"The Unincorporated Man": SciFi Like Ron Paul Might Write It
Written: Nov 24 '09 (Updated Nov 25 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: an interesting premise
Cons: completely buried by political pronouncements
The Bottom Line: The Kollins brothers came up with an interesting premise for their first novel, The Unincorporated Man, then bludgeoned it to death with their politics.
scmrak's Full Review: Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin - The Unincorporated ...
The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin
Justin Cord woke from a nap that put old man Van Winkle to shame; woke to gaze upon an angel. Neela Harper wasn't really an angel though, she was a "reanimation specialist." Lots had happened in the three centuries since Cord crawled into his supersecret cryogenic suspension unit and "disappeared." Society has changed immensely: not long after Cord died the first time, the world economy collapsed with society close behind. The center of society became Alaska, and the hardy self-sufficient types who'd populated America's last frontier had interesting ideas about the order of things. In short, every living human is now a corporation - forty billion corporations, from Mercury out to the Oort Cloud, following a deceptively simple model: At birth, everyone accrues 100,000 shares of stock. Five thousand belong to the government; 20K are for the parents; and the remainder are cashed in to feed, clothe, house, and educate the kid. Once he reaches legal age, a citizen takes possession of whatever's left over. A system-wide stock exchange allows everybody to trade in the shares of everybody - including yourself. The goal is to buy enough of your own stock to become the majority holder, which - in theory - allows you the freedom to do pretty much what you want. If you have special talents or skills, your stock becomes more expensive; likewise if you get a good job or become famous - even if it's just for being famous, like a Paris or a Nicole.
Justin Cord, however, was a "new" kind of citizen: no one owned a share of Justin Cord, and he refused to own a share of any person. For that stand on principal, Cord earned 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" - represented the greatest conceivable threat to the world's socioeconomic system. On that basis alone, Cord had to be neutralized: either forced to incorporate or just plain terminated; either would be fine. CGI was up against a formidable foe, though: Justin Cord had already had an entire lifetime of fending off financial and legal attacks - but he was also in a world in which everyone had had a lifetime of experience in high finance. Could Cord remain The Unincorporated Man? Stay tuned...
Speculative fiction may be especially difficult to write successfully: not only must an author fulfill the audience's expectation for a solid plot and believable characters, those readers also expect a future that can be logical extrapolated from the present. That probably explains the plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War era, or predictions of unchecked sea-level rise in more current scifi. Readers cut authors slack on those predictions by using their willing suspension of disbelief. Even if 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 force a future to fit that convention is an author who fails his readers.
SoCal brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin base their first joint project (Dani's website cites three YA novels) on a sea change that sweeps society, uniting every human under a single socioeconomic system: personal incorporation. The brothers take particular pleasure in explaining how their predicted flavor of hypercapitalism is the best of all possible worlds, alternating between paeans to the infallibility of the market and the evils of any government larger than the brain of a brontosaurus. Their system government's sole 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. All other functions handled by present-day governments - education, the justice system, transportation - are "better" handled by private corporations in the Kollins brothers' future.
There is no argument that the Kollins postulate 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 authors overlook or ignore. On the other two responsibilities of the scifi author, the brothers meet with less success. The plot resembles a poorly-rigged tightrope: it's taut at both ends, but sags badly in the middle. In the case of The Unincorporated Man, sagging is because vast chunks of the novel's middle are gratuitous expository passages that laud the libertarian premises underlying the fictional universe. Only a few minor characters are particularly likeable; and the major characters are so stereotypical that they might as well be acting in Kabuki. The writing is frequently clumsy; and the novel suffers from editing lapses, dangling plot threads, the occasional visit from the Coincidence Fairy, and a scattering of continuity problems. It ain't gonna win awards from the proofreaders. And this aside to the Kollins and their editor: Campbelltown Springbank 21 is not "whiskey."
It's unusual, but not unheard-of, for works of fiction to thinly disguise proselytization for political positions. A recent example of such a work was Michael Crichton's often heavy-handed anti-global warming volume, State of Fear. The Unincorporated Man, however, takes this practice to extremes. Going beyond Crichton, the Kollin brothers take their lead from AM radio. That which is not part of their philosophy does not deserve respect, and must instead be mocked: 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 beg for help from the private sector because they can't afford anyone who isn't simply mediocre. Ahhh, but the future universe is a capitalist paradise.
Yet there are still serpents in that paradise: the system's most powerful corporate boardroom reminds one of 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 barely 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 essentially 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." The lengthy defense of its futuristic libertopia notwithstanding, at its core the novel is still a work of science fiction: and it's really not that good at what it does.
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