Landscape with Invisible Hand

Landscape with Invisible Hand is a novel by M. T. Anderson, published in 2017. Adam, an aspiring artist, is the teenager at the centre of it, and the arrival of the vuvv is the event that reorganises the world he is growing up in.

The vuvv did not come as conquerors in the ordinary sense. They offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable, and the question the book raises at the start is whether an invasion can be described as an invasion when it arrives generously.

The answer turns out to be yes. Adam's parents lose their jobs to alien technology, the household has no money for food, clean water or the medicine the vuvv brought, and he and his girlfriend, Chloe, have to get creative in order to survive it. The novel follows two teenagers working out how to make a living in an economy that has been rearranged around them.

Adam's painting is the thing he can still do when there is no money for anything else, and the book keeps returning to it while the world around him is being repriced. The vuvv's generosity has a cost, and the two teenagers are working out what they are willing to sell before they find out what the price is.