Part of my series of posts on Scottish SFF in the run-up to this year’s WorldCon, focusing especially on the work of GOH Ken MacLeod.
(NB. I am discussing the plot and ending of the novels in detail here).
The three volumes of The Corporation Wars were published as hardbacks without dust jackets but with coloured illustrations and titles directly on the hard cover in the manner of ‘library editions’. However, they clearly weren’t intended only for library sales, so the format must be seen as a marketing decision, following a similar approach to that taken with Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, all three volumes of which were published by Fourth Estate in the UK in library-edition style in 2014. It’s not an approach you see that frequently and I’m not sure that it works (although in both cases it made me nostalgic for the school edition of the three volumes of what was still in the late 1970s, the Earthsea trilogy). I guess the thinking is that if the books are going to come out in close succession, you can’t expect readers to stump up for traditional hardbacks, but you’re still hoping to price the volumes above paperback level. In any case, The Corporation Wars is probably more like a long novel than a trilogy; although apparently the UK one-volume paperback edition was not consecutively paginated, but simply collates the three PDFs. In other words, this was not one of Orbit’s finest moments.
Even with a more typical format, however, The Corporation Wars would probably still feel like the odd one out among MacLeod’s novels. It’s fairly far future – being set mostly in the 32nd century with some late 21st century and a final sequence 74,317 years in the future. Only Learning the World has anything like a comparable timeframe but tonally, despite containing humour, The Corporation Wars is quite different with fewer characters to warm to (although I do like Carlos and Nicole). Coming as it did after a run of five standalone near-future novels, it was also a bit of a shock to read because it didn’t seem like a MacLeod novel. I should say at this point that I have benefitted from discussing the trilogy recently with Farah Mendlesohn and Niall Harrison and we did explore the question of what actually drives these books – whether it’s ideas or action? Normally, we might expect this to be a combination of both, but here the different components don’t always seem to be pulling in the same direction. I think this is largely due to the set-up of the trilogy within a specific political paradigm, which I failed to understand when I originally read Dissidence back in 2016.
The context is that the 32nd century ‘present’ of most of the novel was set up by the late 21st century conflict between the ‘the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax’ and ‘the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax’. (While neither of these are similar to the ‘Naxals’ of Intrusion, the terms are clearly related – I’ll come back to this in my post on Intrusion). The credo of the Axle is
At the fag-end of the twenty first century, immortality was the only thing worth dying for. The only celebrity worth dying for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World problems.
In other words, accelerate through late-stage capitalism to the point of full automation and genuine freedom, which doesn’t consist of infinite choice (as in the false promises of capitalism) but the condition of being able to freely develop body and mind. Time would no longer be divided between ‘fake work’, ‘make-work’, and ‘the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure’, but involve what Marx described as unalienated work – simultaneously meaningful, creative and transformatively productive – enabling meaningful individual and collective fulfilment (a situation not entirely dissimilar to that which holds on the generation starship in Learning the World).
However, while this all seemed relatively simple to the Ax (and, indeed, to this reviewer), unfortunately not everyone agreed. Hence, the Reaction: ‘the ultimate counter-reaction, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution’. The aim of the Rax is to use all the tools of modernity to return to a period before modernity:
With intelligence enhancement you could have an aristocracy, a monarchy, or for that matter a master race that really was superior to common folk. With universal connection and surveillance you could make its rule stick. Top-down control of society had at last become possible at the very moment in history when it became most necessary.
This divide is familiar to us – certainly in Europe and the US where it is ripping apart the existing liberal democratic order – even though it is often presented in different terms. For example, although the British media often treat the ‘culture wars’ as a US import and distraction, they are very much an expression of diehard counter-revolution and the attempt to instigate extreme authoritarian values in the face of the trend to liberalisation within society. While binary mindsets are rarely helpful, they have regularly occurred throughout human history (indeed, some might say that such conflicts have shaped history) as not just a product of different interests but also of the tendency of populations towards what anthropologists call ‘schismogenesis’. Furthermore, such divisions are not generally resolved by everyone getting together and finding the values they hold in common. Generally, the conflict is unavoidable and one side has to lose. However, it is also possible that such divisions might get resolved by the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The Corporation Wars explores this latter possibility and presents it very much as a satire (complete with playful allusions to Hollywood attempts to reconcile Ax and Rax viewpoints such as Avatar). It is because it is very much a satire, that the novel sometimes has an exaggerated hyperreal quality that marks it out from Macleod’s other fiction.
