Deregulation as dystopia: Corporate hegemony in twentieth-century American Science Fiction

This project is intended to demonstrate that a particular subgenre of science fiction, the dystopian narrative, has produced the most trenchant critiques of the modern corporation in twentieth-century American fiction. If literature reflects the anxieties of the times, then the science fiction produced in the United States after the Second World War expresses a profound anxiety about the modern corporation. Because it cognitively estranges its audiences by giving them new perspectives from which to reflect on the sociopolitical, scientific, and economic issues of their times, I argue science fiction---and, more specifically, its dystopian subgenre---is the ideal narrative form for expressing popular anxieties about the corporation. To substantiate this, I look at historical trends within science fiction since it emerged in the United States during the twentieth century, as well as the emergence of the dystopian impulse alongside the rise of the modern multinational corporation. I then examine what I believe are three representative texts---Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)---within a specific tradition of dystopian science fiction that I refer to as the corporate dystopia, and identify how each text critically engages with the growing presence of corporate influence in every facet of American society.