Today Briane Pagel is joining us to tell us about... I'm not sure what he's telling us about, actually. Take it away, Briane...
“I hate corporations,” a rather bellicose new employee told
me one day at my old job, when we were discussing some sort of regulation or
other.
“You work for a
corporation,” I pointed out to her, at which point she looked rather
embarrassed.
Has there ever been a more potentially malignant
organization than the corporation?
We're more or less geared to hate them (even though most of us work for one, I
bet) from the earliest days of US History classes: the corporation was something spawned by Robber Barons to allow them to
pave the US with railroad tracks and the blood of immigrants, while they smoked
cigars moistened with baby’s tears. (Chapter 2, History 101 Textbook.)
This sort of reputation makes corporations the go-to bad
guys of any sort of science fiction, and the fact that the US Supreme Court
declared corporations to be people
right around the time they also declared that companies can use your genes
without paying you for them only added to that reputation. So it’s no wonder that I picked a corporation
as the root of all evil in my book Codes,
is it?
In Codes, the
corporation (which goes unnamed throughout, the anonymity adding to the
sinister nature of the company) that is behind all the evil has begun a program
to clone human beings – against their will—and implant them with computerized
personalities, which can be tweaked to make the person a better worker, or more
loyal, or instill other features. But
the company doesn't just make clones (which are called Codes… hence the title.)
They are also slowly taking over the city around them. When people call the police in that city,
company security shows up. The same for other government services, such as the
department of health. The corporate
employees can set up other dummy corporations and infiltrate the internet, and
they're able to kidnap people and hold them without any sort of repercussion –
they do it in broad daylight. It’s
pretty apparent, throughout Codes,
that the company is not only powerful, but so powerful it can flaunt it, with
most people in the city just accepting this as a fact of life.
That’s pretty bad, right? But it’s not like I’m the first
person to make the link between “anonymous shareholders forcing the company to
seek profits at all costs” and “nihilistic vision of a society where that is
condoned.” There’s, as I said, a rich history of corporate badness in movies,
television, and books. I could probably do the top 100 of these, but I've
limited it to the five best (or worst).
5. The Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy series, Douglas
Adams. Perhaps not so much “evil” as “inept,” Sirius was responsible for
such abominations as the talking doors that smugly waited for you to open them,
elevators that eventually have existential crises, and my favorite, the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser, which
engages in an in-depth probing of the user’s likes and dislikes to craft a
particularized beverage meant to provide the ultimate drinking experience, and
then dispenses something almost, but not completely, unlike tea. The complaints division for the company
sprawled over three planets, and the company’s motto, “Share And Enjoy,” was
built right into the company’s headquarters, the buildings being shaped like
the letters – but then they sunk halfway, so that the buildings appear to spell
out “Go Stick Your Head In A Pig” in the local language. Not the kind of company you’d want to deal
with, at all.
4. Rosen Industries:
(Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep/Blade Runner): The makers of replicants, androids built to mimic
humans exactly, but who ultimately tend to go rogue and want to kill humans,
the Rosen Corporation is so awful it created a replicant specifically designed
to trick the best test available to sort out who is human and who is not – and
then didn’t tell her she was an android, but used it to seduce bounty hunters
so they couldn't keep killing replicants. (Fun fact: Phillip K. Dick set his
story, originally, in the far-distant year of 1992. Later editions have
now set it in 2021.)
3. Ilium Works, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. I couldn’t find out if the corporation in
this book had a name, or if in fact the corporation was simply the US government;
set in a post-WWIII society, the corporation is busy automating everything,
which has the effect of replacing anyone who’s not an engineer or a manager;
those people have the choice of menial labor or receiving a stipend to live on.
When Paul, the main character, begins to dislike this system, he eventually
decides to rebel against it, leading to a brief (and unsatisfying) armed
conflict.
2. The entire planet
Proton, The Apprentice Adept
series, Piers Anthony. Another one I’m not entirely sure is a corporation,
but it sure seems like it. The citizens of Proton are insanely wealthy –
the 1% of the 1% of the 1% ad infinitum
as a result of mining protonite for fuel.
They've set up a system in which they hire ‘serfs,’ people who work for
them for 20 years, receiving their pay in a lump sum at the end. 20 years of work pays enough to make a serf
wealthy on any other planet, but barely buys one’s way into society on
Proton. The serfs, though, have almost
no freedom, must live and work entirely naked, and exist solely to please the
Citizens. Oh, and many of the Citizens
are aware that their planet shares an alternate space with an identical magical
planet, one they intend to raid of its magical energy because their own
protonite is running out.
1. The General Oblation Board, His Dark Materials Trilogy, Phillip
Pullman I suppose it’s not technically a
corporation, since the G.O.B. was a branch of the church, but I had to include
this organization because it’s just so
evil: Run by Mrs. Coulter, a beautiful but cold woman, the G.O.B. was tasked
with finding a way to rid humanity of Original Sin – and opted to do that by
experimenting with the children of Philip Pullman’s phenomenal alternate-Earth.
I'd rather face off against any three on this list than take on the Board.
What’s your (least!) favorite corporation from a book?
Briane
Pagel is the author of Codes,
available on Amazon and through Golden Fleece Press. He blogs at Thinking The Lions.
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianePagel
Thinking The Lions: http://www.thinkingthelions.com
Codes, on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Codes-Briane-Pagel/dp/1942195109/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431311676&sr=1-1&keywords=codes+briane+pagel
Codes, on Golden
Fleece Press: http://goldenfleecepress.com/catalog/fiction/
