Economics, Capitalism, and Debt

Introduction

The Malazan Book of the Fallen conducts, across its middle volumes, the most sustained critique of capitalism and debt culture available in contemporary epic fantasy. The critique is concentrated in the fifth and seventh novels — Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale — and centres on the Letherii civilisation, a wealthy, expansionist, coin-denominated society whose internal structure Erikson designed as a thought-experiment in what happens when economic relations replace every other form of human obligation. The portrait is neither incidental nor satirical in the shallow sense. It is the product of a decade of anthropological and historical reading on Erikson's part, and it anticipates by several years the central thesis of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) — a fact Erikson has acknowledged with surprise in interviews, noting that his own formulation of the theme preceded his discovery of Graeber's work.

This essay reconstructs the economic argument of Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale under eight headings: the Northwest Coast slave-keeping cultures as Erikson's anthropological model; the Letherii financial system as a deliberate translation of slavery into debt; the prescient parallel with Graeber; the Denabaris epigraph as the text's central thesis statement on "mirror reflections"; Bugg/Mael's "delusions" speech as the in-text articulation of the critique; Tehol Beddict's plan to dismantle the system from within; the internal hierarchies of the enslaved revealed in the Udinaas/Rhulad dialogue; the Patriotists as the authoritarian upgrade of a naive society; and the underlying thesis that capitalism's link to individualism is precisely what makes it unable to contain the collective sources of meaning it depends on.

The Northwest Coast Model: A Slave Society Built Visible

Erikson has been explicit that the Letherii civilisation was constructed from a specific anthropological template — the complex, sedentary, wealth-stratified slave-keeping cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast:

"I looked to the northwest coast because I wanted a sedentary but fairly rich cultural base, and of course one of the first things about — if you read up on the northwest, like Haida, Salish, all of these cultures, indigenous cultures — is that they were slave-keeping cultures. So I realised I thought that would actually be a nice counterpoint to the indebtedness of Lether... they're almost they're both economic functions." (DLC Bookclub Special Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

The identification of slavery and debt as "both economic functions" is the analytic key to Erikson's design. Most contemporary readers treat slavery and debt as categorically distinct phenomena — slavery as a moral atrocity belonging to a historical past, debt as a neutral contractual relationship belonging to an acceptable present. Erikson's argument, built into the architecture of Midnight Tides, is that this categorical distinction is ideological rather than empirical. The Tiste Edur maintain a conventional slave-keeping society, in which the enslaved are explicitly marked as such and treated as chattels; the Letherii maintain a debt-based society, in which the indebted are not called slaves but are bound by financial obligations so pervasive that the binding is functionally indistinguishable from chattel slavery. By placing the two systems in direct military confrontation, Erikson forces a comparison that the abstract categories of economic discourse are designed to prevent.

The anthropological precision here is worth noting. The Pacific Northwest cultures Erikson is drawing on are not the stereotypical "simple" hunter-gatherer societies of introductory anthropology textbooks; they are complex, wealthy, hierarchical, and sedentary despite being non-agricultural — a combination that has forced successive generations of anthropologists to revise the assumption that wealth stratification requires agriculture. Erikson, trained as an archaeologist, is drawing on this revised picture deliberately. Letheras is not a lazy analogue for medieval Europe or early modern England; it is a counter-factual imagining of what a Northwest-Coast-style wealth-stratified society would look like if it developed coinage and scaled to imperial size.

Debt as the New Slavery: The Letherii Thesis

The core thesis of the Letherii portrait is stated with unusual directness by Erikson in the same interview:

"I pushed the Lether to that extreme of capitalism, but actually more about debt I think than anything else... we are still a slave society even though we don't have slavery because debt is the creepy glue that's holding everything together." (DLC Bookclub Special Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

The formulation "creepy glue" is worth pausing over. The phrase captures two features of debt that ordinary economic discourse tends to obscure. First, debt's ubiquity: unlike explicit slavery, which marks out an identifiable population as enslaved and leaves the rest of society formally free, debt saturates a population until almost no one is exempt, and the stratification becomes a matter of degree rather than kind. Second, debt's adhesive character: debt is not simply a constraint on the debtor but a relationship that binds creditor and debtor into a single economic organism in which each is dependent on the other's continued functioning. The creditor cannot simply kill the debtor (as the slave-owner could kill the slave) because the creditor's wealth is denominated in the debtor's continued capacity to produce. The "glue" is therefore bidirectional, and its creepy quality comes from the fact that both parties experience it as freedom while functioning, in aggregate, as a system of total constraint.

