Library of America: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

At a certain point, I realized that I owned every Library of America science fiction release... except two. One, Five Classics Novels 1956-1958, contained five books that I already owned four of, so that seemed fair to skip, but the other had four new-to-me works, so I put it on my wish list and my wife got it for me for my birthday last year.

Collection published: 2012
Novel originally published: 1952
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

The first is The Space Merchants (1952), a novel that has long stuck in my head because Isaac Asimov briefly mentions it in his introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction under its alternate title of "Gravy Planet," which is, to be honest, a bit of a daft title, but certainly an evocative one. It is not about a planet of literal gravy, alas. It's also not about merchants flying through space, which is what I had imagined before reading it; it's about the people trying to sell the public on going to space, the people merchanting space.

Asimov cites it as an example of what he calls the "Stage Three-C" anti-utopian science fiction story: "It deals with a dreadfully overpopulated world in which advertising techniques have been made the only acceptable guide to human behavior. Its gambits are: 'If the population explosion goes on—' and 'If the theory that anything that is good for business is morally correct goes on—'" The former gambit has dated itself a bit, but the latter has held up, and if anything probably seems even more likely than it did back in 1952. Senators literally represent corporate interests, no form of advertising or corporate skulduggery is illegal—except where corporations infringe on each other, they can do whatever they like to people. The main character is an advertising executive put in charge of selling Venus to the American people, who suddenly finds himself on the outs when he had been on the top.

The actual story is what it is; I don't think it's terrible or anything, but it's not why you're reading the book. It's one of those sf books you read for the world. Pohl and Kornbluth have that 1950s sf obsession with advertising-as-science, which also appears in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1952), Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's They'd Rather Be Right (1954), and Philip K. Dick's Ubik (1969), this belief that with the right combination of triggers, anyone can be sold anything. The advertising satire is one of the best parts of the book; the book definitely performs a Stage Three-C gambit with the ubiquity of advertising, and it's hard to imagine that Dick hadn't read The Space Merchants. The leap that Pohl and Kornbluth don't quite make (but are so close on) is that, as John Berger would highlight in Ways of Seeing (1972), advertising doesn't just sell you a product, it sells you the entire idea that the way to improve your life is through the purchase of product. What the novel does delve into, though, is how there's an invisible class divide when it comes to marketing—well, invisible to those on the top, anyway. Some people aren't even worth selling to!

It's a quick read and a fun one; Pohl and Kornbluth have an easy style and the protagonist has a strong narrative voice. This would be fun to teach in a class on early science fiction, or one in a class on advertising in sf.

I am only a little bit into the second novel, More Than Human, and so far it is a very different book! But more on that in a future post.