Mega-Corps in literature.
- The Sol Corporation (otherwise known as the Earth Company) from the Alliance/Union series. They developed a monopoly on space travel, and on all resources produced by interstellar colonies, and the colonies were dependent on them to supply food and other organic materials. It wasn't until the discovery of Pell and Cyteen that it was even possible for any of the colonies to try and become independent, after which they did try. The Company's response was to manufacture a giant fleet of space battleships and go to war with the Union.
- The Asterisk War has the integrated enterprise foundations, a group of six international conglomeratesnote that control the world economy. Everything they do is in the name of profit, such as bringing entire countries to the brink of poverty, organzing fighting tournaments between teenage superhumans and brainwashing its own members to prevent any defiance.
- Interspace, otherwise known as IS, covers The Bones Of Time by Kathleen Ann Goonan with the underhanded dealings of the Mega Corp, with worldwide shareholders. They pay people to act as lab rats for their yet to be approved nanotech, as well as fund studies in various fields like genome nature and cloning, spatial and dimensional warping mathematics as long as it benefits IS. Killing to further the IS agenda is also a go.
- Cats vs. Robots had GloboTech, a worldwide conglomerate in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. They developed the Home AI that the Wengrods installed into their house.
- Clocks that Don't Tick features a company known simply as, well, The Company. Though few details are given about it, one can assume its reach is worldwide, and was the result of the bank merger the protagonist mentions.
- Crysis: Legion (Peter Watts' novelization of Crysis 2) claims that Hargreave-Rasch is so big and powerful that even real-world giants like Monsanto
and Halliburton are small fry compared to it. Uniquely enough (especially for a Watts novel) is the fact that the entire corporation and its subsidiaries are secretly dedicated to one man's shadowed, century-long struggle to prepare humanity against an imminent conflict with Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that he first came across at Tunguska. The corp is stated to own, among other assets, an Arecibo-sized radio telescope which it uses to scan the sky for something. - In Cursed World, ONY makes pretty much everything and has a great deal of say in the government. And they also make magical Super Soldiers and Artificial Humans, and the company's president is Lord Orochi Yamamta, the Big Bad.
- In the Cybione series by Ayerdhal, the protagonist is employed by Ender, an insurance company that, amongst other things, guarantees the constitution of "a thousand worlds".
- In The Dark Tower series, North Central Positronics seems to be all over Mid-World.
- Dead Silence has several, the main ones being Verux, which employs the space salvage crew, and CitiFutura which was bought out by Verux after their flagship space ship the Aurora was lost.
- Philip K. Dick loved this trope:
- Trails of Hoffman Inc. appeared in Lies Inc. The company offered teleport services to a far-off world. It was a one-way ticket, no way home. But the company definitely had its fingers in other pursuits, and whatever they were doing on Whale Mouth was not what they claimed.
- New Path in A Scanner Darkly also qualifies. Though it advertises as a rehab clinic for Substance D addicts, it actually grows the plants the drug is distilled from and is implied to have connections to law enforcement and other industries.
- In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, P. P. Layouts, Inc. has near-total control over the entertainment available to the Martian colonists, until Eldritch comes along to challenge them.
- Ubik has several, which may control reality itself.
- Draconis Memoria: The Ironship Trading Syndicate is the largest and richest private company in the known world. It pretty much corners the market when it comes to procuring drake blood, possesses the largest and most modern navy in existence, is on the razor’s edge of the world’s technological innovation, has access to a vast network of trained operatives through Exceptional Initiatives and basically runs much of the Mandinorian continent through the so-called Ironship Protectorate. Small wonder that the only power able to challenge it in any capacity is literally The Empire of the setting.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe: INITEC (Interstellar Nanoatomic Independent Terran Empire Corporation) in Original Sin. Its specialty is robotics, but it also produces weaponry (including the glitterguns that saw off the Cybermen) and spaceships. Oh, and it's run by a robot with the mind of Tobias Vaughn. Small surprise, considering the real significance of the corporation's name. "Interstellar Nanoatomic ITEC" is a Significant Anagram for "International Electromatics", Vaughn's original corporation.
