Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin: The Unincorporated Man

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Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin: The Unincorporated Man

Dear Brothers Kollin,

this book is one of few that have amazed me this year. You took a concept that has kept appearing in future fiction and thought it to its logic consequence: Everybody is incorporated, percentages of their income get traded on the stock market. The government, instead of collecting taxes, holds 5% of everybody. Into this setting, you send a man from our time, cryogenically preserved and finally resurrected. Justin Cord, a billionare in his own time, is incredibly rich in this future, too - and he doesn't want to sell pieces of himself to anybody. We follow his struggle to live as a free man in a society where being incorporated is not only normal, but seen as the only good and proper way a society can work.

The Unincorporated Man was your first novel, but it is a masterpiece, so good a read that I can forgive your editor's not knowing when to use "who" and when to use "whom", your failed attempt at translating "council room" into latin, and the avatar subplot not going anywhere.

Harder to ignore are some inconsistencies in the plot itself, like a couple having a bet about how many shares of himself the Chairman owns. They both have one. The woman asks the Chairman directly for this information because there's no other way to get it. Later, Justin wants to know how many shares of herself a certain acquaintance owns and buys a share, which gives him immediate access to this information.

But all this was forgotten the moment I came to the Second Trial. My favourite character in this book at that point wasn't Justin Cord anymore. Justin Cord had become a stereotype. A necessary stereotype, but not too interesting. My favourite character in this best part of the book was Manny Black. After the verdict, I found myself lowering the book, relishing the aftertaste, and noticing I had, all that chapter, been cheering for a lawyer fighting tooth and claw for a man's right to - - No, I'm not spoiling this for future readers. The exquisite irony!

The second best part of the book was the Virtual Reality Museum. A harrowing dystopia of what would happen to a society that gets so addicted to VR that it forgets the real world. You make us live it through the eyes of a helpless spectator - a haunting scene.

Thank you two for this book. Keep writing.

C. Widmann