Excerpt from Landscape with Invisible Hand by M.T. Anderson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Almost no one had work since the vuvv came. They promised us tech that would heal all disease and would do all our work for us, but of course no one thought about the fact that all that tech would be owned by someone and would be behind a paywall. The world's leaders met with the vuvv, after meeting with national Chambers of Commerce and various lobbyists. The vuvv happily sold their knowledge to captains of industry in exchange for rights to the Earth's electromagnetic energy fields and some invisible quantum events. Next thing we knew, vuvv tech was replacing workers all over the world. At first, it was just manual labor, factory labor. Show tech a product — a shirt, a swing set, a subdivision — and in minutes tech could make it from trash. No reason for an assembly line, for workers. We watched a billion people around the globe lose their jobs in just a year or two. My parents thought they were safe, white-collar.

My mom was a bank teller. Most of her work was already done by ATMs, even before the vuvv came, and what was left required someone who could listen, think, decide, and verify. But within six months of the vuvv landing, she was fired. Almost all bank tellers were fired, and so was everyone else who did paperwork and customer interface in any other business. Vuvv tech did it all now — a computerized voice purring, "Let me help you with that"; "I'm sorry, but your account is already overdrawn"; "Very funny, Mr. Costello. I always appreciate a little sarcasm at day's end."

The human economy collapsed. No human currency could stand up against the vuvv's ch'ch. The lowliest vuvv grunt made more in a week than most humans made in two years. Only the wealthiest of humans could compete, once they had a contract for vuvv tech, once they could invest in vuvv firms.

My father thought that his job was safe. He was a Ford salesman. There was no way, he said, that he could be replaced by a computer, because salesmen need that human touch, that twinkle in the eye. It turned out, however, that no one could afford a new car anyway. With the human economy in the shitter, who had the money to upgrade just to get a Ford Desperado that could run errands for Mom on its own, pick up a dozen donuts from the drive-thru and a bottle of Pepto? Sales were nil. People were holding on to their dumb mouth-breather pre-AI plastic sedans. He was one of the best salesmen, but the showroom let him go. He was laid off. He couldn't believe it. He said he was not just a car, truck, and recreational vehicle salesman — he was selling the American dream. But our leaders were making speeches about how America's middle class had to stop dreaming and start learning how to really work. By that point, I'm not sure there really even was a middle class anymore — just all of us hoeing for root vegetables next to our cracked aboveground pools.

People always need food — many tried to turn to farming, and in the shattered suburbs, people grew their lawns into paddocks, chicken yards, and plots. But the vuvv could grow food cheaper, and their government subsidized it, and that meant they could sell it cheaper, and, frankly, our family had almost no money, so when we went to the supermarket, we didn't buy American; we almost always bought vuvv-grown veggies, vuvv cereal, beef tissue raised on platforms in orbit (the cow jumped over the moon). Farms failed. Economies collapsed. Only big industrial farms that could act as distributors for vuvv foodstuffs stayed viable.

The only way to make money was to work with the vuvv personally. Work as a technician at a vuvv firm and you could make a few hundred dollars a week. Go into the tourist industry, give the vuvv a massage, and you made several hundred dollars in an hour. Stand at attention for three hours at a vuvv banquet — nothing but show, of course — and you'd make enough to live on for a year. People killed, literally, to get close to the vuvv. They killed to get property rights to vuvv resorts and locations for energy rendering plants.

Landscape with Invisible Hand Copyright © 2017 by M.T. Anderson. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.