Political Horror, or Governments as Living Gods and Corporations as Hostile Alien Lifeforms

In the third of my posts on collective villainy, I'll talk about genre. Now, you might read a whole lot of books and articles about political crimes and governmental shenanigans, but no matter how all-powerful they get you've probably never thought of them as literal gods. You might read all the business publications in the world and still never conceive of even the most predatory corporations as hostile alien lifeforms. Is the Federal Government of the United States of America a berserk Titan? Is Enron a collective vampire? Is Nazi Germany the manifestation of one of the dreaded Elder Gods? It may or may not be true in the real world (but see the last two posts), but the answer is a definite yes in the new genre of fiction I'm creating, a hybrid I'm calling political horror.

When I say "political horror", many of you probably think of such dystopian novels as 1984, Brave New World, and Darkness at Noon. They are indeed the forerunners to political horror. But I have something different in mind.

Dictel Corporation, the US Government, and Other Collective Vampires

Last time, I wanted to make it clear that Dictel Corporation is the villain of Bad Company and the rest of the Dictel trilogy. However, I'd forgotten one thing: the nature of the beast. I'd written about this subject a lot during NaNoEdMo on the EdMo forums, but I never wrote any entries here in Spanner's World about it in March. So I'm making it clear right now that Dictel is no ordinary institutional menace. Or rather, institutional menaces are more than just institutions. They are collective vampires.

Isn't the Dictel Trilogy Supposed to Have a Villain Called Dictel Corporation?

Tonight I realized that I haven't paid enough attention to Dictel Corporation in the Dictel trilogy. Now, you can't have a good thriller without a strong villain, and Dictel is one of the nastiest collective villains in fiction. We're talking a combination of Blackwater, Halliburton, Enron, a big weapons maker, and the Mafia. Even better, there's an dark occult secret behind the company, and a cult it's promoting as a replacement for a dying Christianity. Cross an anticorporate thriller with something like The Da Vinci Code. And cross George Orwell with H. P. Lovecraft by giving the Dictel brass, led by the powerful Becket brothers, a new kind of Social Darwinist ideology which claims that corporations are the new kind of lifeform destined to replace humanity as the masters of Earth. I neglected all this, and thus my plots for Bad Company and Black Science became weak, turning my manuscripts into complete messes I could not straighten out. Until now.

My Goals for June 2008

May is finally done. Since I no longer have writer's block to deal with, I think I can actually achieve my goals for June. These are:

1. Rewrite the Spanner script. This is a Script Frenzy thing, using the old month (June) as the "EdMo". The deadline is June 30. In addition to the script rewrite, I'll do the accompanying page layouts.
2. Finish the second draft of Bad Company. This is when I'll start fitting the old scenes and plotlines from the first draft back into the rewritten story alongside the new ones.
3. Complete my self-instruction course on how to draw the human figure, then begin drawing my character designs.
4. Learn how to play the guitar, learn at least a little about how to play the piano (or keyboard), and learn to read music better. This is for the "50 Songs in 90 Days" thing I'm doing in lieu of FAWM.
5. Start relearning French, German, or both.

I should have a better chance at pulling this off now that I'm able to write again. The script rewrite should be the easy part.