Much of the early humour of the first volume, Dissidence, concerns Carlos waking up in the 32nd century in a sim and plaintively enquiring who won the war: ‘“Is it communism yet?” “Certainly not!”’ But nor is it the Rax. Instead, humanity has enjoyed a prolonged peace under the guidance of ‘The Direction’, which is basically a set of machine algorithms running a capitalist economy in which everyone’s an equal shareholder: ‘Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like’. This system seems very similar to that in Learning the World, raising the question as to whether this is close enough to communism to satisfy the Ax? Certainly, one of those who wakes up alongside Carlos, Beauregard, thinks that the Acceleration might as well have won. Although he has little time for ‘the rabble who rallied to the Reaction’s banner’, he was only in the Ax as an undercover British Army agent. Therefore, he finds himself unhappy with the world he finds himself in, as do – as becomes clear in the second volume, Insurgence – hardcore members of both the Ax and the Rax. Within this unfolding framework, the reader has to consider how to react to the Direction: whether it can be seen as generally good or somewhat dystopian?
There is another narrative point of view. In an interlinked plot, the robots ‘Seba’ and ‘Rocko’, working for rival companies, become conscious as a result of trying to internally model each others’ internal models of each other. They quickly gather other robots to their cause and effectively secede from the Direction by evading the latter’s attempts to destroy them. Indeed, it is the conscious robot problem which leads the Direction to start waking long-dead soldiers of the Acceleration and download them into sims in order to train them to fight the rebel robots in far-off solar system. As Nicole the local embodiment of the Direction, and Carlos’s lover, points out, while the AIs running the mission and the simulation have constraints, the rebel robots do not and so Carlos and his comrades should take note of this. As it happens, though, the robots are easily the most sympathetic characters in the novels and so we, the readers, are not inclined to treat them as a threat. Indeed, after MacLeod has dispensed with all the usual arguments about sims – if we know sims are possible then the chances are we’ve always lived in a sim, why not just run millions of years of post-scarcity civilisation in a sim – and come back to the real-world question of how the relationship between humans and AIs might best be organised, Carlos eventually plumps for supporting the rebel robots in their attempt to become freebots.
One of the best lines in the novels regarding human-AI relationships occurs as pillow talk between Carlos and Nicole, when he tells her that ‘I think you’re a person like me’: ‘“Oh no!” Turning over, looking into his eyes. “I’m not a person like you.”’ In other words, there is still plenty of MacLeod’s trademark comedy of manners amidst some very long action sequences and complicated plot juggling. While much of this is enjoyable, it doesn’t always add up to a greater whole. Ideas are always a key component of MacLeod’s work but here, with exceptions such as the exchange above, they often overshadow the characters and become deterministic. On one level, this is no doubt intentional on MacLeod’s part, because the point of the satire is that these kind of ideas – whether accelerationism (or longtermism or that fantasy for people opposed to socialism, ‘effective altruism’) or reaction – do tend to become deterministic and lead people to forget the truth that ‘evolution is smarter than you’. On the other hand, though, the novels only fully work if the readership is willing to read different sections of the novel in slightly different registers because the satire, ideas, characters, and comedy of manners are not entirely seamlessly woven together. Compared to MacLeod’s best novels such as Learning the World and Intrusion, The Corporation Wars is a long shaggy dog story. I like where it ends up – and the ending is certainly earned – but I’m not convinced we necessarily had to go through every stage of the journey to get there.
One final point worth discussing derives from the role Locke (the social theorist) plays in The Corporation Wars, which is much greater than the passing mention in Learning the World, but similarly relevant to the shared question of how we treat natural resources in space. Ostensibly, when Carlos and his comrades are decanted into bodies and deployed in space to fight the rebel robots, they are working on behalf of a legal corporation, Locke Provisos. ‘Enough and as good left over’, as Beauregard explains at one point, was Locke’s ‘justification for taking resources from nature and making them private property’. By the second volume, Newton, the Rax agent, is thinking about Locke as the inventor of liberalism, ‘the first political ideology’, and the origin of the ruinous road to democracy and the ‘rabble’ getting ideas that they had a say in how things were done. By the third volume, Carlos has come to the conclusion that: ‘The fight against the Rax, and the fight to free the freeboots from the Direction’s constraints, must surely be the strangest and most far-flung battle of the bourgeois revolution, and perhaps the last’. In this respect, the three volumes together comprise an alternative dialectical account of capitalist history culminating in a far-future communist resolution which takes the form of what one character describes as ‘an endless soap opera, set in a retirement resort’. This description reminds me of the work of another Scottish SF writer. Indeed, I’m inclined to argue that The Corporation Wars provides a better worked out model for how we get from here (the wonderful and whacky 21st century) to the Culture (or near enough) than anything by Banks himself. Let’s leave the last word to Nicole, now human:
‘But in that soap opera,’ said Nicole, earnestly, ‘we have the last laugh. Because unlike the mindless replication of the AIs, we do indeed die in the end. New generations replace us. Humanity will evolve. Death is the deal we strike for the future.’
Prospective Cultures 