Quote:
"And Then There Were None" is a much-anthologized sf short story by Eric Frank Russell. Its peaceful anarchism enchanted me when I first read it, decades ago; I still think that it holds great and gentle wisdom. I'll struggle to restrain myself from spoiling the tale for those who haven't yet seen it. But one facet, the monetary system that Russell sketches out, is so central that I have to describe it here.
On the planet where the story takes place people trade not coins or currency but "Obs" --- their shorthand word for "Obligations". Do me a favor and I owe you in turn: you've laid an ob on me that you can call in, or use to kill an ob that somebody else has put on you. (It's similar to a famous exchange of favors in Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather.) Maybe an ob-based economy couldn't work on a larger scale than a village, where everybody knows everybody else. (Or maybe it could?!).
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from
here.
The story is
here. And the novel is described
here and the novel is
here. I think it is legal as it is linked by Wikipedia. Guess what I'm reading next!