Worthless Yellow Rocks / Literature

• The 13 Clocks featured a woman who was cursed to cry jewels - once word spread about her, people came from far and wide to tell her sad stories and make her cry. Unfortunately, over time she flooded the economy with jewels and her town collapsed once cobblestones became more valuable than jewelry.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, space-entity Dave Bowman peers down into the depths of Jupiter and discovers that its core is a diamond the size of the Earth. He is still human enough to appreciate the irony. In 2061: Odyssey Three, it turns out that the stellar ignition of Jupiter at the end of the previous book tossed a few "insignificant chunks" of this core up into orbit, including one mountain-sized hunk that landed on one of the Jovian moons.

• Most of the societies in Alice, Girl from the Future are moneyless, which leads to this trope. Most notably, The Voyage of Alice features Alice looking for a replacement for a 1.5 kg gold nugget she took from the school's museum and lost. Since she has plenty of friends, the next day she comes to school with her dad carrying twelve times the required amount.
• Played with in Aliens: The Other White Meat. A dimensional traveler named Blackbeard found a universe where gold was so common as to be lying around on the ground, but chewing gum was viewed as an incredibly rare treasure. Naturally, his response was to buy large quantities of gum, transport them to that world, and make himself the richest man in history.

• Lawrence David Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - SOLVED:
  Several novelists have created civilizations in the center of the [Sargasso] Sea. Here, according to the stories, countless wrecks, many of them hundreds of years old and full of treasure, pile up against each other. The residents of the floating kingdom, who all drifted in helplessly at one time or other, disdain the treasure since it is no use to them.
• A Biblical example:
  1 Kings 10:21: All King Solomon’s goblets were gold, and all the household articles in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon were pure gold. Nothing was made of silver, because silver was considered of little value in Solomon's days.
  • This is either a case of silver being Worthless Yellow Rocks (or worthless white rocks, in this case), or a Badass Boast about the level of Solomon's wealth.

• The "valuable treasures as common as dirt" variation is Older Than Radio: In Voltaire's Candide (1759), the title character ends up in El Dorado, the mythical "land of gold". Rubies, emeralds and other precious gems are just ordinary rocks there, and Candide sees kids playing with particularly large gemstones during their school break in the same way children would play with pebbles anywhere else in the world. Later, the King allows him to leave with a large abundance of these stones, but is perplexed why he wants them.
• In Francis Carsac's Ceux de nulle part (Those from Nowhere), the protagonist finds a crashed alien ship in the woods. The aliens ask for his help in repairing their ship. All they need is a fist-sized chunk of gold, which is only valuable to them as a useful substance. He ends up "borrowing" a fairly large nugget from a guy he knows. He also off-handedly mentions that he has since "returned" the gold, or, rather, a replicated nugget that any star-faring race can easily make.
• Chasing Jenny has a thief trying to recover a rare stamp he stole years ago. The story ends with the stamp in the hands of a little girl. She doesn't understand its value and just sticks it on her teddy bear.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Several merchants in Rylleh attempt to bribe the ants into giving them better deals, holding out purses of money, only to be met with uncomprehending stares. The ants share everything communally as a fundamental part of their nature, and have no trade nor currency.
• Played with in James Blish's Cities in Flight novels. The protagonists carefully save up germanium for use as currency. After they come back to "civilization" some time later, they are told that it's a "fine and useful metal, but you buy it, you don't buy things with it." Ironically, the sellers want a "valuable" metal like... gold. Essentially, the saved-up germanium is only worth a fraction of what the travellers had expected.
• The City and the Dungeon: Due to the way crystals work, this is inevitable. Red crystals are roughly equivalent to the currency surfacer countries use, but orange crystals are worth a thousand times more, yellow a thousand times more than that, so on and so on. When Alex first becomes blue he tries to send a blue crystal to his family, and is informed that this one crystal could kill the economy of his entire home country. He sends yellows instead, a million times less than what he wanted, and when he returns home he finds that his family is now the richest in the city by a very large margin.
• Conqueror:
  • Wolf of the Plains: When Wen Chao attempts to recruit the Mongols as mercenaries to fight the Tartars, he offers Temujin (the future Genghis Khan) gold. Temujin turns him down and demands a more useful payment instead - swords, bows, and armour.
  • In the second book, Lords of the Bow, 'Ma Tsin' tries to bribe Temuge into persuading Genghis Khan to lift the siege of Yenking. He fails, because Temuge finds the idea of exchanging a horse for a bag of metal, which can then be exchanged for another horse, ridiculous.
• In Cryptonomicon, the heroes discover a small fortune in sunken gold plates. Due to the unusual legal situation they're in, they treat the gold as more of a liability than an asset. However, a reader who has also read the prequels knows that the sheets are giant punch cards from a failed attempt at a Steampunk computer, not to mention an unknown isotope of gold that is the key to immortality.
• In The Crystal Palace by Phyllis Eisenstein, a bit of magical travel gone awry sends the wizard Cray Ormoru to a land where gemstones are so common that they're no more valuable than any other pretty rock. On the other hand, silver is so rare that a woman he makes a purchase from hardly knows what to do with the coin he uses to make the purchase, ultimately choosing to make it into a piece of jewelry.