- Cowles Industries, from the Dream Park series by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, subverts the connotations of this. Huge? Check. Multidisciplinary? Check. Consider themselves above the law? Check. Manipulate people with subliminal messages? Check and Double-check. Good guys? Also check.
- Dune
- Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles or CHOAM (roughly translated as "The Corporation of Honest Profit Traders"). They control all interstellar business in the Imperium except for star travel. The major stockholders of CHOAM consist of the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and... the Spacing Guild. CHOAM has the curious distinction of being a Mega Corp in a feudal society. The main indication of political power among the nobility is the possession of CHOAM stock and directorships.
- The Guild could actually be considered a mega-corporation in its own right (beyond the fact they have a sizeable stock, the exact figure never given, but probably a third, in CHOAM) — CHOAM controls trade, but guild ships are required to move anything out of a particular system, and they have an absolute monopoly on spaceships, and are the only organization who can travel in space, and as such are tremendously rich and powerful.
- The prequels introduce Venport Holdings (which, presumably, eventually evolves into the Spacing Guild), originally founded as Foldspace Shipping Company by Aurelius Venport and Norma Cenva. Originally, it's the only transport company that uses the newly-developed Holtzman engines instead of the much slower conventional FTL drives. After Emperor Jules revokes VenHold's monopoly on foldspace technology, rival foldspace companies spring up, but they don't know how to make Navigators, which is VenHold's best kept secret, and their ships have a chance of being destroyed in transit due to navigation errors. Nevertheless, Director Josef Venport (the great-grandson of Aurelius and Norma) ruthlessly destroys the competition and absorbs their assets. He maintains a private mercenary army and a powerful fleet of advanced warships that rival the forces of House Corrino. Venport has also created a puppet company called Combined Mercantiles (the predecessor to CHOAM) to mine spice on Arrakis. After Emperor Salvador tries to appropriate all spice mining, Venport has him assassinated. The next Emperor responds by enacting a new law and appropriating all of Venport's assets, resulting in Venport upping the ante and taking his fleet to threaten Salusa Secundus with his advanced warships and cymeks. Venport also withdraws all his transport ships from their regular service in supplying multiple Imperial worlds, resulting in unrest. While other companies have picked up some of the slack, they are unable to provide spice to the billions of addicts throughout the Imperium due to Arrakis being, effectively, Josef Venport's personal fiefdom at this point. It's even speculated that, should Venport wish to depose the Emperor, the Landsraad would not object, as VenHold's services are far more important to them than continuing the relatively new Corrino dynasty. However, Venport is a businessman and has absolute no intention of holding a political office. Kolhar, the location of the VenHold HQ, is a veritable fortress, protected by multiple planetary shields and a powerful fleet, impregnable to even the Imperial forces (that is, until the fanatical Butlerians find a cache of forbidden atomics and nuke the planet to hell and back).
- The Expanse has Protogen and Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile, the founders and funders of the protoparticle conspiracy, who have Super-Soldier troops and more advanced weapons than what the other power blocs have. However, once the other power blocs know that the corporations are behind the attempted "Helter Skelter" situation that had been brewing up, the corporations get utterly curb-stomped in retaliation.
- In Fallen Dragon, Earth is essentially run by the megacorporations, and they have far more power than national governments. Zantiu-Braun is the largest, with one character commenting off-hand that Z-B own "half the bloody planet these days". Z-B is also the only corporation large enough — and willing enough — to still be able to fund exploratory missions, although new colonies are now founded through one-shot wormholes and left to fend for themselves rather than via starship. The remaining starships are repurposed by the corporations into the only interstellar venture that remains profitable: "asset realization", or the pillaging of colony planets in debt to the aforementioned corporations for material to sell. The corporations buy out struggling debt-laden founding companies in order to provide some kind of legal basis for their asset realization missions, and then send invasion fleets to subjugate and pillage the colony planets for valuable industrial assets to sell at a profit, thanks to the production costs being cut out. Essentially, it's piracy. Muddying the waters a little bit, Z-B's ultimate motive is to elevate the human race via corporate stakeholding, which essentially means corporate socialism, in order for humanity to truly reach for the stars. The Board — which consists entirely of different batches of the Roderick clones — is divided on the best approach to do this, and the discovery of the dragons and their patternform technology is likely to cause an unprecedented split.
