ESCP Europe

Langue

French

Publication year

20/11/2019

The Space Merchants (Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, 1953) and Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling, 1988) are two science fiction novels in which large corporations are essential to the story. This article follows the journey of their respective characters and places the books in the context of the period of time in which each was published. In doing so, it seeks to analyze the possible evolution of large corporations. There is a gap of thirty-five years between the two novels and they reflect both common and different (sometimes opposite) conceptions of the modern corporation. Both imagine future societies where this corporate structure will play an increasingly central role. We discuss three main themes in the article. One theme concerns the corporate profile of the future: what will its functions be, and how will it be organized? Based on the forecasts of the authors studied, it appears inevitable that the corporation of the future will be more powerful. A second theme concerns the society in which these corporations will exist. In this regard, internationalization and globalization need to be addressed, as does the question of whether the corporation will overtake or subvert the nation state. The final theme concerns the concept of work life in the future, based on insights from the characters of both novels. The futures that were imagined continue to resonate deeply with contemporary theories and observations of the times in which they were written. Although they were writing about the corporations of tomorrow, the authors of these novels also had much to say about the world they lived in and its failures and promises.