The Unincorporated Man by
Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin
Justin Cord awoke after a nap that put Rip Van Winkle to shame; awoke looking upon an angel. In fact, Neela Harper wasn’t an angel: she was a reanimation specialist. A lot happened in the three centuries since Justin Cord had crawled into a secret cryogenic suspension unit and staged his disappearance. He woke to an entirely different society: not long after he went under, the world economy collapsed and society followed close behind. The center of American society became Alaska, and the hardy self-sufficient types who populated the last frontier had some interesting ideas about how things should run. In short, every human being is now a personal corporation – all forty billion of ‘em, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. At birth, each person accrues 100,000 shares of stock in himself. Five thousand belong to the government, 20K belong to the parents, and the remainder get used to feed, clothe, house, and educate the child. Once of legal age, the citizen takes possession of whatever stock remains. A system-wide stock exchange allows every citizen to trade in the shares of every other citizen – including oneself. The ultimate goal is to buy enough of your own stock to become the majority holder, which – in theory – allows you to do pretty much what you want. If you have special talents or skills, your stock becomes more expensive; same thing if you get a good job or become famous – even if it’s just for being famous, like Paris or Nicole.
Justin Cord, however, is a “new” breed of citizen: no one owns a single share of Justin Cord, and he also refuses to own a share of any person. For that stand on principal, Cord earns the undying enmity of the world’s most powerful corporation, CGI, in general; and CGI’s corporate hatchet man Hektor Sambianco in specific. Why the fear and loathing? To CGI and Hektor, Justin Cord – the “one free man” – represents the greatest threat in history to their economic and social system. On that basis alone, Cord must be neutralized: either forced to incorporate, or just plain terminated; either one would be fine. CGI is up against a formidable foe, however: Justin Cord has already had one lifetime of experience fending off financial and legal attacks – but he’s also in a world in which everyone has had a lifetime of experience in high finance. Can Cord remain
The Unincorporated Man? Stay tuned…
Speculative fiction can be especially difficult to write successfully: not only must the author fulfill his audience’s expectation of solid plot and believable characters, those readers also expect a future that’s a logical outgrowth of current trends. That probably explains the plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War era; the predictions of rampant sea-level rise in more current scifi. Readers cut authors slack on those predictions by way of a process called the willing suspension of disbelief. Even when we can’t quite accept an author’s vision, we’re still willing to adhere to the polite fiction that all things are possible – as long as everything hangs together in a coherent whole. An author who struggles to make his future fit that convention is an author who has failed his readers.
SoCal brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin base their first joint novel (the latter’s website cites three prior YA novels) on a single change that sweeps society, uniting every human under a single socioeconomic system; the system of personal incorporation. The brothers take particular pleasure in explaining how their prediction of a sort of hypercapitalism is the best of all possible worlds, alternating between paeans to the perfection of the market and the evils of any government larger than the brain of a brontosaurus. The system government’s only purpose is to let contracts to private companies for the largest possible projects – terraforming the other planets of the Solar System and developing interstellar travel, for instance. Any other functions handled by present-day governments – education, the justice system, transportation – are “better” handled by private corporations in the Kollins’ future.
| There is no argument that the Kollin brothers have postulated a future that, while unlikely, could occur under certain circumstances (this reader finds it both amusing and slightly chilling that the father of the personal incorporation movement was a “minor elected official from Alaska…”). That duty of the scifi writer has been satisfied – though the “universe” of personal incorporation has some obvious flaws that the writers either ignore or overlook; that's what "willling suspension of disbelief" is for. On the other two responsibilities of the author, the brothers meet with less success. The arc of the plot resembles a poorly-rigged tightrope: it seems taut at both ends, but sags badly in the middle. In the case of The Unincorporated Man, this is because vast chunks of the novel’s central third are riddled with gratuitous expository passages, presumably intended to laud the libertarian premises that underlie the fictional universe. Only a few minor characters are particularly likeable; and the major characters are so heavily stereotyped that they should be wearing Kabuki makeup. The writing is often clumsy; and the novel suffers from editing lapses, dangling plot threads, routine visits from the Coincidence Fairy, and a scattering of continuity problems. It ain’t gonna win awards from the proofreaders.
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It’s unusual, but not unheard-of, for a work of fiction to thinly disguise proselytization for a political position. A recent example of such a work was the late Michael Crichton’s heavy-handed
State of Fear.
The Unincorporated Man, however, takes the practice to extremes. Going beyond Crichton's rather genteel partisanship, however; the Kollin brothers take their lead from AM radio: that which is not part of their philosophy deserves no respect, and must instead be mocked. That means tht the government is ineffective by definition. The “tax man” has become an evil demon; who might as well have a big knife and a hook, and spend his nights lurking on lovers’ lane. Government courts need to ask for help from the private sector because they can’t afford anyone who isn’t simply mediocre. Oh, yes, the future universe is a capitalist paradise.
Yet there are still serpents in that paradise: the system’s most powerful corporate boardroom looks like an episode of “The Apprentice,” for instance; and the excesses of that same corporation (CGI) are every bit as repugnant as anything a democratic government has done (we’re not talking Idi Amin’s Uganda here…) – bribery is routine and murders are contracted with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. And if you’ve read this far and don’t mind a spoiler, by the end of the novel the characters suggest that incorporation is akin to slavery, and that anarchy would be preferable…
The Kollin brothers have written what amounts to a white paper for the Libertarian Party of the 24th Century – so be it. But don’t be fooled by all the accolades heaped on The Unincorporated Man by “fellow travelers.” Five hundred pages in defense of a futuristic libertopia notwithstanding, at its core the novel remains a work of science fiction: and it’s really not all that good.
