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Zillion-Dollar Bill: Difference between revisions
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* In [[Mark Twain]]'s short story "The Million Pound Bank Note", a man lost in England is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|given a million-pound note]] by an eccentric rich man he has just met. He can't actually ''spend'' it, since no one can make change, but showing it everywhere is enough to let him open a lot of lines of credit. It turns out {{spoiler|the whole thing was a bet on what a foreigner lost in a strange land with nothing to his name but a million-pound note would actually ''do''}}. It was made into a 1954 film ''The Million Pound Note''. It was also made into a [[Donald Duck]] story.
* The low-budget version appears in Upton Sinclair's ''The Jungle''. In 1920s Chicago, an unemployed stockyard worker is given a hundred-dollar bill by a rich drunk. (This is about as much money as the hero could make in a year.) But he has no other money with him, and he'll freeze to death if he tries to walk home. In desperation, he goes into a bar to stay warm until the banks open in the morning. They won't let him stay without buying something, so he uses the bill to buy a 5-cent beer. The bartender gives him 95 cents in change, and everyone else enjoys a big laugh when he tries to convince them that he's been cheated.
* In Terry Pratchett's proto-[[Discworld]] book ''[[Strata]]'', money is defined as ''time'' - each bill is worth extra years of life. The biggest bill is the Methuselah (named after the longest-lived Biblical personality) which few people have ever seen. The book also features a bottomless purse, which continually spits out bills which are not technically counterfeit, but which have serial numbers that haven't been used yet.
** There's a similar short film where the currency is your own life. You work for more life and spend bits of your life to buy things, the basic currency being hours or minutes. The Heroine eventually marries and gets rich and rewards her friends with a necklace, each bead of which is several months or years, but they fight over it and it breaks. It had people playing poker machines and gambling for more life. That's right, people were [[Stealth Pun|wasting their lives gambling.]]
* The eponymous dragon in Peter F. Hamilton's ''[[Fallen Dragon]]''. In a subversion, the small community benefiting from its advanced technology attempts {{spoiler|to hijack a starship to return it to its own kind. In a brilliant sucker punch, the dragon is as valuable to its own kind as a single sperm is to us.}}
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