Is SF anti-capitalist?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Or at least deeply uninterested in it?

Sure, there's lots of Yay Free Marketism but how often do books focus on non-malevolent companies [1]? I think Flynn's do (but I can't read him) and so do wossname's books about the immortal time salvagers (but the Company in that does not seem all cuddles and happy songs around the campfire). There's Moon, but even her business adventure series seems to have turned into MilSF.

This may be related to the dearth of people who work for a living doing anything but stealing stuff or shooting people.


1: MARKET FORCES, for example, does focus on a particular company and its stuggle to prevail but I believe that if one looks very closely, some elements could be interpreted as being critical of modern capitalism.

Comments

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Umm, name a form of literature with more businessmen than warriors as protagonists.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

City girl books. I don't think Bridget Jones ever joined the Army. I do recall one where the protagonist burned out on PR and took time off to work in a North African refugee camp, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Mainstream literature. Every niche from car salesman -- John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom -- to high-powered financier -- Christina Stead's The House of All Nations. (And it's not wish-fulfillment. Oh no.) One of my favorite French novels is about the founding of one of the world's first department stores, written at the time.

[bile deleted about people who only read in-genre, or even only read "the exceptions" outside of the genre; after all, I have my own blog]

Carlos of "Halfway Down the Danube", a nice place to be

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Mark Pierre Vorkosigan springs to mind, but that's not exactly rigorous economics.

There is no regorous economics in SF.

[james-angove.livejournal.com]

Seriously. Economic thinking in SF is dominated by people who ideology trumps evidence everyday of the week and twice on Sunday. Measured against those standards, Bujold has reached undreamt of heights or rigor.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Andre Norton's Solar Queen books, which concentrate on a space going tramp frieghter, and has a believable crew of non-Navy spacer types, who have real worries about coming out ahead on their deals. Admittedly there is a Big Bad Corp out there, but it mostly serves as a rival to the hero's adventures, not something actively malevolent.

Nothing else really comes to mind, except for the Miller's Conflict of Honors which also has a trading ship, but was less about running a business and more about Lackeyesque Abused Heroine With Powers dropping into a group of Happy Fluffy Healer folk.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Andre Norton's Solar Queen books, which concentrate on a space going tramp frieghter, and has a believable crew of non-Navy spacer types, who have real worries about coming out ahead on their deals. Admittedly there is a Big Bad Corp out there, but it mostly serves as a rival to the hero's adventures, not something actively malevolent.

I just reread some of those. Her reprints do ok for the club, I am told.

What struck me was the recurring pattern of the current deal always turning out to be much worse than it first appeared, and how they kept trading away the deals they knew to be bad for ones that turned out to be even worse. I'm not entirely sure how those poor devils ever made any money.

[drplokta]

Kim Stanley Robinson is very much in favour of certain kinds of company (e.g. Praxis in the Mars trilogy), while being against traditional corporatism. There's the Business, in the Iain (no M) Banks novel of that title. Kage Baker's Dr Zeus Company is looking pretty malevolent, yes. Do not forget about the Solar Spice and Liquors Company (and the rest of the Polesotechnic League) in Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League series.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Huh. KSR is some kind of weak-minded leftie. Banks is no raving Tory. Someone else mentioned Eric Flint, who is a Trot. Shetterly has written about a PI (CHIMERA) and he's a pink of some kind. MacLeod bears the Trotsyite taint and yet parts of hypercapitalist New Mars look ok. Does anyone see something wrong with this picture?

[james-angove.livejournal.com]

Evidently you don't think the Rosinante, since if you did, you'd not have missed the chance to mention them.

I'd say that the company from Falling Free wasn't so much implicitly evil as afflicted with a seriously bad middle manager.

There has got to be someone else. Weber, maybe? Weber seems like he'd have corporations Doing Right in the face of Small Minded Traitorous Government Flunkies.

Hey, maybe I should have included my unspoken qualifier

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Recent SF.

Old time SF is filled with people working for companies, many of whom were not plotting to suck out their employees eyes to sell the contents on the internation eye-jelly market.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually I forgot the Rosinante books. I probably wouldn't count them because to me it felt more like a war/political series.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Honor Harrington starts that joint venture to build domes on Grayson (with the engineer that has the idea). She also has other business ventures going.

The Seaton Crane Company, Engineers, also comes to mind. Smith also does a lot with private companies in Subspace Explorers.

There's also "The Man Who Sold the Moon".

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Before I forget, Little Fuzzy, or was it the Fuzzy Papers? The Chartered Zedartha Corporation seems to be acting evil in the first part and then the president of the company enters the picture and from that perspective they're not so bad.

[redbird]

SF writers (or editors?) seem to be in favor of small businesses--individual trading ships rather than large companies. (Heinlein, for example, has Lazarus Long as an independent interplanetary trader at one point in his over-long life.) I'm not sure if that's what most writers actually think in the real world, or if they just find it more useful for plot or world-building.

[(Anonymous)]

Cryptonomicon? This may not be SF depending on POV.

Peter F Hamilton's Mindstar Rising series has a mostly benevolent view of a company. Of course, the view point is that of people who occupy the top echelon of management (see Crypt above as well).

