Is it really so hard to understand what a "corporation" is? The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

 Yes, we have the midterm elections this week, but I'd like to take a moment aside to grumble about another book that bugged the crap out of me.  Oy, was this a stinker.  I know, with the possible end of democracy staring us down, it may seem petty to whine about a bad novel, but that's actually the point.  The stakes are lower, so I do not feel as alarmed.  Let me have this.  Would I rather the novel have been good?  Yes.  Could I have put the book down at any time?  In theory, yes.  But at least I can grumble.  So grumble, I shall.  Do I recommend The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley?  Have you been paying attention?

Anyway, the title is obviously a reference, but the novel is about as deep as the title and that reference.  It was one of the 2020 Hugo nominees for Best Novel, and... no.  Arkady Martine won for A Memory Called Empire, which was a far superior novel (although I think Tamsyn Muir's Gideon The Ninth was a better book).  By 2020, though, the key to a Hugo nomination was basically wokeism, and this book was the most insufferably woke thing I have ever read.  Oy.  Let's go through this.  The premise is that the future is some sort of dystopian, corporate hellscape.  Totally original!  Anyway, there is a war with breakaway commies on Mars.  Get it?  Red?  Mars?  Yeah, that's about how deep the book is.

So your POV character is Dietz, who enlists after Sao Paolo is destroyed, blah, blah, war.  Dietz turns into Billy Pilgrim, but way less funny, and way less insightful.  Unstuck in time.  Here's the shell of the nut of the book.  You have a basic war narrative, from basic training to deployment to semi-resolution.  That's just rote, by the numbers, drivel.  There's an unstuck in time plot.  If you aren't going to add something to Vonnegut and others, why bother?  Then there's the dystopian, corporate hellscape, which is just kind of a genre of its own, and there isn't much new here.  Point being, there's really nothing new here.

The plot twists don't even deserve to be called twists.  There are these interludes of an interrogation.  The prisoner was caught by some Earth corporation on a sabotage mission, and it is blindingly obvious from the beginning that it is future-Dietz being interrogated after defecting to Mars, and that the interrogator is the agent who dragged off Dietz's dad years earlier.  Yet the "reveal" is put off until the end, like I'm supposed to be shocked, or something.  Like I didn't figure that out from the beginning.  What, am I fucking stupid?  [Yes, but not so stupid that I cannot figure out a plot so predictably inane.]

Then there's the reveal that Mars isn't the culprit, and that the corporations are just playing some shell game.  Yeah, like I didn't see that coming either?  This was immediately, blindingly obvious, and here's why.  Sao Paolo was "blinked."  Here one moment, gone the next.  The whole schtick for deployment is with teleportation technology that breaks down the soldiers and converts them into light, so that they travel at the speed of light, and rematerialize wherever they are going.  Why, it's almost like Sao Paolo got treated to that very same thing!  Weird, right?  Or maybe you shouldn't be an absolute, fucking idiot when you read, and you should figure out this stuff from the beginning.

So yeah, the corporations are fighting each other, because they have to be the real villains, power to the people, viva la revolucion, workers of the world, unite, and all that stupid shit.

For fuck's sake.

And of course, the novel is insufferably woke.  For a dystopian, corporate hellscape, the military is amazingly woke.  Like, if you are a modern lefty, corporate stuff aside, you'd look at their social ideas and say, wow!  Heaven on Earth!  They're so progressive!  And if that strikes you as just a bit incongruous, well, that's because Hurley is writing incongruously.  That's what happens when the genre forces certain conventions on you (which you, the author, gladly adopt).

So here's a thing in modern sci-fi action.  No male action heroes allowed.  Militaries have to be female.  Why?  Because of course.  So the military is largely female, and your POV character, Dietz, is of course, a bisexual woman of color, but here's the thing about the writing.  Hurley wanted to try the Scalzi Lock In thing.  If you don't know what that is, go read the book.  It is a far superior book.  For a variety of reasons, Scalzi avoided any pronouns for the main character, "Chris," so that you never know if the protagonist is a man or a woman because it doesn't matter, and in fact, it is relevant to the world that it doesn't matter.  Yet, because the POV character is an FBI agent, if you are unaware of what is going on in the writing, you are likely to read Chris as male because of societal biases.  It is very cool.

