The Space Merchants

Took me a while to warm up to it - given its very Golden Age, good ol' boy sci-fi style - but it eventually won me over with its awesome, scathing worldbuilding.

This is like good Phillip K. Dick, or excellent M.T. Anderson, or even the ur-text The Machine Stops. That is, Frederik Pohl (whose Gateway I ADORED) extrapolates forward from current trends - and it's horrifying. I would recommend this to (a) any libertarian/person who took Econ 101 and never learned about negative externalities in Econ 102, and (2) all social media users. Apropos, I would also shelve this by The Attention Merchants.

Pohl unveils the horror slowly: a world where government is subsumed by corporations, hideous inequality with a subclass of “consumers” and an almost priestly caste of “copysmiths” (Mad Men-style advertisers), sales and consumption and increasing GDP raised to moral ideals, the constant degradation of the environment and even just a humane life. E.g. being nickel and dimed by public 5-minute “salt showers”, and being told this is a luxury! Brainwashing lifestyle commercials for products with addictive additives! I.E. PROCESSED FOOD, HELLO.

Anyway, much of this is now par for the dystopian near future course. My favorite example of a corporocratic eco-disaster Earth remains Kim Stanley Robinsons's magisterial Red Mars, since - while both Pohl and Robinson are discussing the same basic premise (corporocratic, eco-greedy Earth set to spoil another planet in our solar system) - Pohl feels tongue-in-cheek, whereas Robinson feels GRAVELY SERIOUS (heavy stare, Karl Marx eyebrows, gong noise).

But this story's great. In usual dystopian style, we follow a brainwashed (male) drone as he is awakened by a femme fatale/manic pixie dream girl emancipator. (Seriously, this is how all dystopias are structured: Brazil, Children of Men, Code 46, Gattaca, even The Lives of Others (about a real-world dystopia - Stasi East Germany!).) The drone is Mitch Courtenay, a totally brainwashed advertisement Mad Man, who's just been given the “Venus account” to manage - how to convince millions (billions?) of people to embark on a treacherous space journey to a known-shitty planet so that his employer, Fowler Shocken, can harvest great profits?

Everything is peeled back, layer by plot-like-a-freight-train layer, and so it's an easy, enveloping read. You're like omggggg through much of it. Now I get Cory Doctorow's semi-fanfic, Chicken Little, (which I remember LOVING) so much more.

Anyway, fun and fast, so: recommended!

There's talk these days of good retro-scifi, and in its own way I think this accidentally fits. Not because it's retro - it was written in its time - but because it has that perfect blend of 50's vernacular with future society problems. Pohl and Kornbluth took a stab at what the future would look like, and for all that they failed and missed with, they still managed to hit a few things dead on. A good read.

4 stars - Metaphorosis Reviews

Advertising runs the world, and Mitch Courtney is a Star Class Copysmith. Sure, he faces trouble with his contract wife, who has Conservationist sympathies, and refuses to move in with him, but Mitch is a man on his way up. When he's assigned the task of selling hot, inhospitable Venus as a settlers' paradise, things start to go wrong, and he finds out just what it's like to be on the outside for once.

The Space Merchants is everything you could want in a satire of the advertising industry, and of corporate power in general. Yes, its attitudes are considerably dated, but then it's over 60 years old: Mitch is clever and resourceful; his wife is beautiful and clever; his secretary is adoring and loyal. It all works pretty well regardless, with a neat skewering of brand idolatry, fear of communists, and other themes that work just as well today as they did in the mid-20th century. Pohl and Kornbluth make a few missteps in characterization - Hester, the secretary, gets a much thinner treatment than she deserves, but largely the concept works.

This is a deserved classic of science fiction, and one that deserves rediscovery. Plus, it's a light quick read. Recommended.

Pros: creepy future, interesting politics/worldbuilding, great plot twists

Cons: protagonist is unlikable (as are most of the supporting characters), protagonist can't think past himself

Mitchell Courtenay is assigned as head of Fowler Schocken's new Venus Section: making the planet look appealing for colonization and subsequent subversion by their company. But this is a tough sell, not the least because of Venus's harsh atmosphere. To help, he gets on retainer the only man who's ever been there, Jack O'Shea, little person pilot and new to fame and fortune. The future overcrowded corporate run world has one main enemy - Consies (Conservationalists), whom Mitchell must deal with. Finally, he must convince his not quite wife to take him back.

This book details a very scary future, and given that it was written in 1953, a surprisingly relavent one. Corporations have nigh absolute power, and what little remains to governments can be easily bought. Advertisers like Fowler Schocken cash in on the art of persuasion, with a touch of a mildly addictive substance added to their products that force consumers to keep buying them.

The novel is told mostly from the priviledged POV of Mitchell, though we eventually learn how others live and are treated by the corporations that come to own them (in a form of indentured slavery).

The plot has several fantastic ups and downs to keep readers on their toes.

I wasn't a fan of Mitchell. He's fairly out of touch with the rest of the world (and how ‘consumers' live) to be sympathetic. Even at the end, when he's started to understand the larger picture, he's not particularly likable. Having said that, I did want to see him succeed at the end, his enemies being even more dispicable (if characters wore hats he'd be in gray while most of the others would be wearing black).

The supporting characters aren't that sympathetic either. Jack starts out as a great guy but quickly descends into - and is destroyed by - debauchery. Mitchell's not quite wife, a surgeon, has her own negative aspects that are revealed later in the book.

St Martin's Press recently published a revised 21st century edition of this book. Having read the original, it doesn't seem necessary to have updated it. The story still has relevance in its original form and packs quite a punch with regards to where humanity is potentially heading.