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.
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