Erikson has elsewhere framed the Letherii civilisation's extractive logic as directly analogous to the British Empire's colonialism:

"Colonialism and all of that was very much economically driven. There were political stuff going on on the European mainland but economics, capitalism was driving colonialism. So that was what I wanted to engage in here because I realised it was built in — you had an indigenous population that was being pressured by a rapacious capitalist-based civilization." (DLC Bookclub Special Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

The adjective rapacious is doing analytic work. It names a specific feature of capitalist expansion — the drive to convert all non-commodified resources into commodifiable ones — which the Letherii embody so completely that their currency (the dolphin coin, the decorative mosaic economics of Letheras) becomes a symbol of the reduction of all value to exchange value. When the Letherii encounter the Tiste Edur, their first impulse is not to conquer them but to buy them out — to draw them into the Letherii financial system until their traditional obligations have been priced in coin and their political autonomy has collapsed from within. The subsequent military phase is triggered only when this economic absorption fails. Erikson's point is that the economic strategy was the primary imperial act; the war is the remedial action when the economy fails to do its work.

Preceding Graeber: Erikson's Independent Formulation

One of the more arresting moments in Erikson's recorded commentary on Midnight Tides is his acknowledgement that his entire Letherii thesis preceded his exposure to David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, whose argument runs extraordinarily close to Erikson's own:

"Ironically this was, I think this was before David Graeber's fantastic book, I think it's 10,000 years of debt history, which was phenomenal. But that's kind of the heavier themes I was messing around with there." (DLC Bookclub Special Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

Graeber's book (published 2011, several years after Midnight Tides' 2004 publication) argues, among other things, that debt precedes coinage in the historical record; that the opposition between "gift economies" and "market economies" is largely an ideological fabrication; that debt-based societies have historically produced both periodic jubilees and periodic slave revolts; and that the contemporary equation of debt with moral obligation is a specific historical construction rather than a natural feature of economic relations. Midnight Tides embeds almost all of these claims in its plot without citing them. The Letherii are introduced as a society in which debt is denser than coin — where individuals inherit their parents' debts as a matter of course, where obligations can be bought and sold, where the indebted are subject to forms of bodily control the text treats as continuous with chattel slavery, and where financial crisis is treated as a moral failing in the debtor rather than a structural feature of the system.

The convergence between Erikson and Graeber is not coincidental. Both were drawing on the same underlying anthropological literature — in particular, the tradition running from Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1925) through Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics (1972) and continuing into the contemporary anthropology of debt and obligation. Erikson's training as an archaeologist gave him direct access to this literature; Graeber's training as an anthropologist gave him the same. Both independently arrived at the conclusion that debt, not money, is the fundamental unit of economic analysis, and that a society in which debt has become universal is not morally distinguishable from a society in which slavery is explicit. The novel was the fictional articulation of the argument; the book was the academic articulation of the same argument; neither was influenced by the other, and their concordance is a form of independent replication.

The Denabaris Epigraph: Mirror Reflections

The text's own most concentrated statement of its political theory appears as the epigraph to chapter 6 of Reaper's Gale. The author is given as "Denabaris of Letheras," and the title of the cited work is In Defence of Compassion:

"The argument was this: a civilisation shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people — for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren't so pathetically idiotic..." (RG, ch. 6 epigraph)

The Denabaris passage is the series' most direct intervention in the contemporary political debate between collectivism and individualism. Denabaris's argument is that both poles are pathologies, and that the standard framing in which one is asked to choose between them obscures the more important truth: the actual moral position is neither, and the choice between them is a false choice manufactured by the partisans of each side. The phrase "mirror reflections" is the operative figure. Erikson is not endorsing some bland third-way centrism but making a sharper claim: that the polarities of state-tyranny and market-tyranny share a common structure — namely, the willingness to subordinate human dignity and community to an abstract principle. The two systems are "belligerent faces" facing each other across a distance whose depth is illusory. They think they are opposites, but in everything that morally matters they are identical.

