☆ Three novels with the rugged, can-do spirit of the California Dream (part 2)
Depicted: Santa Rosa and San Jacinto mountains. Image by Bureau of Land Management
Some books portraying the free market in action get a bit gritty and dark. Others (like three rec’d by Bay Area English profs, below) spotlight the successes that may come from perseverance, thoughtfulness, and Silicon Valley-style creativity. An Opp Now exclusive.
Dean Rader, University of San Francisco English professor: While it is not a book that considers conventional notions of entrepreneurship, Toni Morrison’s marvelous 2008 novel A Mercy explores, in fascinating ways, what it means to start something from scratch, whether it is a plantation or a new country. Set in the late 1680s in rural New York, the novel follows the financial, logistical, and ethical challenges faced by Jacob Vaark, an immigrant who is trying to build a sustaining farm without slaves. However, as payment for a large debt, he agrees to take on a young girl, Florens.
Florens can read and write, so the financially concerned part of Jacob hopes she can help him and the farm. As it turns out, Florens was abandoned by her family and has no one; so the benevolent side of Jacob thinks he can truly help her. Even so, he wonders if he is doing the right thing for her, for him, for the farm. These questions are played out against the larger backdrop of Colonial America, itself a kind of entrepreneurial experiment as it figures out who it is, what it wants to be, what its values are, and how it will survive.
Being an entrepreneur is about making hard choices, taking risks, and treating clients and employees with dignity. I know of no other novel that interrogates these issues more poignantly on both a local and national level. It is a great book.
Scott Lankford, Foothill College English professor emeritus: Two recent celebrated science fiction novels present inspiring visions of how business, finance, and tech entrepreneurship might someday drive sustainable growth and development—even in the face of the Anthropocene's onrushing climate catastrophes.
The first of these novels is the 2017 climate-fiction thriller by the legendary Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson. Titled New York 2140, it's set in a future New York City drowned and half-destroyed by a fifty-foot rise in global sea level, which makes the opening scenes seem hopeless. But not after Robinson's initially random-seeming cast of characters—including a self-absorbed young finance bro and the future Chairman of the Federal Reserve—all band together to find innovative ways to reengineer the entire global financial system on a more sustainable basis.
My second recommendation is the 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning cli-fi novel The Overstory, this time penned by a former tech-bro turned Stanford English professor (now retired) named Richard Powers. Powers' unlikely assemblage of fictional characters includes a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic Computer Science genius (and centibillionaire) who's launched the dominant video game platform of his generation. Still not satisfied, this Silicon Valley native shocks his game design team by pivoting the entire platform away from gaming. The platform begins integrating an AI—trained on global planetary intelligence—to send out mosquito-sized AI drone data scrapers to study the entire biological terrestrial sentient system.
The end result, Powers hints in his final pages, is the evolutionary emergence of a "Multilarity" far more sustainable (and infinitely more powerful) than any of the narcissistic pipe dreams today's AI-wizards naively believe will send them off to live on Mars. But only after they've finished ravaging planet Earth completely.
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