Ananyo Bhattacharya this week brings Futures a disturbing tale of strange goings on at the stock exchange in his story The buyout. As well as being a former editor at Nature, Ananyo has appeared in Futures before, with his story about the bizarre world of expectancy theory, which also appeared in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. Now community editor at The Economist, you can find out what Ananyo’s up to by following him on Twitter. He kindly stopped tweeting long enough to explain what inspired his latest story — as ever this contains spoilers, so please read the story first.
Writing The buyout
I think it was the crowdfunding site Kickstarter that originally inspired the story two or three years ago. We were supposedly still in the midst of a cataclysmic global recession triggered by the greed and myopia of the world’s bankers. Yet in Britain the economy and house prices were recovering, both fuelled by a consumer credit boom. What was pushing people to borrow rather than save in tough times? Who would suffer the consequences and who would ultimately profit?
The plot outline of The buyout began to coalesce in my mind around then, but it would not be until January or February 2014 that I would write a first draft. I proudly presented it to my historian wife, a playwright, a seasoned editor and a published science-fiction writer. It was quite clear that no one could make head nor tail of it. Why would anyone want to float themselves on the stock market when the consequences were so appalling, they asked? The consequences of not participating in rampant consumerism had to be worse than mere status anxiety, they said, and there needed to something more urgent driving the central character than a severe case of affluenza. They were right. I redrafted the piece a few months later, resulting (more or less) in the story that is published in Futures this week.