Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young and

Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Marshall, it's Monstone.

I got nothing more on that incident in the mine yesterday.

It looks like some guy just went wacko.

The company's having the body shipped back

or what's left of it immediately on today's shuttle. It's impossible to do an autopsy.

Christ you should have seen that mess. Anyway, definitely no homicide. There were two witnesses right next to him when it happened. It happens every once in a while up here.

Some people just let this place get to him.

Welcome to the Colette Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay. What you just heard is a snippet from the 1981 science

fiction film Outland, in which Sean Connery stars as a federal marshal assigned to investigate a titanium mining

outpost on one of Jupiter's moons, operated by a company called Congolomerates

amalgamated. In the scene you just heard, the corporation assures him that nothing's amiss, but as the plot develops, Connery discovers a criminal plot that goes right to the top.

We start the podcast with that scene because that's one of the dark themes that emerges in science fiction portrayals of interplanetary corporations.

Out of the reach of terrestrial authorities, they become dominated by greed.

It's a theme you see from the Spacing Guild and Frank Herbert's Dune universe to the Tyrell Corporation

depicted in the 1982 film Blade Runner. But San Francisco-based venture capitalist and

...