More Words, Deeper Hole

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

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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.

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I don't know that city girl books would count as a genre like SF, but okay I'll give you that. I didn't think of it because I don't read that sort of book. Though if that counts what about the libertarian polemics? Lots of them have hero businesses.

From: (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

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I bet they have more warriors than business people though. Lots of mainstream literature about the hero back from war, going to war, or whatever. All those stories like Cold Mountain that get turned into big Hollywood epics. I don't know for sure though because I don't read a lot of mainstream literature.

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I bet they have more warriors than business people though.

I bet they don't. Look at all the small business folk who are the protagonists in detective novels. One of Easy Rawlins' defining characteristics is that he's actually quite a talented businessman, despite the constraints his deep-seated paranoia [1] put on him.

1: I don't know if paranoia is the right word, since white folk do screw him over on a routine basis.

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I bet they don't. Look at all the small business folk who are the protagonists in detective novels.

Which leads to the conclusion that V.I. Warshawski is more of a capitalist than 90% of the protagonists in SF.

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joenotcharles.livejournal.com

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

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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.

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snowwy.livejournal.com

I'd metaquote you, but noone in that community would get it. Thanks for saying it anyway. I nearly had a spittake at my monitor.

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shimgray.livejournal.com

Logical conclusion: we need more economic sf.

(Motto: "We've exhausted every other genre. Why not?")

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Logical conclusion: we need more economic sf.

Read Stross's Family Trade books.

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shimgray.livejournal.com

Unlike some people, most of us are only able to read one of the Family Trade books. (I have, mind you. We still need more like them.)

(Well, probably I could find a way to read the second. But the housebreaking approach is a pretty elaborate thing to do when "wait six weeks" is the alternate solution.)

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There will be more of them. (Unless I keel over and die of overwork, #3 is due out next summer and my agent is now haggling over #4 and #5.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Other than that you seem to be conflating "anti-corporatist" with "anti-capitalist"?

It's possible to be both pro-free-enterprise and against the corporatist way it is currently implemented. Look at the way Adam Smith defines capitalists and bankers, for example -- and at what he says about bankers!

From: (Anonymous)

No, it makes sense from a Marxist point of view. Capitalism as a necessary -- if occasionally horrible -- stage towards something better. Eventually the productivity gains caused by capitalist accumulation will lead society to progress to the point where the inequalities can be ironed out. If I understand them correctly, many British leftists feel that we're not quite technically there yet -- "money is a sign of poverty" and all that -- while the Trots seem to think a necessary precondition is a worldwide movement. But, to paraphrase Dale Gribble, there's nothing wrong with running a business in and of itself. (Banking, I am not so sure about.)

But IANAM, so take this with a grain of salt.

Carlos

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It's not the leftists writing about business activities in positive manner that surprises me. After all, Orwell ran a shop. It's the deficit of non-leftists writing about business activities in a positive manner.

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I wonder if it's because so many of the self-identified right wing of SF writers came in under JEP, whose grasp of and respect for the market is almost entirely theoretical. (It seems to be more about "How dare the government tax me! Yay military spending!" with a side order of: "Those awful poor people! Why can't they join and quit the Communist Party while on the GI Bill and then become a crony of the mayor of Los Angeles the way I did?")

On the other hand, Neal Stephenson does not strike me as any sort of leftist, and he's fascinated with capitalism. He doesn't write much about the small-scale stuff, although I seem to remember something about the economics of running a decent Vietnamese restaurant in Zodiac.

Carlos

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cincinnatus.livejournal.com

It's interesting- at first I had you pegged for a leftist, albeit a grouchy one, but now I'm rethinking and getting either very old-school conservative or Militant Centrist- although chances are both are incorrect.

Berard

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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.

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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.

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adrian-turtle.livejournal.com

Does _Zodiac_ count as recent?

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Sure. Let me reduce my weasling room by specifying a cut-off date: March, 1981.

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james-angove.livejournal.com

Part of the problem, at least in the last five years or so, may be the decision of many in corprate leadership roles to find new and innovative ways to combine "evil" with "stupid"

Sean McMullen's recent fantasies have a trading vessel it them. Were there any non-malevolent corporations in _Singlarity Sky_ or _Iron Sunrise_?

Varley's _Red Thunder_.

Flint's 1632 and 1633, those people start companies like crazy.

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"Singularity Sky": no corporations, the Festival ate them all. (Anyway, it was a critique of the monarchical principle and, to a lesser extent, a reductio ad absurdam for Straussian politics. Not much scope for corporations in a future dominated by philosopher-princes and their catspaw warriors, eh?) Iron Sunrise: Frank the Nose is effectively a large chunk of a roving News corporation. The interstellar liner is owned by a transport corporation who don't actually rip off their customers or mistreat their staff. The security company in chapter 3 is making the best of a bad job. The Bad Guys(™) in "Iron Sunrise" aren't corporate, in fact they're posthuman industrial feudalists along the lines of a nanotech-assisted Third Reich.

So yeah, no evil corporations in either book -- the evil is associated with authoritarian (monarchist/fascist) political structures.

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

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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".

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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.

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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.

From: (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

From: (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?

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"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.

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RESUME WITH MONSTERS has a protagonist who is not high up the ladder at his company.

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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?

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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?"

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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.

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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).

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

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Counter-argument: I'd assert (based on my hazy memory of reading the books) that the corporation in question was a personal fiefdom run by one woman who was single-handedly reclaiming the nation from the Evil Commies™ who had taken it over in the wake of global warming (hey, it might be Tory SF but it's post-1980's Tory SF) and was running the company very much along lines of personal loyalty.

This might have looked kind of advanced during the middle ages, but these days we've got a name for corporations that run on patronage, personal loyalty to the [wo]man at the top, and target their enemies: they're the maf[iy]a.

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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.)) )

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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"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 ..."

Au contraire: that's a cracking idea for a novel! The insurance office story focusses on a tale of alien contact and barratry, and goes out to inspect the wreckage by following the Loss Adjuster on his/her daily grind; you've got skullduggery, the romance of travel, alien contact, the whole lot!

Excuse me but if you don't mind, I have a novel pitch to write. (But don't hold your breath -- it'll come out just after the social democrat revolution in volume #5 of the fantasy series. NB: I'm not joking.)

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