Above: Gattac (1997)—a sterile future of mass-manufactured men
The Year of the Flood By Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) Generation A By Douglas Coupland (William Heinemann, £16.99)
MegaCorp is taking control. You have absolutely no choice in this. MegaCorp is going to own your life, from incubation chamber to cremation chamber. You can do nothing to fight against this. MegaCorp is an inevitability. So, just relax and enjoy the ride. Well, it’s not really a ride, more a slide. And MegaCorp is at the bottom and the top. Oh, and MegaCorp built the slide. And pretty soon, MegaCorp’s going to be building you, as well.
It was science fiction that gave us our earliest and clearest visions of MegaCorp. But does consuming such fiction foster any desire to avoid this future? And, if not, why not? Is it because, when it’s really successful, science fiction presents the future to us as a fait accompli—or is it something more dismayingly insidious than that?
This September, two of Canada’s most prominent writers, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, are publishing new novels which are set in gone-wrong futures. They do this at a conservative moment in the development of science fiction. There is now, across the mainstream of the genre, in book and film and children’s cartoons, a fairly consistent vision of the shape of things to come—a vision with which Atwood and Coupland are in accord.
In the future, corporations will become even more powerful than they are now: far more powerful than any democratically elected government. As a result, they will usurp all the traditional functions of the state, including healthcare, urban planning, defence and policing. Social polarisation will result in gated compounds for the super-rich, air-conditioned suburban nightmares for the middle class and ghetto-wastelands for the disenfranchised poor. Commerce between the top and bottom of society, most commonly drug-dealing and prostitution, will be based solely on exploitation and cruelty. At some point in the more distant future, MegaCorp’s conviction that it can control and manipulate nature will come back and bite it in the MegaArse, causing a total collapse of society and a new dark age where humans survive amid the useless techno-detritus of an electricity-addicted past.
This is a vision that has been fluidly forming in fiction for a long time. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had the whole thing pretty much cinched in 1932, minus branding. Even earlier, EM Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops” described a hive-like social structure that many may feel we’re still heading towards. In film, George Lucas’s 1971 THX 1138 shows an entirely corporatised world—and was the visual model for later movies such as Gattaca (1997), Code 46 (2003) and The Island (2005). All of these stories culminate with some kind of escape or attempted escape from the hegemony of MegaCorp. The screen ceases to be silver and white, instead becoming brown or green or dirty grey. However embedded in the system they are to begin with, the American individualist hero is somehow able to fight back. This is even the case when their reality has been almost entirely constructed by MegaCorp, as in Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Total Recall.
In Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, we are in both pre- and post-corporate worlds. We follow a small group of characters as they prepare for and deal with the consequences of a “waterless flood”—a global viral pandemic that causes society to collapse thus beginning a new dark age, etc. One of her main characters, Toby, survives by joining a millennial sect called The Gardeners (as in the Garden of Eden), who write cruddy hymns and live on the roof of a tower block, Edencliff. As with most millennial sects, they have their own slanguage: “The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because—said the Adam and Eves—they had short attention spans and no morals.” The “pleeblanders” are what we would or wouldn’t call plebs.
In Coupland’s Generation A, set not so many years into the future as The Year of the Flood, life is pretty much the same as now, only that bees have become totally extinct. And so when five people, in different parts of the world, are consecutively stung by bees, it is a really big deal. Government/MegaCorp swoops upon each of the victims and renditions them off to isolation units in America. After their release, they are gathered together by a mysterious scientist on a remote Canadian archipelago, where they are encouraged to tell one another made-up stories. The parallel with Boccaccio’s Decameron, where another small group escapes another pandemic (the black death) and amuses itself by tale-telling, is explicitly made. Fiction, Coupland still believes, can save us all. In both Atwood and Coupland, survival depends on isolation.
The tone of The Year of the Flood is bizarre. I’d call it smugly apocalyptic: as if the end of the world were so inevitable, and our species-hubris so gross, that the only way to play it is for laughs. Coupland, as always, tries to appear deadpan while, underneath it, weeping with despair at the mess we’ve got ourselves into.