• Inverted in the first Deathlands novel which takes place in an After the End Scavenger World, where fuel and bullets are regarded as valuable. However Jordan Teague, Baron of Mocsin, made himself wealthy by realising the potential of gold which he could mine locally and ship to the Eastern baronies, which were civilised enough to start getting interested in jewelry and gilding.
• In The Diamond Age, the most valuable items are things that are handmade, due to ready access to nanotechnology. Diamond (and anything else that's made of carbon) is basically worthless. The book's title alludes to the fact that thanks to nanoconstruction, window panes are often made of solid diamond.
• "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Percy is the inheritor of a large diamond mine, and when he went to look he also found on the property a mountain made of the titular diamond. He knows darn well that if he just dumps all that on the market, it'll make the bottom fall out of the diamond market. So he keeps his sales small and very spread out -and his methods to keep it secret get pretty horrifying. Conning slaves into staying slaves is the least of it.
• Discworld:
  • In the Agatean Empire, gold coins are used for small change and gold itself is used in place of lead for everything from roofing to plumbing, while real money is made from paper and backed by silver. This comes as a shock to Rincewind for two reasons: First, because if such a currency were ever implemented in Ankh-Morpork the Guild of Artificers would promptly become the (highly-successful) Guild of Forgers, and second, paper can't be that valuable... right? In the first two books of the series this is the cause of a Running Gag where an Agatean tourist obliviously spreads chaos in his wake by paying with what to him is small change but to the locals is more than the business is worth.
    • Later, it's revealed that it is, in fact, about as in-demand (and thus as valuable) as it can be in a place where a corrupt, wasteful bureaucracy rules with an iron fist.
  • Played with in the later Making Money, which introduces paper money to Ankh-Morpork anyways. Moist von Lipwig, as the new Master of the Mint, says the Bank has a pile of "useless metal" in the vaults that needs clearing out and that potatoes are worth more than gold if viewed dispassionately, since food will do much more in times of poverty than gold will in times of starvation. He also neatly sidesteps the counterfeiting issue pointed out above by employing the city's best stamp forger (since people have already begun using postage stamps as a de facto currency) to design the city's new banknotes (with the intention that he will make them more complex than anyone else can copy).
• Doc Savage: In Murder Melody, the Beneath the Earth kingdom of Subterranea uses gold for a huge variety of uses as it is the most abdundant and ductile metal available.
• In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Night of the Humans, Amy is in the far-distant future, and when she learns she's got involved in a treasure hunt she says "Like a chest of gold or something?" Her companions are amused; it's like she's never heard of Voga.
• Justified in Frank Herbert's Dune, when the Freemen, who live on a world without rain, refer to two litres of water as "treasure."