PKD had a nice treatment in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, but again that's someone who is setting up their own buisness.

I can't think of any novel offhand which involves people working in the middle or lower rungs of a company.

Stephen Shevlin

[(Anonymous)]

That's one of the reasons I like The Man in the High Castle. The understated details. Any fool can write about a Nazi America (and sadly, many have).

And the idea of Japanese tourists buying American kitsch that appeals to their own aesthetic -- well, I don't think SF's role is predictive, but that was DEAD ON. (When PKD wrote TMitHC, the Japanese had only been allowed to leave the Home Islands for eight years or so; I forget when the ban on foreign travel was lifted. '53? '55?)

Didn't PKD run his own record shop for a while?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

"I can't think of any novel offhand which involves people working in the middle or lower rungs of a company."

John Sladek (before his untimely death) staked out that territory. (Which admittedly goes to underscore your point.)

One of the items on my to-do list is pretty much such a novel, although arguably it's horror or mainstream rather than SF. (Not to mention semi-autobiographical.) Ah well.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think it's actually something very disturbing indeed. It's not just that corporations are shoiwn as evil, they are shown as having no alternative . . . just as many SF writers assume that it's inevitable that space travel means a return to hereditary tyranny.

Of course, in some world views, capitalism is stealing stuff and shooting people. By nature. And it seems to me that there are points of view that embrace this as being a good thing. And that some people who have this point of view write SF.

I kind of think, though, that the reason that SF hardly ever writes about corporatiuons which are not evil is laziness. They don't think there's any drama outside that construction.

Now -- you know what I think of capitalism, but the corporation in the Chuy book isn't exactly evil, though it's dangerous for Chuy. I wonder if a reader can tell the difference?

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

Could it be that (1) a fair amount of sf, old and new, is set in lawless or law-enforcement-impaired frontier zones/other areas where civilization is a bit weak and (2) authors are looking at the real-world history of some corporations operating under such non-constraints and figuring "Why not?"

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

_First Contract_ by Greg Costikyan has a man building a small business after galactic contact turns Earth into a third-world planet.

Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ has a symbiosis between trading ships and planetary governments.

There are Poul Anderson's Starfire(?) books, but they were horrendous.

I'll take your general point that there isn't much.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Poul Anderson's Poleosotechnic League series, for a start, and a lot of his other books.

John Barnes' "The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky".

Robert Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon", "Rolling Stones", and others.

Michael Flynn's "Firestar" series, as well as "Country of the Blind".

Bruce Sterling has portrayed companies sympathetically (can't remember title -- think it had the Rhyzome Corporation in it).

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Peter Hamilton's Mindstar series displays at least one corporation in a good light.

criticality

[p-o-u-n-c-e-r.livejournal.com]

Why is it odder to be critical of the market than to be comparably critical of the temple, the capitol, the legion, the university, or any other way or place of organizing large numbers of people towards a more-or-less common goal?

Picking up on the remark about Weber's Harrington series -- "if one looks very closely, some elements could be interpreted as being critical of" -- seniority promotions in the military, fanatics in the church, bullies in business, academics who've never attempted to apply their theories in practice ... People aren't perfect, and their institutions merely magnify our imperfections. If SF markets are largely driven by American tastes then authors working in that market are certainly aware of the flaws of marketing and capitalism -- perhaps more so than they are aware of the quirks and flaws of, say, parlimentary governance. (Weber's Star Kingdom political portrayals never seem convincing to me (( hmm. that sounds as if the rest of his stuff is; not an impression I'd like to convey on purpose.)) )

[redbird]

Thought the first: someone who actually believed in free markets might be highly critical of modern corporate capitalism because of the ways that it shields company-owners for responsibility for their actions, and/or because of the ways that it deviates from an ideal market economy ("ideal" in the sense of an "ideal gas").

Thought the second: whatever the military is, it is not a free market economy, and those who idealize the former may lack interest in the latter.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Adam Smith was very critical of people who managed other people's money -- by his definition, a capitalist was someone who invested his capital, not someone else's.

Somewhere in "Weath of Nations" there's a lovely quote where Smith says that any advice coming from bankers should be listened to with the utmost suspicion, because they are only concerned with their own profit and care nothing for the community -- and will leave it in a trice if it profits them to do so. (Paraphrased because the bookmark fell out and I can't find the quote this evening.)

Which is why neocons remind me of fundy Christians -- both text-proof their sources and often haven't read the actual book closely, being more inclined to read accepted interpretations and commentaries...

[countess-sophia.livejournal.com]

I guess it's because a story about people who work in the office of a firm that insures space ships, or a cab company on a planet near Alpha Centauri is a bit too prosaic but East India Company with Ray Guns is fun, to a certain kind of mind. It's for the same reason that you don't get many social democracies among the governments in fantasy novels.

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

It's for the same reason that you don't get many social democracies among the governments in fantasy novels.

I just got the weird thought of an alternate Dune in which MP Leto Atreides battles the fiendish Harkonen scheme to reduce health benefits to the citizens of the known universe.