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Fictional currency is currency in works of fiction. It is often invented, bearing little or no resemblance to any modern or historic currency. This is a necessary plot device, in order to increment the completeness of the environment, and at the same time dissociate it from any known economy on earth. A very common type, especially in science fiction, is credits. This is easily recognizable as money, and different from all earthly currency. The use of credits may serve to prevent the reader from inferring a lot of significance to it, e.g. by maintaining lack of depth that may be inherent to a short story, or simply to prevent it from overshadowing more important themes. However, this term would be inappropriate for a work set in a more technologically primitive environment, such as a medieval fantasy novel. Generic money in this genre is typically constructed from one or more precious or semiprecious metals, such as copper, silver, gold, electrum, or even platinum, followed by coins or pieces.

Contents

List of fictional currencies

Currency frequently serves as another vehicle to flesh out a story.

Credits

Many futuristic settings use credits, including:

  • The movie Total Recall
  • The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov.
  • Doctor Who (sometimes specified as Galactic credits). In one serial the currency symbol is a Ƶ. A conversion ratio is mentioned in the episode "Voyage of the Damned": 1,000,000 pounds is equal to that of 50,000,056 credits.
  • The Star Wars universe: see dataries.
  • The Star Trek universe – though credits have not been seen in transactions for any large-value items. See Federation credit.
  • The space trading computer game Elite
  • Batman Beyond
  • Babylon 5.
  • Perimeter 2. The US dollar in the video game Perimeter 2 is denoted with the symbol similar to the American dollar sign ($), however, in the game, it is worth approximately as much as a Vietnamese dong, 6 x 10^-5 US dollars.
  • F-Zero video games and anime. A space credit, written with a symbol identical to a dollar sign ($), seems to be approximately equal to one Japanese yen, or about 0.8¢ US.
  • Judge Dredd ("creds").
  • The Traveller role-playing game universe: CrImps, i.e. Credits Imperial, or "Imperial Credits".
  • The Galactic civilizations depicted in many Andre Norton books.
  • The space-faring 1964 alternate history timeline of Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe", abbreviated to "Cr.", with one Credit (a worldwide currency) having the purchasing power of about 10 American cents in our timeline.
  • The interstellar civiliazrion of A. Bertram Chandler's books uses both Credits (2000-2500 Credits pay for a ticket on a spaceship across many light-years' distance), and Dollars (lucky spacemen and spacewomen who did a major salvage job can get several million Dollars, which are enough to buy second-hand a spaceship of their own).
  • In the TV series Firefly and it's follow on movie Serenity, credits are used by the more 'civilised' inner planets, while the out worlds use Platinum coinage.

Names adapted from real-world currencies

Others

Exchange media

These are not currency as such, but rather nonstandard media of exchange used in certain works of fiction.

  • Dirt from Waterworld (Since the world was covered in water, dirt was a valuable thing).
  • Energy, mentioned as a world currency in a "future timeline" by Arthur C. Clarke. It is also used this way in the Alpha Centauri computer game.
  • Latinum, or Gold-Pressed Latinum, used by Ferengi in the Star Trek universe, is a fictional liquid, stored in gold slips, strips, bars and bricks in standardized amounts. Latinum derives its value from being non-replicable by any known existing or predicted replication technology.1 It should be noted that, as Quark points out in "Who Mourns for Morn?", the gold in Gold-Pressed Latinum is merely a convenient material in which to suspend standardized quantities of Latinum, which, as Rom points out in reply, is somewhat awkward to use as cash due to being a liquid at room temperature and standard pressure. (Compare with events in Venus Equilateral: in one episode, the crew of the titular space station invent similar replication technology, inadvertently creating a solar-system-wide inflation crisis (suddenly anyone can materialize all the cash they want out of thin air at the push of a button), which they then solve in the next episode by developing a substance which cannot be produced by replicators to be used to create non-replicable currency.)
  • The K, or kilocalorie, is based on a human's dietary needs and has become the unit of exchange in Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War.
  • Masses of the high-energy rare mineral Naqahdah in several grades is used as a galactic currency of sorts in Stargate SG-1. The value of the Prometheus appears to have been a suitcase-sized chest of weapons-grade naqahdah, the most refined kind of naqahdah.
  • Replicator rations are used as currency (mostly by Tom Paris) in Star Trek: Voyager.
  • Water, in the cult-classic Ice Pirates and on Arrakis in the Dune series.

Fictional currency in games

See also

References

  1. ^ Drexler, Doug; & Sternbach, Rick; & Zimmerman, Herman (1998). Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-01563-X. p. 63
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