The Space Merchants

The Space Merchants was written by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth and published in 1952.  It's a satire of corporate America and the phenomenon of Advertising and Consumerism that still exists today.  This book has aged pretty well; it's dated for sure, but kinda like the TV show "Mad Men" only set in the future.  This book really delineates the difference between the rich and poor.   If you are a star class top ad executive then life is pretty good, but if you're just a regular working person, then, well, you are basically a slave in a system that is designed to make you an addict and forever in debt.

In his excellent book New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis says that in The Space Merchants,  reality is "a utopia in which the economic system has swallowed the political, with power wielded immediately as well as ultimately by the large companies, the forms of the administration retained for their usefulness as a "clearinghouse for pressures," and society rigidly stratified into producers, executives, and consumers.  The opening is pure Pohl:  the hero, Mitchell Courtenay, copy-smith star class, attends a top-level conference of Fowler Schocken Associates, the advertising agency he works for, one of the most puissant and formidable in all Madison Avenue, billing "a megabuck a year more than anybody else around."  The reader is introduced, casually and by degrees, to representative features of the society imagined: the industrial anthropology expert reports that while schoolchildren east of the Mississippi are having their lunches--soyaburgers and regenerated steak--packed according to the prescription of a rival firm, their candy, ice cream, and Kiddiebutt cigarette ration have been decisively cornered by a Fowler Schocken client, so that the children's future is assured.  Similarly, the Coffiest account is mentioned and the cost of the cure from this habit forming beverage estimated at a nice round five thousand dollars.  Finally we come to the Venus project and a preview of the relevant television commercial:

     "This is the ship that a modern Columbus will drive through the void,"  said the voice.  "Six and a half million tons of trapped lightening and steel--an ark for eighteen hundred men and women, and everything to make a new world for their home.  Who will man it?  What fortunate pioneers will tear an empire from the rich, fresh soil of another world?  Let me introduce you to them--a man and his wife, two of the intrepid..."
     The voice kept on going.  On the screen the picture dissolved to a spacious suburban roomette in the early morning.  On the screen the husband folded the bed into the wall and taking down the partition to the children's nook; the wife dialing breakfast and erecting the table.  Over the breakfast juices and the children's pablum (with a steaming mug of Coffiest for each, of course) they spoke persuasively to each other about how wise and brave they had been to apply for passage to the Venus rocket.  And the closing question of their youngest babbler ("Mommy, when I grow up kin I take my
littul boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?")  cued the switch to a highly imaginitive series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up--verdant valleys, crystal lakes, brilliant mountain vistas.
     The commentary did not exactly deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working on Venus' un-breathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry."


If you have ever had a desire that you don't trust or have wondered why you have bought (or bought into) shit you don't need that may even be detrimental, then this book is for you.  High marks for capturing the timeless dynamic and infinite layers of punishment and reward, or as D. Boon said, "Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed..."  The Space Merchants is loaded with class warfare, some 50's type commie red scare shenanigans, and now that the U.S. Supreme court has decided that a corporation can donate to a political organization unlimited funds just like an individual, this novel is more profound and timely than ever.  It's a prophetic mirror, one you can see clearly for miles in, and that's a very high compliment.