Free at Last: a review of "The Unincorporated Man"

I am unfortunately that kind of person who has a hard time not finishing a book once I've begun it, even after I've decided it's worthless, but thankfully I'm finally free, free at last! from the nearly 500-page long The Unincorporated Man (2009) after putting it down and picking it up over the course of about a month and a half.  I'm almost exactly a year late with this review, as Annalee Newitz at io9 already said just about everything I have to say about it back in March of 2009, but I feel like I have to do something to recoup the time I lost reading it, so I'll waste just a little more time writing a blog post about it.

But I won't be as mean as a feel I could be, partly because this is the first novel written by brothers Dani and Eyton Kollin but also because, according to Dani's personal blog, their mother passed away this winter.  So...my condolences.

The premise of this novel is that a brilliant industrialist from our time, Justin Cord, is un-frozen three hundred years in the future into a world that, having survived both the Grand Collapse of the global economy and a plague of Virtual Reality that almost wiped out humanity with sloth, has become a utopia spanning the solar system thanks to the wonders of nanotechnology and society's universal embrace of an extreme form of market capitalism in which people themselves are incorporated and split into shares.  The (very limited) government owns 5% of an individual's stock, one's parents start out with 20%, and another 50% can be sold to whomever cares to invest in that individual's future productivity.  Most people own less than a majority of themselves.

The conflict is that Justin Cord views personal incorporation as a form of slavery and so refuses to comply with it, remaining instead the titular "hero."  This singular attitude of resistance threatens to resurrect once more the fractiousness and internecine strife characteristic of the "pre-GC" civilizations and shatter the supposedly dynamic and adaptable harmony of corporate culture.  (What would they have done if they ever met up with aliens?  Maybe you'll find out in the sequels.  I won't, but maybe you will.)

In spite of how nakedly Heinleinian the novel is in its masculine advocacy of self-righteous libertarianism, and also in spite of how fanboy-ish the tone of the novel was when it came to the practical magic of nanotech, I definitely enjoyed a lot of the world-building aspects.

Most of the standard tropes have been done better and more insightfully in other places.  For example, Pohl and Kornbluth at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum had a somewhat more adventuresome take on what happens when corporations take the place of nation-states in The Space Merchants.  Damon Knight, in Dio, thinks more deeply about the relation between freedom and death in a world where technology makes us virtually immortal than the Kollin brothers are probably capable.  And Harlan Ellison, when it comes to examining the cultural relativity of taboos (as the Kollins do primarily through through the "perverse" relationship between Justin Cord and his re-animationist/love interest, Neela), beats these fledgling writers hands-down in "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," in which it is no industrialist but Jack the Ripper who finds himself awake in the far future.

Nevertheless, personal incorporation is a pretty novel idea, and the Kollins for the most part do an acceptable job thinking through the details.

But there are, regrettably, at least three major flaws that mar this debut work:

• The protagonist is completely unlikeable.  Scifi has it's bastards...the work of authors like Zelazny and Gaiman is chock full of them, but Justin Cord is just a whiny, charmless baby...like Harry Potter or the girl from the Twilight Series. Childish.  Also, unconvincing as an eccentric billionaire industrialist.  He brought a box of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch with him to the future because it was his favorite cereal.  That suggests to me that Cord is a little too transparently based on the lives of the scifi fans who wrote him.
• The narration is about as childish as Cord.  It is uncertain whether the narrative voice is from the past (our time) and therefore partially justified in calling so explicitly and so often on 9/11 as a cultural frame of reference or from the future, and the result is awkward, superficially sci-fi idioms like "stop on a credit" instead of "stop on a dime."  I guess I should be grateful that at least they're not eating space-burgers and washing them down with space-beer.
• Lastly, and most infuriatingly, the "freedom" Cord so values is never really articulated.  According to one character, Cord's definition of freedom "wasn't just semantic, it was intrinsic" (187), but Cord's calls for freeeeedoooom! never amount to more than post-Braveheart sloganeering.  You're really comparing incorporation to southern slavery?  I'd compare it to having credit bureaus.  

So, all in all, pretty crummy.  But you don't have to take my word for it.  The second book in the series, The Unincorporated War, comes out next month.

Politics: My "Meh"-nifesto

A few days ago, Herman Berliner authored a brief post over at Inside Higher Ed about the complaints he occasionally receives as an administrator about faculty members who blog about politics.  Berliner has no trouble separating classroom performance from political belief:

Faculty are very smart individuals and there is no shortage of political (and other) opinions emanating from faculty. And often, I find that my opinion is different from and at times in total disagreement with positions taken by individual faculty. But it would be a bad use of my time and energy to confront opinions which faculty have every right to have. As an educator, I choose to focus on the educational forest, not the opinion trees.

Good for him.  Still, my decision to blog anonymously is at least in part motivated by my hesitation in having the things I write here associated with my professional identity.   In class I tend to keep my political and other beliefs from the students.  That seems proper to me, as well as rhetorically wise...because what if they've been raised to disagree with something I claim to believe?  That might cause them to turn off to any future lesson, regardless of its content.

I accomplish this near-neutrality by telling my students, usually early on in the semester (if not on the first day then the first time we discuss something overtly political or religious), that they shouldn't necessarily believe that I mean anything I say.  And, in fact, I often play devil's advocate or argue an issue from multiple, conflicting sides.  In my comp-rhet classes I'll even make deliberately flawed arguments designed so that my students can call me out, overcoming any automatic deference they might maintain towards my authority.

But the real reason I link to Berliner's post is not to occasion some meditation about partisanship and neutrality in the classroom context, but because I've been thinking of becoming more explicitly political in this context.  I waste a depressing amount of my time following American politics and reading the analyses of various commentators, and while it's not my intention to fashion this blog into one more surface for the echoes to bounce against, I thought some sort pronouncement of political convictions was in order.

To begin with, I'm not much in the way of a political scientist and I don't have any principled convictions about tax policy, deficits, interest rates or really any of that shit.  I guess I don't make enough money yet, or else I don't value enough the money I have.  I also don't have any principled preference for "big" or "small" government, except that it seems to me that any institution, large or small, that is too inflexible to adapt to changing circumstances will inevitably fall before them.  And it could probably go without saying that I don't think much of what is described as "left" and "right" in the US.  "Thinking" and "unthinking" would be a meaningful way to divide politicians for me, but it certainly doesn't map onto left and right.  Exhausting the usefulness of labels in politics, I probably see myself as a "left-libertarian" in the style of these guys.

I suffer from a few ideals, I suppose, though they are unfortunately the sort that tend to lack deep-pocketed advocacy.  I support civil liberties.  I think that the drug war is a shameful, murdering farce that empowers criminals (both federal and other) and fuels an ongoing multi-polar fire-fight on our own continent.  I wouldn't particularly mind if the US disbanded its army.  Also, it would be great if you could be an atheist in public and still get elected here.

But although there are occasional moments when the difference between is and ought causes me some pain, I also see myself first and foremost as a pragmatist and admire that characteristic when I rarely observe it in a politician.

Well, that's going to suffice for now.  Hardly a manifesto, and in fact, despite its brevity a little tiresome.  I promise that my next post will be more interesting.  I was planning on reviewing Tarkovsky's 1979 sci-fi thinker, The Stalker, but I just watched Alex Rivera's 2008 sci-fi thinker, Sleep Dealer, and I liked it and it feels a little bit more relevant, so I might do that first.