The fact that the epigraph is attributed to a fictional Letherii author and titled In Defence of Compassion is itself significant. The implicit claim is that the series-wide theme of compassion, which Erikson has elsewhere identified as the central moral argument of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, is politically incompatible with both extremes of the contemporary economic debate. To defend compassion is to refuse the totalising claims of any system that demands the subordination of individual human flourishing to its own logic. The Denabaris passage is the ten-novel series' political philosophy in 200 words.

Bugg's "Delusions" Speech: The Critique from Within

The most direct in-text articulation of the critique comes from Bugg, the manservant who turns out to be Mael, the Elder God of the Sea. In Reaper's Gale, in conversation with the shadow-broker Sleem, Bugg delivers what is in effect the entire Graeberian thesis in three sentences:

"'As Tehol Beddict has observed on countless occasions, delusions lie at the very heart of our economic system. Indenture as ethical virtue. Pieces of otherwise useless metal — beyond decoration — as wealth. Servitude as freedom. Debt as ownership. And so on.'" (RG)

The four propositions are precisely the propositions Graeber's Debt devotes itself to dismantling. Indenture as ethical virtue: the moral framing in which a person who has fallen into debt is regarded as morally compromised, as if the failure to repay were a character flaw rather than a structural condition. Useless metal as wealth: the gold-fetishism whose only basis is collective agreement to treat a particular substance as valuable. Servitude as freedom: the ideological inversion by which submission to the wage system is presented as liberty. Debt as ownership: the legal mechanism by which a creditor's claim on a debtor's labour is treated as equivalent to property — the precise mechanism by which "free" persons can be reduced to functional slavery without the legal apparatus of slavery.

Sleem's response is the standard defence of the existing order, and it deserves attention because it gives the opposing position its strongest form:

"'Ah, but those stated delusions are essential to my well-being, Master Bugg. Without them my profession would not exist. All of civilisation is, in essence, a collection of contracts. Why, the very nature of society is founded upon mutually agreed measures of value... Why am I even discussing this with you? You are clearly insane, and your insanity is about to trigger an avalanche of financial devastation.'

'I don't see why, Master Sleem. Unless, of course, your faith in the notion of social contract is nothing more than cynical self-interest.'

'Of course it is, you fool!'... 'Without cynicism,' he said in a strangled voice, 'one becomes the system's victim rather than...'" (RG)

Sleem's defence collapses into the admission that the social contract is "cynical self-interest" — that the participants in the system know perfectly well that the contracts are arbitrary, but participate in maintaining the fiction because the alternative is to be victimised by it. This is, unintentionally on Sleem's part, the strongest possible vindication of Bugg's analysis. The system is sustained not by genuine belief in its legitimacy but by mutual self-protection: each participant maintains the fiction because they cannot afford to be the first to abandon it.

The fact that this critique is delivered by Mael — the Elder God of the Sea, whose memory extends across millennia, who has watched civilisation after civilisation organise itself around different myths and collapse around different contradictions — gives the passage cosmic weight. To hear the Letherii system described as a "delusion" by a being whose normal stance is total disengagement is to be told that the description has the seriousness Mael's interventions always have. Bugg's later reflection on the Letherii themselves extends the critique to compassion for the system's victims:

"As for the Letherii themselves, no, he did not hate them. More like pity and yes, compassion, for they were as trapped in the nightmare as anyone else. The rapacious desperation, the gnawing threat of falling, of drowning beneath the ever-rising, ever-onrushing torrent that was a culture that could never look back, could not even slow its headlong plunge into some gleaming future that — if it came at all — would ever only exist for but a privileged few." (RG)

The passage disarms any easy reading on which the Letherii would simply be villains. They are not villains; they are victims of their own civilisation, trapped in a logic that none of them individually invented and none of them individually can escape.