• David Eddings:
  • The Redemption of Althalus does this one when the titular thief, in the middle of a stream of bad luck, breaks into a strong room (this in the world's Bronze age) and opens a chest reputedly jammed with cash. He finds it full of worthless scraps of paper and leaves. Only to be told in a tavern the next day of the owner's confusion at having come in the next morning to find someone had broken into his strong room, opened his safe, tossed all his Bronze age paper money in a pile on the floor and left.
  • In another of Eddings' series, The Belgariad, the Marag people were wiped out by the Tolnedrans (a Race of Hats based on Imperial Rome and phenomenally greedy) ostensibly because of the Marag habit of ritualistic cannibalism, but largely because their streams were literally lined with gold. The Marags, having a barter economy and being phenomenally xenophobic, didn't care about the gold. In a Karmic Twist Ending of sorts, after the genocide, the Marags' gold-filled country becomes so overrun with vengeful ghosts that no one can set foot there without going insane.
  • Belgarath also has a vast hoard of gold, which he mined himself, and which he almost never needs. Although he could create all the gold he wants, he doesn't do so, partly perhaps because it's less fun, but probably because doing so would gradually devalue the metal.
  • Of course Belgarath also places a huge diamond under a step in his tower to see how long it would take to wear down to dust, then forgets he placed it there anyway.
  • During their travels, Belgarath and Garion encounter an alchemist who really can turn lead into gold. Unfortunately, the chemicals he uses cost more than the gold is worth (he's trying to refine the process). While talking to him, they learn that a former colleague managed to turn glass into a substance that was as strong as steel, but still transparent. Belgarath points out to the alchemist that the materials for glass are literally dirt-cheap, and can be molded into any shape. A process that could make it unbreakable would be more valuable than all the gold in the world. The alchemist is suddenly very upset at the missed opportunity.
  • In the David Eddings series The Dreamers, the four gods hire armies with gold, except for Aracia. Queen Trenicia of the Isle of Akalla won't accept gold- she refers to it as 'yellow lead' and took gems as payment instead.
• In the Eldraeverse:
  • Asteroid mining in the Empire and other core worlds has made gold worth about as much as iron is in the present day, while most mining corporations will give you iron for the cost of transporting it. Though on some undeveloped border worlds and recently contacted planets gold and platinum are still used as currency.
  • One story features a museum of early nanotechnology that includes a device which converts CO2 to solid bars of diamond for mitigating global warming, the tour guide offers the bars it makes as free souvenirs.
• In The End Of The Matter, the incomprehensible alien Abalamahalamatandra sits around idly, playing with its toes and setting stones into circles, while the other characters talk. Naturally, nobody notices that it's using very large gemstones to do so, or that it stumbles in a hole where the priceless archeological treasures two of the speakers had been seeking for months are concealed.

• Water Elementals in J. Scott Savage's Farworld series place value on an object because of its craftsmanship. An old boot holds equal value to an expensive necklace (or at least, they are judged against each other based on craftsmanship, and not the obvious value), where a lump of gold is just a shiny rock. While this much is understandable, they go on to confound the other characters as well as the reader when they show that they would rather throw a 'valuable' item back into the water than give it to someone without compensation, regardless of whether or not they were ever going to keep the objects.
• In the Fighting Fantasy book Creature of Havoc, the PC is a monster, and so gets to kill several adventuring parties in the early part of the book. If they choose to investigate the corpses, they find some shiny metal disks, but can't imagine what purpose they might serve and so throw them away.
• H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon. Gold is so abundant on the moon that when our protagonists are captured by the Selenites, even the chains they are bound with are massive gold.
• Forest Kingdom: In book 3 (Down Among the Dead Men), normal gold ducats are worthless to Scarecrow Jack, who lives off the bounty of the Forest. Strangely, after having helped recover a large load of gold from the fortress where it was being kept, he doesn't even try to take any to give to people who need it, despite his reputation.

• Inverted in Gate where wyvern scales are considered expensive and valuable commodities by the locals but deemed almost worthless by the JSDF. As the result the refugees were able to freely harvest a lot of them from wyvern carcasses remnants of the defeated Imperial army. The Italica arc was kickstarted when Lelei enlists Itami and Third Recon Squad to escort them to the city where they can find the trader who they can sell those scales to.
• Sort of in Gnomes. Money, as a whole, is of little value to Gnomes, but they do appreciate gold and silver for its beauty and durability, and tend to use it in crafting, and if it's stolen from them, they will find a way to get it back.
• Diamonds, rubies, sapphire, and emeralds are all popular building materials in the Great Ship universe. Glass has been replaced by diamond panels, and the other precious gems are used essentially like wallpaper.

