Literary science fiction about staying kind inside systems that don't reward it.
Four people. Four institutions. Four small refusals.
Naomi is a postdoc cataloguing a defunct radio telescope program when she finds the signal her predecessors spent their lives listening for. Declan is six weeks into a contract he's paying for in ways the recruiter never listed, and they want him to sign a longer one. Elena trained an artificial mind, and she's the only one who will answer when the program office decides it's cheaper to delete it. Ethan keeps a private score of his country's decline, and this quarter it crossed the line he set for himself two years ago.
Moral Arithmetic is a debut collection of literary speculative fiction about the quiet negotiations people make when the systems they live inside stop deserving them. From SETI labs to corporate war zones, T. H. Mercer follows characters who keep showing up for the work even when the work cannot show up for them.
For readers of Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility.