- The Formic Wars novels have Jukes Limited, a Luna-based corporation whose specialty is asteroid mining. In practice, they control much of the Solar System and continually expand, pushing free mining clans further outsystem. They have so much control that they can pressure the Lunar Trade Department, the government agency that's supposed to regulate companies like them, to drop investigations into their shady activities. The company's CEO Ukko Jukes is a mastermind, who always thinks several moves ahead and ends up using the Alien Invasion to move forward with his plan to convince the world governments to form the International Fleet and the Hegemony with himself as the first Hegemon. His son Lem tries to usurp control of the company (as a way to show his father that he's not a complete failure), but Ukko outsmarts him and leaves him with a consolation prize — Jukes Limited (which shifts its primary focus to building ships for the newly-created IF).
- In the Alternate History classic For Want of a Nail by Robert Sobel, the company Kramer Associates directly runs the Philippines and Taiwan along with influencing many of the great powers economically with holdings in the United States of Mexico, Japan, The Confederation of North America, etc., and it was also the first to develop the Atomic Bomb in the 1960s. The notable thing about For Want of a Nail is that it was written well before cyberpunk popularized the sovereign corporation trope.
- Morning Star Cartel in A Game of Universe is a global corporation that became an interplanetary and then an interstellar corporation, thanks to the founder making a Deal with the Devil.
- In The Golden Witchbreed, it seems that Earth is run gigantic Companies of the likes of NuAsia and ChinaCo. The second book has the planet Orthe being all but conquered by the PanOceania Company, which can not only monopolize on travel to an entire planet, but also has its own military and spacefleet. They're not really evil, though (at least nowhere near as evil as the real villain) — they just want to get their hands on the nifty technology left behind by the Precursors, and don't care what happens to the natives.
- Robert A. Heinlein:
- In Friday, the Shipstone corporation owns, by the protagonist's own accounting, everything on Earth — to the point where it controls nuclear weapons and uses them on countries that piss it off; and its internal "power struggles" are resolved by mass assassination. It is made clear that Territorial States don't stand a real chance against Corporate States. This fits into Heinlein's "Future History" timeline. In one story, Daniel Shipstone invented what was, basically, an extremely good battery. As in, one of them was capable of powering a starship, and a small bank of them could run a decent-size city. He briefly considered patenting it, but realized that a) to patent it he'd have to explain how it worked, and b) anybody trying to disassemble one to see how it worked would get a mess, if lucky, or an explosion, if not so lucky. He also decided that his business model would be leasing them rather than selling them outright. By the time of Friday a couple hundred years later, the company he founded controls pretty much everything (Friday's assessment that they own Earth is probably not literally true, but it is likely that they have a controlling interest, or at the very least could buy one if they sold off their offworld assets).
- The main plot of Magic, Inc. is about the eponymous corporation taking over all magical dealings first in the city, then the state and the US. The heroes find out that it is a literal evil corporation when they discover that the founder and CEO is a high ranking demon from hell.
- Rudbek Enterprises, from Citizen of the Galaxy, has enough pull to get a military starship to land at its private spaceport.
- In The Henchman's Survival Guide, PAGS (a merger including Pepsi, Amazon, and Goldman Sachs) is a media company that is stated to have bought media rights to the entirety of the United States and most of Mexico, and have had laws passed that let them run entire towns as living reality shows, insulating them from any consequences from death and injury resulting from their shows.