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:
  • The Ireland Quiddich team mascots are leprechauns that make their entrance throwing gold coins on the audience. However, this trope is inverted when it becomes apparent that the leprechauns had thrown leprechaun gold, which vanishes after a few days. This puts Ron in an angsty mood since he paid Harry back for buying him some binoculars with the gold instead of "real" money, and is too poor to actually pay him back. It also angers Fred and George when a rather large bet they won is paid in the gold.
  • Also invoked with portkeys. Almost anything can be made into a portkey, so if someone is making a portkey to leave somewhere outdoors so that someone else can use it later, they often make it out of something seemingly worthless (like an old newspaper or an abandoned shoe or something) so that Muggles who happen to come along in the mean time won't be tempted to touch it.
  • In a similar vein, Horcruxes can be made out of anything. In fact, the very first Horcrux Harry ever found was a blank diary. Harry mentions that this would make finding all of Voldemort's Horcruxes a difficult task. Dumbledore however, points out that Voldemort's fatal flaw is vanity and he would never store parts of his soul in anything he doesn't deem "worthy" of him (the diary being just his first attempt at creating one).
  • Rubeus Hagrid uses the unicorn hair he finds in the Forbidden Forest as bandages since he's totally unaware of how valuable it actually is. Horace Slughorn is quick to befriend Hagrid when he realizes that Hagrid's sitting on a small fortune in valuable materials from the Forbidden Forest.
• In Diana Wynne Jones's Hexwood, the offworlders are deliberately keeping Earth ignorant and backward so they can buy Earth flint very cheaply. They use it to make portals and no other mineral will do, and if the people of Earth found out how valuable it was they would raise the price dramatically.
• In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Rob is contacted by a woman who wants to sell an entire collection of rare and valuable records for a pittance. Justified in that the woman's husband just left her for his much-younger secretary, and asked his wife to sell the collection to finance his new life with the secretary. She's deliberately trying to short the husband. Rob can't go through with it in the end. This sequence was done for the movie as well; it didn't make the theatrical version, but is in the deleted scenes on the home releases.
• At one point in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Book muses at length about how most of the proposed solutions to Earth's unhappiness have involved the movement of small green pieces of paper. It considers this odd, as generally speaking, it isn't the small green pieces of paper who are unhappy. As brought up in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, all forms of currency are ultimately proven to be either pointless or useless.
• In The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, an early Soviet sci-fi novel from the 1920s, the eponymous Mad Scientist takes over the corrupt United States by offering everyone who asks an endless supply of cheap gold, thus bringing the entire monetary and financial system to its knees (while becoming popular with the masses). (Since at the time the value of currency was pegged to the value of gold, the devastating effects of a supply of cheap gold are quite believable). It is then up to the brave Communist heroes to foil his plot to Take Over the World. For those wondering, he got the gold by using his laser-like Death Ray to drill deep beneath the Earth's crust, where there is apparently an entire geological layer composed of gold mixed with mercury.

• In Illegal Aliens, the galactic currency is based on Thulium, because "Gold is prettier, Silver makes a better conductor" and a number of other reasons.
• In H. B. Fyfe's "In Value Deceived", an alien exploration starship is searching for a way to alleviate the famine on their home world. They make first contact with a human starship on some barren little world. On a tour of the human's ship, they are thunderstruck when they see the hydroponic installations. It's the key to salvation for their people! But of course they feign disinterest. They ask for one as a souvenir. They don't notice the similar disinterest with which the humans ask for an alien heating unit. The one that produces all that pesky ash. Stuff like uranium and gold nuggets. Both aliens and humans are surprised when both parties make quick good-byes after the trade and take off before the trade is regretted. They both think "gee, the other guys act like they cheated us."
• In "The Iron Standard", by Henry Kuttner, a spaceship crew is starving on Venus because gold and silver are too common there, the society is too conservative to buy any of their devices, and the main medium of exchange is iron, which they only have as alloys. They end up giving away (there are rules against trading without a license, but the right to give presents is sacred) stimulants, threatening the stability of the system and forcing the ruling monopolists to bribe them with enough money to survive until they can go back to Earth.
• In the Isaac Asimov's Robot City series, the robots of the eponymous city see gold as a very weak metal, and mostly useless. They don't even need it for its utility as a conductor, since Asimov's "positronics" are said to be superior to mere electronics and instead employ a sponge of platinum-irridium alloy. However, seeing as how gold never corrodes, they ended up finding a use for it: eating utensils for the humans that visit.

• In the picture book The Littlest Angel, all the angels in Heaven are asked to bring gifts for the birth of Jesus Christ, the best of which will become the Star of Bethlehem. The titular angel, a small boy, brings a box of his earthly possessions from when he was human: a broken dog collar and some shiny pebbles. Because of its sentimental value, the littlest angel's box of trash is chosen over the more elaborate and costly gifts of the other angels.
• Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth takes place in a near future where simple devices allow (nearly) anyone to "step" sideways onto Earth in parallel universes. A minor character decides to step a few worlds over from Sutter's Mill with the intent of finding a jackpot of untouched gold - and finds out that: 1) he's not the only one who had the idea, and 2) it's pointless because there's literally an infinity of Earths out there making every material abundant if you can get to it. However, iron (aside from the iron in blood) can't be carried while stepping, meaning every colony is starting from Bronze Age technology and real value is no longer in resources but expertise - every colony wants someone who knows how to work metal and eventually let them develop iron production. Many others realize infinite abundance means billions of humans could simply forage for what they need, dissolving the need for high-density agriculture and stable settlements entirely.

• Men of Honor by Will Garth. Earthmen land on an alien planet and find a city of gold. Thinking the aliens will defend this valuable commodity, they sneak in at night and steal all that they can carry. But on returning to their rocketship they find the aliens have cut it up for the steel, which is rare on their world. Being honorable beings however, the aliens leave a huge mountain of gold in compensation next to the now-useless rocket.

