Guest Essay: Thomas S. Roche: ‘The House of Corporate Horrors’

Thomas S. Roche is the author of The Panama Laugh, available now from Night Shade Books:

Ex-mercenary, pirate, and gun-runner Dante Bogart knows he’s screwed the pooch after he hands one of his shady employers a biological weapon that made the dead rise from their graves, laugh like hyenas, and feast upon the living. Dante tried to blow the whistle via a tell-all video that went viral — but that was before the black ops boys deep-sixed him at a secret interrogation site on the Panama-Colombia border.

When Dante wakes up in the jungle with the five intervening years missing from his memory, he knows he’s got to do something about the laughing sickness that has caused a world-wide slaughter. The resulting journey leads him across the nightmare that was the Panama Canal, around Cape Horn in a hijacked nuclear warship, to San Francisco’s mission district, where a crew of survivalist hackers have holed up in the pseudo-Moorish-castle turned porn-studio known as The Armory.

This mixed band of anti-social rejects has taken Dante’s whistle blowing video as an underground gospel, leading the fight against the laughing corpses and the corporate stooges who’ve tried to profit from the slaughter. Can Dante find redemption and save civilization?

The House of Corporate Horrors

by

Thomas S. Roche

Despite its outward appearance as a straightforward zombie apocalypse, my novel The Panama Laugh is a novel with an explicit science fictional premise. SF-horror has always been one of my favorite kinds of horror, partly because I started out as a hardcore SF reader, and didn’t start reading horror until I got into goth in my late teens.

But while the underlying premise might appear to be the idea that a virus could turn humanity into zombies, the important part of The Panama Laugh isn’t the biological science fiction — about which I don’t have the expertise, really, to make a meaningful scientific argument about should we or shouldn’t we? I was a medical writer for several years in my twenties, and I’ve made a certain habit of crankily critiquing on the gross mistreatment of science in mainstream news sources. But first and foremost I like to think of myself as an amateur pulp historian, and the 20th century has always my stomping ground. My chief interest in writing science fiction is is what’s happening to society, so The Panama Laugh is really intended as social science fiction crossed with horror and filtered through the hard-boiled style of an early-’60s crime novel.

Anyway, the important social observation that inspired The Panama Laugh is simply this, and I’m not the first one to have it:

By limiting the power of the public sector and privatizing things like the military, law enforcement and counter-terrorism, we as a globalized society offer a dangerous amount of power over to multinational corporations that are, at best, benignly amoral. At worst, they careen into soul-crushing evil.

The premise therefore became, just how evil could they be?

This seems, in retrospect, like a straightforward premise of the sort that’s common in cyberpunk: “Heartless monolithic multinationals do awful things to the little people.”

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not actually 100% anti-corporate. I’m a passionate supporter of small business, and I think when small businesses get big(ish) that’s just dandy. But I believe what we have today is a grotesque conflation of the public sector and the private, where corporations have been allowed to get too big to fail, and therefore have been handed the keys to the kingdom. Public money should not be used to bail out private enterprises — certainly not unless there is some kind of accountability for providing long-term benefit to the people whose money that is, rather than simply the stockholders.

These are current issues. They’re what I actually care about far more than whether humanity will ever reach the stars (which I care about, but in an abstract sense).

That’s why in writing a near-term SF-horror crossover, I wanted to bring it not into the world of 20-years-on, but in the world of today — and even five years ago. The consolidation of corporate power and the “preferred citizenship” of the corporation over the individual is something that was happening twenty years ago — and, in a less egregious way, forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred or even three hundred years ago, so it was important to me to have my SF-zombie apocalypse happen soon.

Because I have always been interested in military fiction, and in particular in military science fiction, I wanted to explore that idea of dangerous privatization from the perspective of a mercenary outfit.

I had just finished reading Jeffrey Scahill’s Blackwater, about the private military firm that made headlines in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s well-researched book but it has a particular ideological bent — Scahill is a reporter for The Nation, and is very strongly against the kind of military privatization that Blackwater (now known as Xe) represents. On the other side of the coin is Robert Young Pelton’s Licensed to Kill, which I see as very much a fanboy tract. Most other recent military nonfiction by Americans is from people who served in the military, rather than in private security firms. The military is a helpful perspective, but to me didn’t represent the experience I was writing about. So I’d been reading political and world-affairs nonfiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation in Darfur, Sudan, and the political environment in other world hotspots.

In writing military-social science fiction, I was interested in the experience not just of members of the “orthodox” military — meaning the actual military. Because I’ve always been interested in outlaws and vagabonds, I wanted to portray people who live on the fringes of legality. Wars are increasingly fought on smaller scales on behalf of corporate interests…and there are certainly those at Occupy Oakland who feel that’s exactly what happened last month in that embattled city. When public employees are the ones doing the shooting, they can, in theory at least, be held accountable to the people. But corporations have a million ways to evade public accountability — and they’ve had fifty years to get damned good at it.

I also posited a relationship between private military consulting firms and Colombian organized crime. These were relationships I was unaware actually existed until, after writing The Panama Laugh, I read the recent At The Devil’s Table, the confessions of an operative for Colombia’s Cali Cartel, which hired British mercenaries to assassinate Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. (They failed.) Most of the Colombian subplots got written out of the final draft of The Panama Laugh, but they’re still there lurking beneath the surface, I’m sure, waiting to spring out of my writing at random moments. One of the central “events” in The Panama Laugh is a terrorist attack on the Panama Canal, and I put it in quotes for reasons that will become obvious when you read the book. There, the privatization of counter-terrorism activity by smaller governments serves as part of the political context of the book.

Last but far from least, I threw in a heavy dose of viral media, with a Wikileaks-style organization both battling against corporate disinformation campaigns and working on behalf of them. The information age is where all modern history happens, and The Panama Laugh is about that, too.

But then, since The Panama Laugh is structured like a ’50s-or’60s-era crime thriller, everything moves so damned fast. Many of the subtexts were gone before I knew it — partially because a lot happens in the book, so I had to cut everything down to the bone to keep it moving and get to the end. It starts in Panama and ends in San Francisco, with stops along the way in Colombia, Oakland, and — virtually speaking — Cuba, Libya, Congo and points even further afield. I had to really grease things to get ‘em moving fast enough to make it to the end and bring the novel to what I hope is a satisfying conclusion. My hope is that it’s the sort of book one can read with pleasure in a single sitting — and that it bears up to a second reading.

I didn’t really set out to write a science fiction-horror-crime-noir crossover, but that seems to be the world I feel I’m living in. It’s a house of corporate horrors out there, so wacky that only science fiction can describe it.