Tehol Beddict: Reform Through Collapse

The plot of Midnight Tides and the Letherii portions of Reaper's Gale is structured around Tehol Beddict's plan to crash the Letherii economy — not as an act of nihilism but as a deliberate attempt to force a "reformation." The plan is laid out in his exchange with the women he has recruited as front operators:

"'Hold on, Tehol! The plan was to bring about a collapse! But now you're going back on it. You must be a fool to think the Edur would win this war without our help...'

'All very well, Shand. For myself, however, I am not convinced the Edur will prove ideal conquerors. As I said, what is to stop them from putting every Letherii to the sword, or enslaving everyone? What's to stop them from razing every city, every town, every village? It's one thing to bring down an economy, and so trigger a reformation of sorts, a reconfiguring of values and all that. It's entirely another to act in a way that exposes the Letherii to genocide.'" (MT)

The distinction Tehol draws is critical. He is not opposed to economic collapse as such; he believes it is necessary because the existing system cannot be reformed from within. But he is opposed to the uncontrolled collapse that would expose the population to the violence of conquest. The reformation he envisions requires that the collapse be managed — that the dismantling of the system happen under conditions in which the Letherii can survive long enough to construct something better in its place.

The mechanism is significant: Tehol is using the system's own tools — equity stakes, money-lending, financial leverage — to dismantle the system. The argument embedded in this choice is that external mechanisms (revolution, conquest, divine intervention) historically fail to dismantle entrenched financial systems because the systems are robust against external attack. The only mechanism that reliably damages such systems is internal: someone with sufficient understanding of the system's logic uses that logic against it.

Tehol's success is staged across Reaper's Gale. By the late chapters, the collapse is underway, and the visible symptom is the reversion to barter — the "low markets" trading in goods rather than coin because the coin has become unreliable. When the collective fiction that gives currency its value loses its credibility, the symbolic medium of exchange disappears. This is the financial system Bugg identified as a "delusion" disclosing itself as such, and it is the precondition for the "reformation" Tehol intends. Erikson has noted in interview that there is a critical reading on which Tehol — "diabolical and monstrous" — is the most disturbing character in the whole series, because his cold calculations are willing to "make an omelette but break some eggs." The series withholds final judgement on whether his method was justified, leaving the reader to weigh the human cost of managed collapse against the human cost of letting the system run to its natural exhaustion.

The Internal Hierarchies of the Enslaved: Udinaas and Rhulad

A subtle but consequential feature of Erikson's economic critique is its refusal to treat the enslaved as an undifferentiated mass. The fifth-book dialogue between the Letherii household-slave Udinaas and the Tiste Edur emperor Rhulad contains an unusually compressed formulation of this principle:

"Roulette said: It is sorted. What am I to make of you, Udinaas — a slave, an indebted, as if that could make you less in the eyes of another slave?" (BH/MT Ch. 19, as discussed in Critical Conversations 05 transcript)

Erikson's close-reading partner in the Critical Conversations episode extracts the theoretical point:

"From an external perspective, groups can appear homogeneous — but when you're in that group we suddenly see that no group is truly homogeneous... even within the indebted slaves, it might be well, I am the indebted slave for that family, and that family has more power than that family." (Critical Conversations 05: Chapter 19 Midnight Tides transcript)

The observation matters because it cuts against the instinct — shared by both naive liberation narratives and naive conservative narratives — to treat "the enslaved" or "the indebted" as a category whose members all occupy the same structural position. In the Letherii system, as in real historical slave and debt societies, the enslaved are themselves stratified: by which household they belong to, by which tier of debt they have inherited, by the relative social power of their creditors. Udinaas's awareness that he is a particular kind of slave — the long-term household slave of a specific Letherii family, enslaved through indebtedness rather than capture, educated in Letherii customs, deferred to by other slaves — places him in a position of internal privilege within the enslaved population that Rhulad, as an outsider, cannot perceive. The point is not that Udinaas is less enslaved than others; it is that slavery is a gradient, and that systems of total domination reproduce themselves internally as well as externally.