• The titular planet from the New Kashubia series is rich in every sort of heavy metal, but desperately, desperately shy of lighter elements. Even air and soil had to be shipped in at hideous expense, and though the inhabitants, transported there very much against their will, live in tunnels drilled through solid gold, they're still the poorest people in the galaxy. By the opening of the second book, their economy has improved to the point that they can afford luxuries like clothing, and actual homes.
• Played straight and inverted with the Modsva in Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy. The Modsva live in massive "disk cities" made out of old asteroids that survived their sun's expansion into a Red Supergiant. Since all the system's planets were destroyed, and every last bit of the original asteroids where mined out and used to build the disk cities, the only way the Modsva, lacking FTL travel, can gain new resources is to mine their sun for hydrogen and then use fusion to transform it into other elements. Since Iron is the heaviest element that can be created without a supernova, it's considered the most valuable, with one character proclaiming that an FTL drive would be worth more than "The sun's mass in iron". However, since carbon is much easier to create through fusion, and the Modsva have the industrial capacity to convert it into diamond, it's commonly used in a number of Modsva technologies, with Iron being limited to the upper class.

• "Onions and Garlic", with one rendition by Eric A. Kimmel: There is a story of a man finding an island where diamonds and other precious jewels were very common, but the food was very bland. He happened to have some onions with him, which he traded (as well as teaching planting and growing techniques) for a small fortune in diamonds. Hearing of this success, another man found the island, and traded garlic for the most valuable thing the natives had. He returned home, opened the chest, and found it full of onions.
• A variation of "Onions and Garlic" also appears in the Arabian Nights - a poor man went to the Caliph (who had never eaten poor men's food before) with a cart of onions. The Caliph loved them, and rewarded the poor man by filling his cart with gold. Another poor man had the idea - "if the great Caliph was so impressed by onions, what will happen when I introduce him to garlic?" The Caliph loved garlic too, and ordered the poor man to be rewarded by filling his cart with the greatest treasure in his kingdom... onions. In much of the Middle East, water and arable land are both precious commodities. Vegetables might really be worth more than gold in some places.

• Played straight, ignored and averted in Hugo Silva's novel Pacha Pulai: a Chilean military pilot (none other than Lieutenant Alejandro Bello) in the early XX century gets lost during a test flight and ends up somewhere in the Andes Mountains. He finds the City of the Caesars, known locally as Pacha Pulai, cut off from communication for at least two centuries and still loyal to Spain. After some adventures and the destruction of the city, he returns to civilization, although he never returns to Chile.
  • In the city, gold and silver are abundant to the point of being worthless, while copper is rare and expensive. The church bells are made of gold, as are many other things, including regular cutlery (fine cutlery is made of copper).
  • As mentioned above, silver is as abundant as gold, but there aren't any references about it being commonly used.
  • Early in the story, the pilot confiscates a suitcase with 50.000 Chilean pesos (about 230000 US dollars in today's money) from a thief. This money is stored away and unmentioned during his time in Pacha Pulai. After leaving the city, he loses the suitcase, but chooses not to retrieve it as it was "ill-gotten money" (and he had the key to a treasury, where he'd later recover many riches in the form of gemstones).
• In The Phantom Tollbooth jewels are valued just like in the real world, except in Digitopolis. They only care about digging up numbers. Precious stones are tossed in the corner and are considered worse than dross. Of course our heroes realize their value, but are distracted by the arrival of lunch before they can even ask for some souvenirs.
• Pippi Longstocking has piles of gold and zero comprehension of math, so she tends to pay people far more than the asking price. At one point, she receives change in silver and reacts with disgust: "What would I do with all those nasty little white coins?"
• The Postman is set After the End. The protagonist finds a heavy box in an abandoned house and hopes that it's filled with canned food, ammunition and/or medical supplies and not useless gold hoarded by a short-sighted pre-Apocalypse citizen.
• In The Prince and the Pauper, the Prince is eventually able to prove his identity by revealing the location of the Great Seal of England, which he hid before he left the palace. The only other person who knew where it was—Tom Canty, the Identical Stranger who took the prince's place—had no idea what it was for and had been using it to crack nuts.

