Winter is coming. People face imminent environmental disaster. The public servants sworn to protect them from the supernatural horrors that walk in the ice and snow are severely underfunded and face crippling labor shortages. Meanwhile, social elites engage in endless political bickering, vying for control in a faraway capital while creating a sovereign debt crisis and using the public purse to line their own pockets.

This apparent facsimile of the day’s events is plucked from the hit HBO show Game of Thrones. And Game of Thrones isn’t the only one cribbing from the real world. The financial crisis; the 1 percent’s abandon and abandonment; the mysteries of value, globalization, finance, and speculation; banking and currency — all of these have seeped into many recent works of Anglo-American speculative fiction, or SF (a broad term describing work across the often-blurred boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and other genres).

Though certainly not new, explicitly economic leitmotifs in SF works have been increasing in importance and centrality. Award-winning contemporary authors like Paolo Bacigalupi, Ann Leckie, and William Gibson have focused on themes of crisis, biopower, finance, and the potential for societal change. Works like Cory Doctorow’s Chicken Little depict finance as an arena for point scoring among ultrapowerful oligarchs, while recent films like Elysium and Snowpiercer portray resistance to growing economic stratification.