Economic analysts on the right and left continue to openly suggest that we may not have hit bottom yet. If you want hope, don't talk to an economist, ask a novelist. Fiction writers tend to have a more optimistic view: once they've thrust characters into a financial abyss, they are forced to script a path out of it. What have our finest authors found to redeem us from this depression?Speculative fiction often refrains from defining the terms of an economic collapse, but it's always forced to either solve the problem or make things considerably worse in the end.