• Release That Witch: King Roland decides to use his technology uplift to devalue all gemstones. Since commoners can just buy synthetic rubies and diamonds, every gemstone in existence is now worth colored glass. This is partly because, in-universe, gemstones culturally represented mindless obedience and caste.
• One of Keith Laumer's stories had diplomat Retief make a deal with an alien who could provide amphibious construction workers. The alien said his people were skilled craftsmen, who had to bring along the materials they knew and loved: gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and granite. Retief okayed the gold and jewels, but said to hold the granite, and the alien was pleased at his generosity, "accepting the stuff we got a surplus of, and foregoing the rare and expensive granite."
• Shifted a few preciousness brackets over in Raymond E. Feist's The Riftwar Cycle. Midkemia (standard medieval-but-with-magic Earth-clone) is invaded by the Tsurani (vaguely-Pan-Asian-but-mostly-Japanese medieval-but-with-magic Earth-clone) for its metal. Their home world, Kelewan, is an old world which was previously inhabited by at least two intelligent races, who mined out all the metals. Silver used to pay for a meal in a tavern on Midkemia could support a Tsurani family for a year. At the same time, the small, low-quality gems used in lieu of large-denomination coins on Tsuranuanni are so valuable on Midkemia that a Tsurani noble's modest travel chest is enough to set him up comfortably for the rest of his life.
• The "disaster situation" applies in the novel Robinson Crusoe: In chapter five, Robinson is stranded on a desert island with no other human being. He needs every tool he can get, things like razors, scissors, knives, and forks are precious, but then he writes: I found about Thirty six Pounds value in Money, some European Coin, some Brazil, some Pieces of Eight, some Gold, some Silver. I smil'd to my self at the Sight of this Money, O Drug Said I aloud, what art thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground, one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee, e'en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving. However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away, Robinson knows the value, but those treasures are really only worthless yellow rocks if there is not a society to give them value.
• The Road is set After the End, in a Scavenger World that has almost run out of stuff to scavenge. The man finds some gold coins in a Survivalist Stash, and puts them back. There is nothing left to buy, and no one to buy it from.
• In Bruce Coville's Rod Allbright Alien Adventures series, it's mentioned in the first book that energy credits are galactic society's basic unit of exchange. "Makes more sense than gold," Grakker comments (rather condescendingly) to Rod. "Not much you can do with gold once you've got it."