- In Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy, the Galactic Cybersystems Corpotation used to be the primary provider of all cybernetics (from household robots to infantry droids and Humongous Mecha) for most of the known worlds. However, they reached their limit, and the heads of the corporation were afraid of a crackdown if they attempt to step beyond the legal and ethical norms imposed by The Federation. They decide to lay low for awhile, letting their competition make these steps and then come back when the laws and ethical norms have changed. It didn't quite work out this way, and Galactic Cybersystems disappeared virtually overnight due to over-consolidation (all R&D and production was done on a single planet known only to a few). The corporation was powerful enough to have its own Humongous Mecha and a private fleet. Later novels have many smaller corporations that qualify as Mega Corps by owning several worlds each, many of them striving to free themselves from the "oppressive" laws of The Federation (Does This Remind You of Anything?). One of these, under threat from a (deserved) crackdown, decides to strike out against The Federation and hold it hostage. In Blind Punch, the first novel (according to the in-universe timeline), Earth is divided by the four largest corporations: Rimp Cybertronics (computer systems and robotics), Genesys (biotech and terraforming), Cryonics (cryogenics), and Megapool (large-scale construction). In the later part of the novel, they start feuding over resources and building corporate fleets, although Cryonics chooses to sell its shipyards to the World Government (the shipyards are run by a newly-created state-run corporation called New Age), which creates a non-corporate Space Navy as well. The most conflict comes from Genesys and Megapool vying for the control over Mars: the CEO of Genesys dreams of the red planet becoming a lush green paradise, while the CEO of Megapool cares only about space to build more and more megacities in order to keep his company from stagnating. Ironically, the technology from all four corporations is necessary to build the first extrasolar colony ship Alpha.
- Honor Harrington
- Manpower Incorporated is the poster boy of this trope. They own and control entire planets, have their own space navy, their own army complete with combat line clones, own other corporations, their main products are genetic slave clones, and practically dictate the foreign and domestic policy of not one, not two, but dozens of star nations. To add icing on the cake, their CEO Albrecht Dettweiler, is a genetically engineered Magnificent Bastard, with major emphasis on the bastard part. And the whole affair is a giant, ultimately disposable front. For the actual government that is supposedly its thinly veiled puppet. Talk about a Double Blind.
- Although Manpower is widespread and powerful, they are not alone in being a system spanning Mega corp. The Hauptman Cartel is a kinder example. Plus the Mafia planets like Erewhon.
- Insignia features the Coalition of Multinationals, a group of twelve of these that effectively rule the world and are fighting a war in space with each other for the resources of the solar system. They're "led" by Dominion Agra and Harbinger, which have global monopolies on food and water, respectively. Thirty-three years before the book begins, they murdered the entire population of the Middle East — 1.3 billion people at the time — with neutron bombs, for the sole reason that its residents refused to pay them for food and water, and managed to get away scot-free.
- Jennifer Government has two giant corporate alliances, U.S. Alliance and Team Advantage, that cover the strongest and second strongest corporations of every trade, respectively. Any independent companies have long since gone bankrupt.
- General Products from Larry Niven's Known Space series is the most famous company in the known universe. It's also run by a race of genius cowards who consider blackmail moral behavior.
- The Last Horizon: Varic was genetically engineered to be the heir of the Vallenar Corporation, and the ritual starts with them spending enough money to bankrupt a few star systems on a single ritual. Various lines throughout the book mention them bankrolling entire government operations.
- From Lensman comes Interstellar Spaceways, or InterSpace. In the book's universe, they are the biggest corporation and still growing-fast. So large a franchise, they are willing to bribe Virgil Samms to their antagonist side with millions of value-increasing credits, and twenty-two-and-one-half percent of their entire Spaceways brigade. It's the highest they can offer, but still...
- The Chartered Zarathustra Company starts out owning the entire planet of Zarathustra in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy novels. Although in the end, The Federation turns out to be bigger than they are. This is actually the standard Federation method of developing planets, as in "Uller Uprising". Kwannon, in "Oomphel in the Sky", is an exception.
- The Syndicate Worlds from The Lost Fleet are an interstellar nation seemingly comprised of several Mega Corps. Officers in the fleet are even referred to as CEOs.
- Benevolent example: World Enterprises in The Man Who Fell to Earth starts with and specializes in electronics but quickly grows into this because its products are so innovative; it is actually able to launch a space program. The secret? The mysterious man at the top is actually an alien who brought his dying world's technology to Earth specifically to make enough money and obtain the resources needed to save the rest of his people, who will blend in with humanity as he has and positively influence it.
