The Most Nefarious Corporations in SF/F

Transformations Incorporated (Weighing Shadows, by Lisa Goldstein)
As recent headlines involving pharmaceutical pricing remind us, corporations don’t always have our best interests at heart, and if genre fiction has taught us anything, it’s that when you’re offered a dream job, it’s almost always a bad idea to actually take it. In Weighing Shadows, Ann Decker is a talented computer hacker and technician who is hired by Transformations Incorporated, a company that has invented time travel. Suddenly off on the greatest adventure of her life, visint ancient Crete and wandering the Library of Alexandria, Ann begins to wonder about the motivations of a corporation that controls such incredible technology, and the consequences of mucking about in the past—and as the story progresses, discovers she was right to worry, and that TI’s hiring a woman might be the height of dark irony.

Weyland-Utani (the Alien films)
Any corporation that would consider the xenomorph discovered in the original Alien a valuable military research subject is likely a low performer on the ethical scale. Every decision made by Weyland-Utani (and its predecessor, Weyland Corporation) is absolute evil in memorandum form. From the selfish motivations of Peter Weyland in Prometheus setting horrific events in motion, to the decision to sacrifice entire spaceship crews, terraforming colonies, and any other humans who happen to stand in the way of military progress, Weyland-Utani is one of the most callous and homicidal companies ever imagined—and that doesn’t even take into account their crimes against fashion, as we blame them for the “popped collar” look popularized in Aliens.

The Clan (The Merchant Princes, by Charles Stross)
The Clan uses their genetic ability to travel to alternate universes to keep their adopted parallel Earth locked in a medieval level of technology, and to smuggle drugs into their “prime” Earth for fun an profit. When Miriam discovers she is the daughter of a Clan member, she stumbles into the parallel universe and discovers she’s a princess and a powerful magic user to boot. As civil war looms, The Clan is revealed as a ruthless oligarchy spanning universes. It doesn’t get much more evil than that. Stross manages incredible storytelling as he gently shifts the books from fantasy to sci-fi, ending with an actual apocalypse that underscores just how high the stakes are in this fantastic series.

Time Warner Time (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu)
Charles Yu’s trippy novel is set in a universe “owned and operated” by Time Warner Time. The protagonist, Charles Yu, works as a technician fixing time machines, and when he meets his future self, he shoots him(self), as one does, creating a stable time loop. His future self hands him a book called (you guessed it) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and that’s when things get really interesting. Time Warner Time might not sound so bad, until you consider that the universe they own and operate is incomplete, unstable, and generally swathed in chaos, guaranteeing less than stellar performance on consumer brand trust polls.

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation (the Terminator films)
Not satisfied with starting World War Three and spending decades hunting humans to near-extinction, Cyberdyne Systems’ creation, Skynet, has to meddle the timeline by repeatedly creating paradoxes and time loops until nothing makes any sense any more (unless you can explain what was going on in Terminator: Genesys). We now have several Terminators running amok, some of which have been reprogrammed, and all Skynet can think to do is send a few more back to slightly different points in time, presumably figuring that eventually, Terminators will be able to form a voting block in the 1980s and change future history in Cyberdyne’s favor. Because malevolent A.I. or no, the whole mess is really the company’s fault.

Yoyodyne (The Crying of Lot 49 and V., by Thomas Pynchon)
More mysterious, maybe, than outright evil, Yoyodyne is mentioned in Pynchon’s two classic novels (and pops up in other science fiction universes, from Buckaroo Banzai to Star Trek, making it perhaps the most pervasive malicious corporation in the multiverse). We never really find out what Yoyodyne is up to, but the themes of dread, conspiracy, and existential confusion in Pynchon’s novels certainly place it in the running for the title of Most Ominous Corporation Ever—and the fact that we can’t point to a specific crime only makes it loom even more, well, ominously.

Manpower, Incorporated (the Honorverse, by David Weber)
Stick a phrase like “genetically engineered slaves” in your company brochures and you’re just asking to be labeled “evil,” and Manpower, Incorporated’s entire business is, well, genetically engineered slaves. Additionally, almost all of the company’s customers are criminal organizations, since slavery is outlawed almost everywhere in Weber’s Honorverse. Even worse, the slaves are self-aware and sentient, as evidenced by the formation of the Audubon Ballroom, a group of escapees who spent their energy tracking down Manpower’s executives and killing them in creative ways. Which, you know: totally understandable.

Goliath Corp. (the Thursday Next series, by Jasper Fforde)
Similar to the fabled Acme Corporation of wyle E. Coyote fame, the Goliath Corporation attains evilness through omnipresence: almost everything in the Thursday Next universe is made by Goliath, and the company acts as a de-facto government as well, controlling events in hidden and not-so-hidden ways, and using a very heavy hand when it comes to maintaining order (and sales). One small example of the company’s moral fortitude (or lack thereof): employees are revealed to have brain implants that will kill them if they attempt to whistleblow about anything.
In other words, next time you’re feeling a bit grim about your job, consider the fate of those employed by these evil corporations, and get back to work.