• Brandon Sanderson:
  • Mistborn: Atium is an astonishingly rare metal that is also extremely useful in Allomancy (it lets you see a few seconds into the future and react appropriately, making anyone using it invincible in a fight). The Lord Ruler's entire economy is based on atium, with the coins backed by it and the nobles taxed in it. Furthermore, the only way to hire a kandra is with atium. A key plot point of the first book is seizing the Lord Ruler's atium treasury to bribe the armies, and a major plot point of the second book is that they can't find it. It's estimated that ninety percent of all the atium ever mined was in the Lord Ruler's hands, but there are no clues as to where it might be. In the third book, they discover that it was actually in the hands of the kandra. Atium is the body of the God of Evil Ruin, so the Lord Ruler focused on keeping it away from him despite needing it for his own purposes. Elend and his atium mistings burn it away fighting Ruin's armies, which puts it out of his grasp for long enough that Vin is able to Ascend as Ruin's opposite and kill him.
    • As Yomen points out, Atium is worthless in his city because of the Empire's collapse. Only rare Mistborn (who can use any metal) can use it, so a city without Mistborn or access to trade with other Mistborn is sitting on a pile of worthless shiny beads. Even after it turns out that Atium mistings (who can use just one metal) exist, they're difficult to find because TLR suppressed knowledge of their existence; anyone not in the Steel Ministry thinks it's a waste of time and money to test for it.
  • The Stormlight Archive:
    • An interesting example. Stone is sacred to the Shin ethnicity, meaning that extracting metal by mining or smelting is forbidden. However, the Vorin ardents have access to Soulcasting, the power to turn one substance into another, and often practice by turning random trash into metal. At least one Vorin merchant makes a fortune by trading this trash-metal for exotic Shin fruits, vegetables, and livestock.
    • The currency of choice is spheres, gemstones (filled with the titular stormlight) suspended in glass. Since the type of gem determines what a Soulcaster can use it for, emeralds (which can make food) are the most valuable, while diamonds (which can make glass) are the least.
    • Due to the aforementioned Soulcasting, most valuable materials are significantly cheaper than they would otherwise be. Gold and silver are rarely mentioned, and when they are it is just as minor decorations. Aluminium (infamously valuable in most societies before they discover how to refine it) does not exist naturally on the planet, so you'd think it would be even more valuable than it was in real life. But since Soulcasters can make it at a whim, it is little more than a somewhat rare curiosity. Gems are one of the few things Soulcasters can't produce, which is yet another reason they're so valuable.
• In The Second Jungle Book, the story "The King's Ankus" involves Mowgli coming upon a huge treasure guarded by a cobra. Unimpressed by the gems and gold in general, and with the cobra being without poison due to old age, he takes the only thing he finds useful - a short spear with a hook, made of something really strong and light - that just happens to be covered in gold and jewels. Not long afterwards, he learns it's an ivory ankus - and is immediately so disgusted by a tool used for torturing elephants he throws it away, saying he doesn't want anything with Hathi's blood on it. Later, he and Bagheera find themselves tracking it down again - as the man who found it was killed to steal it, as was the thief, etc. To prevent further deaths Mowgli gives it back to the cobra and recommends it to find a young successor to guard the treasure.
• In The Secret of Platform 13, the protagonists have to convince Raymond to come back to the Island with them. He seems pretty uninterested in all the magic they show him, until he asks Cornelius to turn metal into gold. Cornelius does so, and tells Raymond that he can have as much as he wants if he comes with them...neglecting to mention that, since any wizard child can do this trick, gold is pretty much worthless on the Island, which instead has a barter economy.
  • Likewise, people who move to the Island soon learn that they don't need whatever money they've brought, so it just winds up in the royal treasury. As a result, the rescuers have plenty when they come to London for their mission.
• Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky duology takes place In a World… where iron is extremely rare, resulting in a Steampunk level of technology in the 21st century. Gold is mentioned several times but is usually brushed off as only useful for decorations. Once, the main character notices a State ship-of-the-line and realizes its wooden hull is gold-plated. He muses that they could've afforded to iron-plate it, but it would just rust. Apparently, steel was never invented in that world, and no one ever mentions aluminium, despite its potential for use in aircraft; a Bayer-equivalent process is also never mentioned.
• In Jean Russell Larson's The Silkspinners, the only village of silk manufacturers in China has withdrawn from society so thoroughly that there is no new silk to be had in the whole kingdom, only hand-me-downs. When, after many adventures, Li Po finally finds them, he finds that the Silkspinners' only resource is silk, and they have grown to hate it and long for other treasures. He is easily able to convince them that should they return to society, they will be able to trade the silk for other commodities, and learn to love their craft again.
• The underground folk from The Silver Chair do value gemstones, but only fresh ones that are filled with delicious juice. The hard, dry, inedible ones that surface-dwellers hoard are stale and tasteless, hence without value.
• E. E. "Doc" Smith:
  • Inverted in Triplanetary, our iron is the most valuable substance in existence for the alien Nevians.
  • In one of the later Lensman novels, the hero rescues a Beautiful Slave Girl and has to explain to her that the jewels she is wearing are worth a considerable amount.
• Inverted in Spice and Wolf: Iron pyrite (also known as "fool's gold") suddenly becomes incredibly valuable in one town, mostly due to some economic manipulation among the merchants.
• In Storm of Steel, World War I German soldier Ernst Jünger finds an incredibly valuable first edition of Don Quixote in a partially destroyed French house. Being fond of literature, he is initially excited about his discovery until he realizes that the book is useless to him as a soldier in the middle of a war. Comparing himself to "Robinson Crusoe and the lump of gold," he reluctantly leaves the book behind.
• In Sword of Truth, the Mud People have gold treasuries (and possibly mines) on their territory, but consider it worthless because it's too soft for spears.

• Comes up in Tales of Kolmar. Dragons in that verse transform dirt and rock into gold over long exposure to their bodies, so caves where they sleep gradually acquire golden linings. They don't find it entirely useless; it's comfortable to sleep on, decorative, they can soften it with their fiery breaths and carve and sculpt it, and most importantly they're able to slather it on as bandages after they're injured, to seal the wounds. They're still baffled by the human desire for it.
• Played with in Elizabeth Enright's Tatsinda. There's a metal — pretty, but devoid of any practical use — that's so common in Tatrajan that the ore is used to pave streets... which happens to be the same metal coveted by a greedy, brutal ogre.
• Inverted in the Thomas Covenant books, where gold is priceless, partly because of rarity, and partly because it makes the local magic stronger. White gold, an alloy, is even more valuable, being the key to wild magic.
• In The Traders, a Terminus trader is surprised that some planet wants gold as ransom for a captured person - for him it is "old fashioned", although he has no trouble understanding the possible uses of this fact (he can synthesize significant amounts of it). Later, he is trying to convince a nobleman of that world to buy technology. He sells him a device to transform iron into gold as part of a blackmail scheme of the supposedly pious nobleman. The man is forced to buy all of the trader's goods at far more than their normal price (two shipfuls of tin) in order to keep video footage of him drooling over gold from being broadcast to the citizens. He later tells a friend how laughable it was because it's just not cost-effective to transmute metals, due to the excessive power consumption in the process. The Galactic Empire is shown to use iridium the way we use silver.
• In the Transformers novel The Veiled Threat, Starscream is shown to be bribing terrorists by using his internal matter converter to produce massive amounts of gold coins. The other Decepticons are baffled that the loyalties of humans can be won by such simple and, from their perspective, worthless bits of metal. They claim that Cybertronians are superior as they only value what is useful for continued functioning, like energon. Considering the behavior of some of the human terrorists within the novel, they may be right.
• In the Transformers: TransTech short story "Gone Too Far", the heroes (for a certain technical value of "hero") at one point end up on an alien planet where the natives are having a problem with millions of tons of Worthless Pink Rocks: "squareish ones that glow and explode if you hit them too hard or bring fire near them". Realizing they just hit the motherlode of energon, our heroes grin at each other and say to the aliens, sure, they'll be nice and take care of these horrible deadly rocks, and they'll even be generous and do it free of charge...
• In Charles Sheffield's short "The Treasure Of Odirex", a dwindling tribe of Neanderthals lives in hiding in an abandoned Derbyshire gold mine, and make necklaces and other simple ornaments from a shiny yellow mineral they occasionally come across.
• In The Twenty One Balloons, a man discovers an island where diamonds are so common that they just lie around on the ground. He's sensible enough to realize what would happen if this became public, so he instead colonizes the island with a small number of other families. They collect a boat-load of diamonds each year to sell off in secret, allowing them to live in luxury on the island. But on the island itself, the rocks are so common that diamond cuff links are simply given away.