- Used and subverted with Event Horizon from the Mindstar sci-fi detective series by Peter F. Hamilton. Although mega-corporations are more powerful than governments, the young and patriotic CEO Julia Evans keeps most of her industry in Britain to provide work and a strong economy, rather than subcontracting out to cheaper Pacific Rim countries. This also increases Event Horizon's power and influence within Britain.
- In The Murderbot Diaries it appears that the entire society of the Corporation Rim has been taken over by Megacorps. Murderbot's original owner has its own gunships, for example, and we later meet corporation Barish-Estranza which claims to own an entire colony planet. However, we also see legal disputes between corporations, which implies there is some larger government somewhere capable of enforcing court orders, and there is currency that is not issued by any one corporation, so the worldbuilding here is unclear.
- The game at the center of Murderworld was created and is operated by Outlandish Ventures, Ltd., a virtual world gaming company with enormous financial, social, and political influence. The company is referred to as a massive multinational run by a "mega-oligarch" named Artus Ods, who is also a character in the book. The story hints at the company's numerous subsidiaries and shell corporations. Its size and integration into the economic structure of the world is compared to that of the mostly-obsolete oil industry.
- The Nemesis Saga has Zoomb. Originally a Google-like Internet search engine company, they now have their hooks in just about everything, enabling them to be able to secretly run programs like the experiments on Nemesis-Prime, and develop military technology beyond that of any nation, with no one the wiser. The end of the third book reveals that Endo had been secretly buying up controlling interest in the company, and upon his "death" by merging with Nemesis, leaves it to Hudson, putting the company under the nominal control of the FC-P.
- The trading companies Struan's and Rothwell-Gornt in James Clavell's Noble House are this, on a (slightly) smaller scale. Ditto their real life inspiration, Jardine Matheson and Swire respectively, which maintain holdings in companies across diverse holdings throughout Asia.
- The novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood features many of these, most of which are bio-corporations or health 'care' industries. The employees of these corporations live in secure compounds, separated from the ordinary city, which they believe is dangerous and disease-riddled. These mega-corporations also have their own security corps, the CorpSeCorps, which has replaced ordinary law enforcement and is a commercial and very corrupt company.
- J Corp in Tad Williams' Otherland is one of these. While not as large as some of the other examples (it has competitors), it's still big enough to own a private army, co-finance a project to build the world's most powerful computer network, and tell governments to piss off. Helps that in this version of the future corporations hold seats in the American government, with the number of seats being determined by shares of the market.
- The corporation Blok in The Pendragon Adventure book 8, The Quillan Games. It thrives off Creative Sterility in its consumer base, to the point that its stores have Brand X names like "CLOTHING", "FOOD", and "HEALTH CARE", all written in the same font. There's also the fact that Blok has been around for so long that nobody can recall a time when other corporations existed. Its owners, or "trustees", run Deadly Games where citizens have to bet on the winning player, or they'll be shipped off to perform menial labor (which, for a few unlucky citizens, can mean the worst fate of all―cleaning up nuclear waste in the dreaded "tarz").
- The Perfect Run: Dynamis, one of New Rome's major factions, is this. It has influence in almost every industry throughout post-Genome War Europe, employs several Genomes, and is frequently mentioned to underpay and mistreat its workers.
