Corporate Speciation Events

In many ways, writing science-fiction and historical fiction is my literary destiny. What is futurism but applying what one has learned from studying history into the future? So, as a fiction writer, it makes sense that I'd be interested in historical and science fiction.

Historical fiction is easier in the sense that I don't have to create a setting. But one of the fascinations about science-fiction is precisely that. But for a long time, I have been daunted by the task of writing space opera - with coming up with a setting appropriate for space opera. Futurism gets in the way, or it has, tho' I think I'm breaking through with that. But it was getting in the way because imagining what technology in the future will actually so, after a certain point, is a fool's errand. The promises of even robust technologies like computers might not go where we want - it does very much depend on the actual nature of intelligence and whether we can actually make a computer intelligence. We just might not be smart enough. Much less the ultimate possibilities behind things like nanotechnology, biotech, or emerging neurological sciences.

So, I decided to come at it from the social dimension. After all, technology is hardly the only human art to improve - government and economics will change, too, tho' again there's the question of "into what?"

Then I mashed all this up in my head, and I came out with one of the creepier ideas I've had in a while: corporate speciation events of humans.

Now, one of the more common sci-fi government types is a corporatocracy, of course. But . . . I reflected that different corporations are good at different things. Now, if space flight is expensive to the extent that only corporate governments are capable of affording it, they'll spread their corporate values through the space they own, and it being corporate driven, they will lay material claim to stars and worlds for their corporations. Then I imagined that through great time and distance, these different corporations, who did different things well, would be responsible modifying their employees into the transhuman world.

It hit me. Corporations responsible for the way that humans evolve. I bet I could write something with that setting feature.