"The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

I love science fiction. I love marketing. So, I guess you could say The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth is pretty much one of my favorite books ever.

And you’d be right. This novel, written, in the early 1950s, envisioned a future where entertainment and advertising have become so entwined that ads are the dominant form of popular culture. Ad writers can become “Star class copysmiths” and be rich, famous and respected. Ad firms are like film studios, and ad executives are the most powerful people on the planet. One of these firms, Fowler-Shocken, is tasked with selling the public on the idea of colonizing Venus, despite the fact that it’s a terrible place where no one would ever want to live.

But in the midst of this consumer culture, a group of people called the “convervationists” is operating in secret. They’re sort of like environmentalists, believing in the preservation of natural things and renouncing the ideas of rampant consumerism waste.  It’s bad to be outed as a “consie”, especially if you work in an advertising firm. But unlike the secret so-called communists of the 1950s, the consies are actually intelligent and organized, with the plan to turn public opinion against Venus so they can take it themselves and turn it into a paradise.

The story itself is something of a fall and rise sort of adventure, where the main character, Mitch Courtenay, works his way to the top of Fowler-Schocken only to find himself framed by a rival and branded a consie. He moves to the evirons of society, discovers how he’s been framed, and outs the consie conspirators. There’s a nice twist to the ending that puts things in perspective, but the structure of the story is fairly standard stuff. Were I judging the book on the merits of its plot, I would probably consider it a readable, but mediocre title. (I certainly feel this way about the sequel, The Merchants’ War, which follows the pattern of the original while updating the book’s ideas for the 1980s.)

No, what makes this book so awesome is the world that Pohl and Kornbluth conceived. It’s frighteningly close to the world we live in today. Advertising is used not just as a means of persuading people to buy products, but to shape public opinion about real issues, like the scarcity of water and fuel, and to make people feel like their lives are better than they really are. Every piece of communication is persuasive; every idea has an agenda. Even the simplest slogan has been massaged by expert ad men. The world is a dark and frightening place, and yet society is kept under control by these resassuring messages that they should be happy because of the products they consume.

One of the most memorable and horrifying scenes in the book comes when Courtenay finds his way into the facility where “Chicken Little,” a processed chicken product, is packaged. What he finds is a giant, living mound of chicken tissue, where butchers come and cut pieces of flesh off to prepare for processing and packaging. The campaign around the product leads you to believe you’re eating normal chicken, but this genetically engineered, unthinking living blob of meat is all it is. The idea is that as long as people don’t know what they’re really eating, society will hold together.

A lot of science fiction looks to the future and sees exploration, space ships, aliens, and evolution. These things exist in a world where there is a single government, and poverty has been extinguished, and anyone can be an adventurer. That is not the case in The Space Merchants, where society is, instead, a glittering sea of false promises established to keep people from understanding how bad things really are. Happiness is not rooted in simple pleasures and natural living, but in consuming products and listening to advertising messages. Achievement is not rooted in social benefit, but in manipulation and half-truths. The ad executives have all the real power; public officials (even including the President of the United States!) are an anachronism. In many ways, The Space Merchants is more realistic than most of the science fiction you’ll find from the 1950s… or in the entire genre.

If you don’t want to read the book, CBS once produced a condensed radio version of it. It misses pretty much the entire point of the novel, but it does cover the plot.

I want to comment on one more thing, and that’s the style of this book. 50s sci-fi really has a certain feel to it — an idea of progress towards simplicity, an idea of buying shiny new things and discarding old ones. The future is a place much like the 1950s, where everything seems exciting and safe, and there’s no pain or suffering. More modern books have played with this theme and shown the rotten supports below this sort of lifestyle. The Space Merchants fits into this paradigm, and it was clearly far ahead of its time in its ideas. I fully expect this genre of “nostalgia punk” sci-fi to show up again down the road. I may even write some myself.

"The Merchants' War" by Frederik Pohl

Ironically enough, I’d place the 1984 sequel, The Merchants’ War, much closer in tone to the futuro noir style of Blade Runner than this nostaglic tone I’m referring to. I felt like The Merchants’ War was a lot closer to cyberpunk in tone, though it lacked the foresight to see the impact computers were having on the world. Pohl seemed a lot more concerned with critiquing collectible items and the cola wars than he was about returning to the themes of the original book, and it’s a shame. As I said, it’s not that the sequel is bad… just that it’s not nearly as groundbreaking or memorable as the original.

Sean’s recommendation: Track down a copy of The Space Merchants, read it, and enjoy it. It’s a fantastic book that was really forward-thinking 50 years ago, and which still has a lot of relevance today. The Merchants’ War isn’t too bad, either, if you’re craving more when you’re done.

You can get both in one edition if you’re really interested.