2 August, 2001: The Space Merchants
It's a terrible disappointment to revisit a book you remember enjoying and not be thrilled. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants is well thought of, and I remember enjoying it when I read it in high school, but it just didn't have any zip when I reread it. Maybe that's because Pohl and Kornbluth's satire -- a world run by advertising agencies, a world of hucksterism gone mad -- just doesn't hold up to real events.
Or maybe it's because it's not very good satire. It's fun reading a science fiction book which takes The Organization Man as a pronouncement of what the future will be. But the transformation of the protagonist (an up-and-coming young adman who is brought low, discovers what life is like as a consumer, joins the underground resistance, returns to advertising life, and eventually Does the Right Thing) never really rings true.
There are two ways to go with a satire like this. Either the figure you're satirizing can be truly as awful as she appears (see Altman's The Player), or she can turn out to be a softy and the cold hard world can swallow her whole (see The Locusts Have No King, which actually has elements of both). When you let your character reform and get away with it, you're allowing sentimentalism into your work that almost always kills the joke. Kornbluth's two classic short stories, "The Little Black Bag" and "The Marching Morons", in which he reveals a truly blistering contempt for the majority of the human race, don't give in to sentimentalism. In one of them, a man from the 20th Century cheerfully sends most of the human race off to their deaths. This is not an author who I expect to provide a neat happy ending.
Perhaps they didn't intend for it to be that way. I seem to recall that after Kornbluth's untimely demise Pohl wrote a sequel, The Merchant Wars, in which the Martian experiment that concludes the The Space Merchant has gone to hell. The Martians -- anti-consumerists one and all -- plot to use horrendously advanced subliminal induction techniques Earth, brainwashing being the only way that they can win the fight against advertising. (The plot device is somewhat similar to a Heinlein story, possibly "If This Goes On...", which Heinlein revised after its magazine publication.) That kind of bitter acknowledgement might have made The Space Merchants more enjoyable this go around.
That's not to say that the book is a total failure; the Chicken Little sequence is quite well done and even slightly squirm-inducing. But given the amount of media and cultural criticism I've read since I first read The Space Merchants (and given the forty years of dystopian corporate futures imagined since Pohl and Kornbluth hatched this one), the clubby admen of the future just don't seem menacing enough.