- In Ready Player One, Innovative Online Industries (IOI) is the largest Internet service provider in the world. They're also the biggest force searching for Halliday's Easter Egg (whoever finds it inherits his controlling shares of Gregarious Simulation Systems, his billions, and total control over OASIS). IOI execs don't hide their true goal for going after the Egg. They want to start charging a fee for logging into OASIS and puts tons of ads into the simulation. They appear to be the embodiment of a typical Cyberpunk "soulless" corporation. Their employees are barred from using custom names or appearances for their OASIS avatars, forcing them to use the standard IOI employee avatar with their 6-digit employee number as avatar name (hence the nickname "the Sixers"). They employ blatantly unfair tactics, such as rigged VR equipment that allows any IOI employee (e.g. one more skilled for a particular task) to take control of another employee's avatar. When finding a key or gate location, they frequently attempt to bar anyone else from accessing it by erecting powerful shields and using teleportation-negating spells or devices. In the real world, they have their own corporate police, who are legally authorized to arrest people indebted to the company, seize their assets, and force them to work off the debt as a lowly indentured employee. Theoretically, once a person's debt has been paid off, he or she is released from indentured service, but, in practice, IOI uses Loophole Abuse to keep people indentured for the rest of their lives (and given the typical state of the world, not everyone minds a steady job, home, and meals). Additionally, they are blatantly violating the law when they use their ISP access to monitor OASIS users in the real world, bribe officials, and send hit squads to kill potential rivals in reality.
- The concept is a heavily examined theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, where modern multinational corporations successively evolve into "transnational corporations" (transnats) and then "metanational corporations" (metanats, richer and powerful than most nations on earth) over the first two books before they effectively collapse in the face of a global catastrophe and worldwide uprisings near the end of the second book.
- Pantheon Corp makes more or less everything in the Red Room series including weapons, medicine, computers, and vehicles. Justified and lampshaded in that the corporation is actually protected by the House, and their diverse portfolio is so they can produce all of the equipment they need to function.
- Mind, Body & Soll LLC from The Seems was responsible for designing the Departments, as well as some of the greatest architectural wonders of the world, including Easter Island and Machu Picchu, apparently.
- Seven Stars: In the chapter "The Dog Story", set in a cyberpunk future, there are occasional mentions of a "vastcorp" called the Walt McDisney corporation, about which the main thing we learn is that it takes a very hard line on trademark infringement.
- Spellhacker: Maz Management Corporation. Not only does it monopolize the maz (magic) supply, it also controls the media and police.
- The universe of Spinward Fringe runs almost entirely on this trope. There are a few planets and space stations with regular governments, but the majority of the galaxy is run by Mega Corps. The largest of them own hundreds of star systems, and many have a presence selling goods pretty much everywhere inhabited by humans. Most are greedy, corrupt, and just generally bad, but one of the largest is also one of the few entities in the series to have been portrayed as unambiguously good.
- William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and short stories set in the same world are the Trope Codifier. Mega-corporations are at least as powerful as major governments, and most of the conflict comes from corporate warfare or as the result of corporate actions. Some examples of megacorps in the world include Tessier-Ashpool S.A., Maas Biolabs and Hosaka Corporation, among others. Real-life corporations such as Hitachi and Sony also make an appearance. The Yakuza is also a nationally recognized corporate power.
- General Technics, in John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar:
- As a want ad says,
When we say "general" at GT we mean GENERAL. We offer the career of a lifetime to anyone interested in astronautics, biology, chemistry, dynamics, eugenics, ferromagnetism, geology, hydraulics, industrial administration, jet propulsion, kinetics, law, metallurgy, nucleonics, optics, patent rights, quarkology, robotics, synthesis, telecommunications, ultrasonics, vacuum technology, work, x-rays, ylem, zoology...
No, we didn't miss out your speciality. We just didn't have room for it in this ad.- GT winds up running the poor African country of Beninia — at the request of its government, with a reasonable chance of doing good while doing well.
- Star Bridge by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn features the Eron Company, which has a monopoly over the secret to Faster-Than-Light Travel. When the General Managernote dies, this triggers a Succession Crisis.
- In Stark's War, they're a major power. While the military is theoretically pursuing America's interests, those interests are defined in such a way that mission objectives often revolve around the needs of the corporations. This doesn't do wonders for the morale of ordinary soldiers.