Does reading about an extremely unpleasant future cause any of us to want to undertake radical political action in order to change the course of history? Given that these books are likely to be read by two rather difference classes of reader— science fiction fans familiar with the genre’s long history of MegaCorp dystopias, and general readers drawn in by the authors’ literary reputations—the question needs to be answered in two different ways.
For the science-fiction fans, it’s unlikely that they are attracted to books that show dystopian future worlds entirely because they enjoy being repelled and appalled by these worlds. There is something in the envisioning of even a socially and morally ugly future that they desire—be it the technological perks or merely the fact that it’s less boringly familiar than what they see around them. (The sexbots, perhaps.) Here the question diverts into territory dominated by what my girlfriend calls the Jeremy Clarkson Defence of Modernity. In other words, if I give you the choice between the rainforest and the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, which do you pick? Never less than consistent, Clarkson calls his favourite 253mph super car “a triumph for man over nature,” and makes his answer pretty obvious. Follow this argument through and you’ll see that writing a novel to warn against messing around with nature is a bit like praying to Allah for the collapse of Islam. A novel is entirely the result of hundreds of years of human beings messing around with nature. The global supply chains that supported Atwood and Coupland while they were writing these books are extraordinarily long, complicated, exploitative and technologically dependent. Can novels be written outside modernity? Wait for the new dark age and see whether you can combine subsistence farming with searching for the new Proust.
Going back to the other readership, the prepared-to-read-science-fiction-if-it’s-by-someone-they-like, these people are slightly more likely to be surprised by the conventional MegaCorp vision of the future. But they are even less likely to take political action.
Is this situation hopeless? I would say not. One of the delights of science fiction is how gloriously inept its prognostications can be. William Gibson, the dominant writer of the cyberpunk 1980s, was being fiscally prudent when he bet the fictional farm on Japan. As a mere glance at the Wall Street Journal would have told him, Japan Inc was inexorably on the rise.
Wrong. A copy of Speeches and Writings by Deng Xiaoping and a world gazetteer would have shown him that China was a far likelier candidate for global cultural domination. But Gibson isn’t to blame. Just about everyone else missed that too.
This may be our most comforting thought: if there is a consensus towards MegaCorporatisation, in science fiction as well as in political discourse, that makes it all the more likely that the future will be entirely other.
The Year of the Flood By Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) Generation A By Douglas Coupland (William Heinemann, £16.99)
MegaCorp is taking control. You have absolutely no choice in this. MegaCorp is going to own your life, from incubation chamber to cremation chamber. You can do nothing to fight against this. MegaCorp is an inevitability. So, just relax and enjoy the ride. Well, it’s not really a ride, more a slide. And MegaCorp is at the bottom and the top. Oh, and MegaCorp built the slide. And pretty soon, MegaCorp’s going to be building you, as well.
It was science fiction that gave us our earliest and clearest visions of MegaCorp. But does consuming such fiction foster any desire to avoid this future? And, if not, why not? Is it because, when it’s really successful, science fiction presents the future to us as a fait accompli—or is it something more dismayingly insidious than that?
This September, two of Canada’s most prominent writers, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, are publishing new novels which are set in gone-wrong futures. They do this at a conservative moment in the development of science fiction. There is now, across the mainstream of the genre, in book and film and children’s cartoons, a fairly consistent vision of the shape of things to come—a vision with which Atwood and Coupland are in accord.
In the future, corporations will become even more powerful than they are now: far more powerful than any democratically elected government. As a result, they will usurp all the traditional functions of the state, including healthcare, urban planning, defence and policing. Social polarisation will result in gated compounds for the super-rich, air-conditioned suburban nightmares for the middle class and ghetto-wastelands for the disenfranchised poor. Commerce between the top and bottom of society, most commonly drug-dealing and prostitution, will be based solely on exploitation and cruelty. At some point in the more distant future, MegaCorp’s conviction that it can control and manipulate nature will come back and bite it in the MegaArse, causing a total collapse of society and a new dark age where humans survive amid the useless techno-detritus of an electricity-addicted past.