The analytic consequence is that critiques of the Letherii system which treat it as a simple binary — slave/free, indebted/solvent — miss the system's actual mechanism of reproduction. The system persists because those it binds are internally differentiated, each position slightly above another, and each occupant therefore invested in preserving the system that defines their relative standing. This is not a novel observation in the sociology of stratification — it is a commonplace of the literature from W.E.B. Du Bois onward — but it is unusual to find it dramatised with this precision in epic fantasy.

The Patriotists: Social Control After Naivety

If Midnight Tides portrays the Letherii system at its steady-state, Reaper's Gale portrays its authoritarian upgrade. The Patriotists — the secret-police apparatus that has taken over internal security in the post-Midnight Tides Letherii state — are, in Erikson's own account, the answer to a structural question the seventh novel is set up to explore:

"I was thinking about what would be the fallout or possible fallout of the conclusion of Midnight Tides... and how would the society and the civilization evolve from that point, where it now had the equipment of the Normans in England ruling everything but from a state of naivety — that I think then became something that could be exploited. And so social control at that point became much easier in many respects, and I think within that vacuum these [Patriotists]..." (Reaper's Gale Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

Three features of this account are worth extracting. First, the Patriotists are not a Letherii innovation but a response to a specific historical condition — the condition in which a naive society has just acquired new tools of social control (in this case, through the partial Tiste Edur conquest and the installation of Rhulad as figurehead emperor). Second, the authoritarian drift is enabled not by Letherii cruelty but by Letherii naivety: a society that has never had to defend itself against its own security apparatus has no institutional antibodies against that apparatus's abuses. Third, the Patriotists operate in a vacuum created by the collapse of Letherii self-government — they are what rushes in to fill the gap left by the decapitation of the previous political structure.

The parallel to twentieth-century experience is direct. The Patriotists are a thinly veiled portrait of the kind of internal-security apparatus that emerges in post-revolutionary or post-conquest states whose traditional checks on state power have been swept away — Jacobin France, post-Civil-War Russia, the Latin American desaparecidos regimes. Erikson is not equating these cases; he is noting that they share a common structural precondition (the removal of traditional restraints combined with the availability of modern tools of surveillance and coercion), and that the Letherii portrait lets him examine that precondition in a setting where the historical specifics can be abstracted away.

The deeper critique is that the Patriotists are not an aberration within capitalist debt society but its logical completion. A society in which every citizen is already bound by financial obligations to creditors who possess a legal claim on their labour has already accepted the principle that the citizen's body and time are transferable commodities. The Patriotists merely extend that principle into the political domain: the citizen's loyalty, their thoughts, their associations also become transferable commodities, subject to extraction by force when their voluntary surrender fails. The critique is pointed: a society that has normalised debt slavery should not be surprised when it normalises political terror, because the second is only the first applied to a different object.

Individualism and the Collective: The Underlying Pathology

The deepest layer of Erikson's economic critique is not institutional but anthropological. He has repeatedly framed contemporary capitalism's pathology as rooted in the mythology of individualism — a mythology whose denial of the collective sources of human achievement makes the collective sources vulnerable to destruction:

"That whole notion of individualism is tied up with capitalism as one of the central tenets, and it's a denial of the efficacy of communal activity and society — the fact that our greatest achievements have all been collective. And yet we're stuck right now in a kind of a madness of a system that raises the individual above all else, and everything's falling apart." (Steven Erikson Talks Building Malazan transcript)

The observation is neither original to Erikson nor particularly radical within anthropology, but its application to the Letherii portrait is illuminating. The Letherii are not merely a rapacious trading empire; they are a civilisation whose self-understanding requires the denial that their wealth was produced collectively. Every Letherii fortune is narrativised as the achievement of the individual who holds it; every debt is narrativised as the moral failing of the individual who owes it. The narrative framing is necessary to the system's operation, because the moment collective sources of wealth were acknowledged, collective claims on the wealth would become thinkable — and the edifice would collapse.

