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.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

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.

[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

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

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.

[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

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Hey, maybe I should have included my unspoken qualifier

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Does _Zodiac_ count as recent?

Re: Hey, maybe I should have included my unspoken qualifier

[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.

Re: Hey, maybe I should have included my unspoken qualifier

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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

[(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?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?