Hurley was late to the game, and as with Billy Pilgrim, she stole the gimmick, but she also couldn't follow it through.  She couldn't bear to not have you know that Dietz was a woman, because Dietz is a soldier, and wokeness!  So, she just waited until the end for the reveal.

Really?  Either go Lock In, or don't bother, but the thing is, I assumed that with this much wokeness-- everyone is bi and polyamorous and all that-- Dietz would be a woman in Hurley's head.  I recognized the writing gimmick because I had read it before, and I knew exactly what Hurley was doing.  The difference is that in Scalzi's head, Chris is not of a determinate sex/gender.  Hurley just couldn't let it be that way.  Why?  It was more important for her to have the soldier be female.

But she wanted credit for the writing gimmick too, and that was just annoying, because as with everything else, you could see it coming, even though the whole thing was told in non-linear time.

OK, so there's the background grumbling.  And now to repeat a point I have made before, most recently about another science fiction series, which fell to wokeness.

What is a corporation?  This is not a trick question.  If you are a lefty, a corporation is a big, evil money thing.  That's it.  Big, evil money thing, money and evil being essentially synonymous anyway.

No.  Bad commie.  No borscht for you.  (Of course, communism leads to famines, so you ain't gettin' any borscht anyway!)

Empirical question:  do most businesses succeed, or fail?

Most fail.

What happens when they fail?  They have debts.  Who pays those debts?

If you start a business, and you are just a sole proprietor, nothin' fancy, you do.  And that will bankrupt you, which means that it is basically stupid to start a business.  And that makes it difficult for an economy to function.

Solution:  "Incorporate."  A corporation is a limited liability partnership, consisting of one or more people, such that if there are liabilities incurred, they are incurred by the corporation, rather than by you.  So if your business goes belly-up, creditors can collect money from whatever assets the corporation has, but they cannot come after your assets.  It is the rational way to operate, and without it, businesses cannot function.  An economy cannot function.

There are two things to note.  First, when we are talking about for-profit corporations (there is such a thing as a non-profit corporation, but that's tangential), they have to be engaged in a thing called...

...

[drum roll]

COMMERCE.

They have to be selling either goods or services to someone.  Otherwise, what's the point?

Second, none of this makes any sense unless these "corporations" exist under the aegis of a contract enforcing mechanism called a "state."

The corporations in Hurley's book?  They make nothing, they sell nothing, and they do nothing.  Except govern.

You know what we call those?

States.  Or sometimes, "nations."  Whatever.  You know what they aren't?

Corporations.

Why not?  No commerce, no liability under laws within a contract-enforcing system.  They aren't corporations.  They're just states.

And in a lot of ways, very leftist states.  Totally hip to all the leftist ideas of gender and orientation, and all that.

Suffrage?  No.  That's where they fall short.  There are different classes:  citizens, residents, and "ghouls," who are basically scavengers, and only citizens can vote and all that, but this isn't really about corporate rulership.  It's just suffrage.  Hurley is just too fucking clueless to know what a corporation is, or why they exist, and hence she doesn't even know what she is railing against.  She is railing against a society that lacks suffrage rights, but is in every other way fundamentally leftist, and her own dream society because she cannot bring herself to write un-woke, even for dystopian purposes.

This book sucked.

I took a break from modern sci-fi for a while because of suffocating wokeness, and this was the kind of thing I meant.  Oy.  Don't read this book.  Unless you feel like hate-reading it.  Or maybe you're hate reading my critique of it.  Whatever.

Southern Avenue, "Move Into The Light," live.  The studio version is on Be The Love You Want.