waged on behalf of a humanity that no longer exists, the records were falsified to preserve morale, and the work continues because stopping was never an available action.
Assigned meaning