I am pleased to announce that Crypto’s Utopian Paradox, a paper coauthored by myself, Kirk Phillips, and Thomas Effertz, is now published in Springer Nature Building Yesterday’s Future for Everyone, Academic Selections from the 2025 World Science Fiction Convention. The volume brings together interdisciplinary scholarship exploring how speculative fiction informs science, technology, philosophy, education, and society. To support instructors, a steeply discounted softcover classroom edition will be available next year.
Written for a general audience, the work explores what money is and cryptocurrency’s role in modern financial systems, supported by onchain data and global statistics. We dive into how financial ecosystems incentivize wealth inequality, the historical conditions that lead to financial resets, and how these systems can become imbalanced. Rather than arguing for or against cryptocurrency, it examines both the advantages and limitations of these systems while encouraging readers to think more critically about the incentives that shape them.
Slides from the WorldCon 2025 Seattle presentation are available here.
Our chapter contributes to a broader collection examining speculative fiction through scientific, conceptual, theoretical, and practical perspectives. Readers can learn how one might hitchhike across a galaxy and speculate on the next mythological weapon. Topics range from literary analysis to robots, flying cars, artificial intelligence, interstellar settlement, speculative technologies, and the realities behind the fantasy. Together, the essays demonstrate how speculative fiction can serve as a framework for exploring emerging technologies, testing ethical and philosophical ideas, explaining scientific concepts, and examining social systems.
We kindly ask that people consider sharing this post and WorldCon members consider nominating this piece for Hugo to help get our book into libraries around the world.
A special thanks to Doug Van Belle for making this work possible. I highly recommend you read his contribution, Metal as Medium: An Artisan Bladesmith’s Insights into the Fantasy of Magical Weaponry, which explores the enduring relationship between craftsmanship, metallurgy, and myths that have shaped cultures through the ages.