Erikson has connected this diagnosis to a broader meditation on progress and consumption in the Bonehunters conversation:

"Capitalism requires an infinite supply of resources, and we are plowing through our planetary resources faster than it can rejuvenate itself." (Conversation with Steven Erikson on The Bonehunters transcript)

The Letherii portrait anticipates this point at the level of allegory. The Letherii economy, as depicted in Midnight Tides, is already in the process of exhausting its traditional resource base and is therefore forced into continuous territorial expansion — not because the Letherii are individually greedy but because the system requires continuous growth to service its accumulating debts. A debt-based economy cannot stand still; it must grow at a rate sufficient to cover its own interest payments, and when the internal economy can no longer sustain that growth, the economy must expand outward. Letherii imperialism is therefore not a cultural trait but a mathematical necessity, and the Midnight Tides plot unfolds as the confrontation between this mathematical necessity and the Tiste Edur's refusal to be absorbed into it.

The Belief That Cannot Be Defeated

The final and most philosophically arresting feature of Erikson's economic critique is the observation — placed in Udinaas's mouth in the Chapter 19 scene discussed above — that the Letherii system cannot be eliminated by military conquest, because its operative substance is belief rather than institution:

"We may conquer them, we may command their flesh in the manner we command yours and that of your fellow slaves — but the belief that guides them, that guides all of you, that cannot be defeated." (MT Ch. 19, as discussed in Critical Conversations 05 transcript)

Erikson's interlocutor identifies this line as "basically the argument of the entire novel, and certainly Reaper's Gale." The identification is correct and should be taken seriously. What the Letherii carry, even into slavery, is a set of beliefs about property, indebtedness, hierarchy, and individual striving that survives the loss of the institutions normally thought to sustain those beliefs. The Tiste Edur can conquer Letherii territory, install an emperor, massacre the Letherii aristocracy, and enslave surviving Letherii citizens, and none of it eliminates the ideology of debt that the Letherii bring with them into their new position. The ideology, transmitted through daily practice and habitual language, proves more durable than the political structure it originally supported.

The analytic consequence is that the Letherii system is, in a technical sense, memetic: its persistence is a function of its ability to reproduce itself in the minds of its adherents, and that reproduction does not depend on the continued existence of its institutional infrastructure. Erikson's argument is that capitalism, understood as an ideology of debt and individual striving, has this memetic character in our own world as well — and that the persistence of its categories into contexts where its institutions have been destroyed (revolutions, conquests, collapses) is not evidence of its correctness but evidence of its depth. What has been thought cannot easily be unthought, and the Letherii relinquish nothing even when they are made into slaves because the relinquishing would require them to imagine a different form of life, which the system has carefully ensured they cannot.

Conclusion

The economic critique embedded in Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale is one of the most theoretically sophisticated features of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Erikson's achievement is to have constructed a fictional civilisation whose wealth, hierarchy, and expansionism follow from a coherent set of economic premises, and whose confrontation with a neighbouring society operating on different premises lets the author examine the unstated assumptions of each. The Letherii are not a caricature of contemporary capitalism but a faithful extrapolation from its underlying logic — the logic that treats debt as neutral, frames extraction as individual achievement, and relies on continuous growth to service obligations that have accumulated beyond the capacity of any steady-state economy to sustain.

The critique gains force from its anthropological grounding. Because Erikson had read the same underlying literature David Graeber would later draw on for Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the fictional system he constructed was empirically responsible in a way that most fantasy economies are not. The convergence between novelist and anthropologist — arrived at independently, from the same primary sources — is a rare instance of epic fantasy anticipating a major academic argument by several years. And because the critique is carried by narrative rather than exposition, it reaches readers who would never open an anthropology monograph, delivering its conclusions through the experience of watching Udinaas and Rhulad speak to each other in the wreckage of two economic systems that have just collided.

The deeper lesson of the Letherii portrait is that economic systems are not simply institutional arrangements that can be reformed by political action; they are also ideological formations that reproduce themselves in the minds of their participants, and that this ideological reproduction must be addressed before institutional reform can succeed. The Letherii relinquish nothing even when they are enslaved, because the belief that guides them is not available for surrender — it is the air they breathe, and they would no more think to question it than they would think to question the existence of gravity. Erikson's novels invite readers to notice that their own relationship to debt, property, and individual striving may have the same unexamined character, and that noticing is the first step toward being able to imagine otherwise.

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