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The title is clearly a reference to The Unincorporated Man [0], a sci-fi novel set in a future where everyone is incorporated at birth and exchanges their shar
by Blahah 12y ago
The title is clearly a reference to The Unincorporated Man [0], a sci-fi novel set in a future where everyone is incorporated at birth and exchanges their shares for goods and services, generally losing majority in themselves in order to get an education, house, etc.
However, they don't mention the novel in the piece. It's worth a read (not particularly well executed, but some imaginative exploration of the key idea).
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporated-man https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat...
- geuis 12y agoThe first book in the series is pretty good. It poses some interesting questions and overall is a fun story. The whole story goes off the rails in the later books.
- yzzxy 12y agoI've only read the first book, but the personal incorporation system described in it seemed... half-baked. I remember thinking about the way their economic system would interact and finding all kinds of logical inconsistencies. It's an interesting concept to be sure but I feel like it was, as you mentioned, not very well capitalized on.
- angersock 12y agoThe only real problem with that book--and it's a big one--is that the main character is The Competent Man, and all kinds of story things basically don't matter because we know, ahead of time, that everything will work out. Some of the ideas are played with really well: the whole notion of stock and whatnot, the touch on how terrible VR could be, and so forth. There's a lot of dumb stuff too, though: no real exploration of the space stuff worth mentioning, no real character development (characters are basically static, even the evil ones--compare with, say, Doctorow's Makers), awkward singularity/AI plot points... It's not a bad book, and it has some fun ideas in it, but it's not a great execution (as has been said).
- Tycho 12y agoRecent Charles Stross novel, Neptune's Brood, had a similar concept: you are born/created with 'instantiation debt' which you spend the first years of your life working to pay off.
- eru 12y agoSaturn's Children, by the same author, also has people as corporations. Said people are all robots, though, because humanity has become extinct.
- will_work4tears 12y agoOh wow, I was talking about this book the other day with a coworker, but for the life of me couldn't figure out the book's name. Thanks for posting this.