- As in the movies, this is a staple of Star Wars Legends, though the books go into a bit more detail about it:
- Megacorps are an inescapable feature of the late Republic, i.e. the prequel era: the galactic economy is, at this point, dominated by a half dozen megacorporate behemoths (usually referred to in shorthand as "the commerce guilds"). They are largely treated as quasi-government entities: they have complete control of a great many planets, have representation in the Senate, and most notably, have their own standing armies when even the galactic government doesn't. Each of them monopolizes a given economic sector (interstellar shipping for the Trade Federation, resource extraction for the Commerce Guild, banking for the Intergalactic Banking Clan, high technology innovation for the Techno Union, and political lobbying for the Corporate Alliance), which means they're rarely in competition and get along with each other fairly well. This ultimately culminates in these movements joining Count Dooku's Separatist movement in open revolution against the Republic, with their security forces becoming the backbone of his army (though at least one megacorp, the IBC, actually supported both sides). After the Separatists lose the war and the Republic is reorganized into an Empire, most of these entities are nationalized and/or liquidated by the new regime.
- Contrary to what might be expected, the Empire doesn't do away with megacorps. Similar entities dominate the Imperial economy, which also have complete control over various planets (Kuat, Sullust) and are allowed their own security forces, complete with warships that rival any in the Empire's arsenal. However, the existence of these megacorps is contingent on their loyalty to the Empire: when political dissidents within Incom Corporation steal the plans and prototypes to the X-wing starfighter and give them to the Rebellion, the company is quickly nationalized. Most of this era's megacorps (Kuat Drive Yards, Sienar Fleet Systems, SoroSuub, Corellian Engineering Corporation, and, before its nationalization, Incom Corporation) are part of the Imperial military-industrial complex, and made most of their money by designing and manufacturing the Imperial Starfleet's weapons and equipment.
- After the death of the Emperor at Endor, much of the Empire flies to pieces, with a number of its admirals and governors breaking off to form their own independent fiefdoms. Unique among these warlords is Ardus Kaine: his territory is noted as being unusually well-organized and well-resourced, partly because he worked hard to build his power base on precisely this community of Imperial-aligned megacorporations. His Pentastar Alignment is a "free trade zone" dominated by a conglomerate formed by these companies. It is, however, reabsorbed a few years later when the various warlords' territories are consolidated into the Imperial Remnant.
- The Bacta Cartel maintains a monopoly on the galaxy's most valuable medical substance. It also maintains complete control over its home planet, Thyferra, where it keeps the native Vratix in virtual slavery, and has enough political muscle that both Rebels and Imperials are very wary of provoking it. In a partial subversion, however, the cartel is a joint venture between two corporations that often don't get along. When the more Imperial-aligned corporation stages a coup that gives it sole control of the planet and cartel, the other retaliates by allying itself with a Renegade Splinter Faction of the New Republic, and with the enslaved Vratix rebels (to whom it offers their freedom), to overthrow it.
- In general, megacorporations continue to exist under the New Republic, including some of the same ones that thrived under the Empire. However, they're at least somewhat more strongly regulated than they were under the Empire. When Kuat Drive Yards defies court orders to clean up a planet that they've polluted to a ridiculous extent, the New Republic retaliates by sending a battle fleet to the planet and freezing all travel to or from it until KDY complies. The New Republic is also generally more sympathetic to free trade and independent shippers, at least in its earlier years, making it possible for many smugglers to reinvent themselves as legitimate small businessmen now that the economy isn't as tightly regulated by the Empire or dominated by Imperial-aligned megacorps.
- X-wing: Mercy Kill revolves around an attempt to create one. The villain, Stavin Thaal, is a corrupt general with black market connections, who's been slowly using misappropriated resources and committing acts of piracy to build up his own fleet of transport vessels. His ultimate goal is to fake his own death and reappear in a new identity as a shipping tycoon, the stolen transports becoming the backbone of his company. Between its extensive black market ties, its intelligence ties in both the Galactic Alliance and Imperial Remnant, its ex-military personnel allowing it to engage in Corporate Warfare, and its home base being outside the GA or any larger interstellar alliance, the company would have found it easy to expand into a galaxywide behemoth in a handful of years. Unfortunately for Thaal, the Wraiths discover the plan and expose the conspirators before this can happen.