• Book Two of The Underland Chronicles has a version of this trope that actually deals with paper money: the ending of the book has the main character (who is a young pre-teen whose family is in dire financial straits) get a special gift from the inhabitants of the Underland. However, due to a lack of packing paper underground, the medieval-era society instead packs the box with the only apparently useless paper in ample supply: surface-money, taken from the wallets left behind by other surface humans who had died underground.
• Thomas More's Utopia points out the bad logic of assigning "value" to things just because they're pretty and rare. In Utopia, they have the stuff and use it to trade to the outside world, but within Utopia, it's communally owned and growing attached to it is discouraged. Gold is used for the shackles of slaves and for things like chamber pots, so that it's associated with the shameful and dirty. Precious stones are given to small children to wear and play with, with the understanding that any self-respecting Utopian will quickly grow out of this infantile attachment to the shiny if they want to be taken seriously — so if any foreigners ever arrive all pimped out in their most ostentatious jewelry in an attempt to impress the locals, they'll look like overgrown babies. In one case a foreign king visiting Utopia is mistaken for a slave due to having a gold necklace around his neck. A group of watching Utopians comment on the scene with one saying "that chain hardly looks big enough to prevent that slave from escaping." Since he's also wearing many jewels, which their society veiws as absurd and childish for an adult, they concluded he's some kind of clown. One of the king's servants, who is dressed in normal clothes, is mistaken for the foreign king because he's the only one not wearing gold or jewels, and therefore the only one respectable enough to even be considered the ruler of such a powerful nation.

• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan:
  • Miles relates how at the end of the "Time of Isolation", when the planet Barrayar was rediscovered, one of his ancestors thought he could make a fortune by trading for precious stones with the galactics. The jewels were synthetic, the market was soon flooded and Miles's ancestor lost a fortune instead.
  • His mother Cordelia inverts it in an earlier book, wondering why the Barrayarans value gold so much when it's only vaguely useful in some electronic capacities.^note Ignoring the number one reason for gold's value, aside from rarity — its malleability and softness. A single ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet measuring roughly 5 meters on a side. You could do anything you wanted to gold — stretch it, beat it, melt it — and it retained its nature. This is why alchemists believed gold was linked to immortality.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan and others are trapped in a slowly flooding room with many rare treasures. After rescue, Ivan describes it as spending the night "contemplating the true nature of wealth." However, at the end, the barrells of gold are considered worth a ton in Betan dollars. Wordof God admitted in the aforementioned book, she should have realized that gold was rare universe-wide.

• In The Water Trader's Dream, a poem by Robert Priest, aliens trade gold and jewels for water on Earth, a scare and valuable commodity in the galaxy (!).
• In Harry Harrison's Wheelworld, the protagonist mentions that there are warehouses in their off-world colony filled with gold and other precious metals (distilled from seawater) that would make anyone an instant billionaire on Earth. On their colony, however, which is deliberately dependent on Earth for survival, gold isn't any more valuable than for its physical properties. They don't even bother bringing it with them during their annual migration to the other hemisphere.

• Young Wizards: In "Wizards at War", Carmela bribes a group of aliens with chocolate bar knowing that off Earth, chocolate is a valuable substance as either an expensive delicacy or a form of currency.

---