This is a vision that has been fluidly forming in fiction for a long time. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had the whole thing pretty much cinched in 1932, minus branding. Even earlier, EM Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops” described a hive-like social structure that many may feel we’re still heading towards. In film, George Lucas’s 1971 THX 1138 shows an entirely corporatised world—and was the visual model for later movies such as Gattaca (1997), Code 46 (2003) and The Island (2005). All of these stories culminate with some kind of escape or attempted escape from the hegemony of MegaCorp. The screen ceases to be silver and white, instead becoming brown or green or dirty grey. However embedded in the system they are to begin with, the American individualist hero is somehow able to fight back. This is even the case when their reality has been almost entirely constructed by MegaCorp, as in Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Total Recall.
In Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, we are in both pre- and post-corporate worlds. We follow a small group of characters as they prepare for and deal with the consequences of a “waterless flood”—a global viral pandemic that causes society to collapse thus beginning a new dark age, etc. One of her main characters, Toby, survives by joining a millennial sect called The Gardeners (as in the Garden of Eden), who write cruddy hymns and live on the roof of a tower block, Edencliff. As with most millennial sects, they have their own slanguage: “The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because—said the Adam and Eves—they had short attention spans and no morals.” The “pleeblanders” are what we would or wouldn’t call plebs.
In Coupland’s Generation A, set not so many years into the future as The Year of the Flood, life is pretty much the same as now, only that bees have become totally extinct. And so when five people, in different parts of the world, are consecutively stung by bees, it is a really big deal. Government/MegaCorp swoops upon each of the victims and renditions them off to isolation units in America. After their release, they are gathered together by a mysterious scientist on a remote Canadian archipelago, where they are encouraged to tell one another made-up stories. The parallel with Boccaccio’s Decameron, where another small group escapes another pandemic (the black death) and amuses itself by tale-telling, is explicitly made. Fiction, Coupland still believes, can save us all. In both Atwood and Coupland, survival depends on isolation.
The tone of The Year of the Flood is bizarre. I’d call it smugly apocalyptic: as if the end of the world were so inevitable, and our species-hubris so gross, that the only way to play it is for laughs. Coupland, as always, tries to appear deadpan while, underneath it, weeping with despair at the mess we’ve got ourselves into.
Does reading about an extremely unpleasant future cause any of us to want to undertake radical political action in order to change the course of history? Given that these books are likely to be read by two rather difference classes of reader— science fiction fans familiar with the genre’s long history of MegaCorp dystopias, and general readers drawn in by the authors’ literary reputations—the question needs to be answered in two different ways.
For the science-fiction fans, it’s unlikely that they are attracted to books that show dystopian future worlds entirely because they enjoy being repelled and appalled by these worlds. There is something in the envisioning of even a socially and morally ugly future that they desire—be it the technological perks or merely the fact that it’s less boringly familiar than what they see around them. (The sexbots, perhaps.) Here the question diverts into territory dominated by what my girlfriend calls the Jeremy Clarkson Defence of Modernity. In other words, if I give you the choice between the rainforest and the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, which do you pick? Never less than consistent, Clarkson calls his favourite 253mph super car “a triumph for man over nature,” and makes his answer pretty obvious. Follow this argument through and you’ll see that writing a novel to warn against messing around with nature is a bit like praying to Allah for the collapse of Islam. A novel is entirely the result of hundreds of years of human beings messing around with nature. The global supply chains that supported Atwood and Coupland while they were writing these books are extraordinarily long, complicated, exploitative and technologically dependent. Can novels be written outside modernity? Wait for the new dark age and see whether you can combine subsistence farming with searching for the new Proust.
Going back to the other readership, the prepared-to-read-science-fiction-if-it’s-by-someone-they-like, these people are slightly more likely to be surprised by the conventional MegaCorp vision of the future. But they are even less likely to take political action.
Is this situation hopeless? I would say not. One of the delights of science fiction is how gloriously inept its prognostications can be. William Gibson, the dominant writer of the cyberpunk 1980s, was being fiscally prudent when he bet the fictional farm on Japan. As a mere glance at the Wall Street Journal would have told him, Japan Inc was inexorably on the rise.
Wrong. A copy of Speeches and Writings by Deng Xiaoping and a world gazetteer would have shown him that China was a far likelier candidate for global cultural domination. But Gibson isn’t to blame. Just about everyone else missed that too.
This may be our most comforting thought: if there is a consensus towards MegaCorporatisation, in science fiction as well as in political discourse, that makes it all the more likely that the future will be entirely other.