- Towards the very end of the Legends timeline, we're introduced to Galactic Exploitation Technologies, a megacorp specializing in resource extraction, which employs its own army of mercenaries, has several Galactic Alliance senators on its payroll, and is shown muscling small independent shippers aside so it can have a monopoly on the resources in an asteroid field. It ultimately plans to take over the entire galactic economy, but doesn't survive the death of its leaders at Luke and Leia's hands.
- The Corporate Sector Authority is one of the most extreme examples: it's a conglomerate that was chartered a few centuries before the movie era to explore and "develop" the galactic sector known as the Tingel Arm, in exchange for an annual tax paid to the galactic government on Coruscant. It's described as "owner, employer, landlord, government, and military", maintains a monopoly on all economic activity in its region of space, and is obsessively preoccupied with stamping out any potential competition. Unlike many other examples, it has no interest in taking over the galactic economy, just rule its own little corner of it, but this makes it extremely durable: because it generally steers clear of wider galactic conflicts, the Republic, Empire, New Republic, and Galactic Alliance all have very little motivation to interfere with it, as they have many more immediate threats to deal with and the CSA is a dutiful (and lucrative) taxpayer.
- Depending on where in the galaxy you are, the Hutt kajidics can be seen as this. As their main revenue comes from activities that most of the galaxy considers illegal, most people consider them crime syndicates. Hutt space is not part of the Republic, however (and was only part of the Empire in the most nominal sense), and by their own lights, they're doing nothing illegal. Since the council governing Hutt space is made up of a representative for each of the kajidics, and since each kajidic is built around a powerful Hutt family, they can be considered Mega Corps, nation-states, aristocratic houses, and tribal clans all rolled into one.
- Strata has The Company. It builds planets. The Company also holds a monopoly on immortality treatments and pays its employees in days of added lifespan (you typically earn more than a Day in any given day, so you can trade the surplus for other necessities). The entire economy of human space basically runs on the Company Day standard.
- The dystopian society featured in Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist is controlled by real companies. Buick has laser satellites, Pepsi has a private army, and so on. And they all have commando-lawyer strike teams. Seriously.
- The Takeshi Kovacs series subverts this trope, in that, while the setting is dominated by Mega Corps, all of the human-inhabited universe ultimately answers to the despotic United Nations Protectorate, and is utterly terrified of it, to the extent that a planetary oligarchy is unwilling to ask for Protectorate aid in the suppression of a potentially world-consuming insurrection, for fear that the Protectorate may choose to take too close an interest in the planet.
- Those That Wake has the MCT and Intellitech, the latter of which basically runs the city and is a key player in both books.
- The Thursday Next books have the Goliath Corporation, which produces everything "from cradles to coffins". They're also more or less the main villains of the series. Well, at least the executives of Goliath are. The Mooks lean more towards Punch Clock Villainy.
- In The Unidentified by Rae Mariz, these corporations run schools. After the government ran out of money for schools, corporations bought old malls and turned them into schools, calling them "the Game". The schools are places for the teens to be marketed to and for them to test products.
- Valhalla by Ari Bach features a world where everything is owned by something. Nothing but the titular organization escapes purchase by increasingly gigantic companies.
- Francis Carsac's novel La vermine du lion (The Vermin of the Lion) has the Interplanetary Metallurgical Bureau. Despite sounding like a state institution, it's definitely a Mega Corp of the mining variety. Several major plot arcs are the result of the IMB attempting to strip-mine this planet or that, damn the natives.
- GalacTech in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. GalacTech is prominent in Falling Free and is still in business as of the latest book. Maker of, among other things, starships, living furs, and fungoid tunnel borers. It's not portrayed as inherently evil, though the initial classification of quaddies as "experimental tissue cultures" — and never getting around to reclassifying them as children — leads to trouble when the Cay Project goes from being an asset to a liability.
- The S & C Company, in Harold Wright's The Winning Of Barbara Worth, is treated in-story like a Mega Corp — or, for that matter, The Empire. It has evil plans, incredible amounts of funding, and any number of Corrupt Corporate Executives. This trope is taken to such an extent that Willard's inner struggle between doing the right thing or staying loyal to The Company and his father could be analogized to Prince Zuko's defection from the Fire Nation.
