The Great Gambler, by the pseudonymous author YRSD NYDU, is a slightly science-fictional story about money and finance. A Wall Street analyst is hired to pick out stocks by a mysterious employer. The employer turns out to be a non-human, digital life form; finance itself somehow congealed into a sort of personhood, or algorithms that attain the temporary stability of a persona. If the atmosphere can self-organize into a hurricane or a tornado, why can't finance self-organize into an extractivist organism that accumulates and expends money? This happens when financial transactions float free of any underlying (as Elie Ayache would put it), or of any connection to the so-called 'real' economy. As the entity declares, "I am capital in the twenty-first century, I must go on." (We might consider this as the 21st-century replacement or updating of Samuel Beckett's "you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”).

The theory behind this is Jeremy England's account of "Dissipative adaptation in driven self-assembly". If, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us, entropy is always increasing, then processes of self-organization (of which life is the most prominent, but not the only, example) arise spontaneously because they offer more efficient means than would otherwise exist for dissipating energy. The novel personifies and narrates this process as it applies to finance, and implicitly links it to similar strategies in 20th century literary fiction (think not only of Beckett, but also Borges and Calvino).

Unfortunately, much like others who cite Jeremy England's work from 2013 to 2015, the novel ignores the earlier development of a quite similar theory by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, in their 2005 book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life.

Nonetheless, the novel is important for the way that it grasps the workings of postmodern finance and links these workings both to other physical processes and to larger cultural patterns that we tend to take for granted without overtly realizing that we are doing so.