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A review by johnayliff
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl
5.0
A satire about a future dominated by advertising companies, which remains at least as relevant today as it was in 1952. The plot is a fun, fast-moving adventure, in which the main character jets around the world and to the moon, evading various groups intent on murdering him and meanwhile trying to reconcile with his estranged wife. Where the book shines, though, is in the world-building. The future setting allows a familiar world with many amusing-but-scarily-plausible twists: addictive goods explicitly engineered to trap consumers in cycles of consumption; warfare between rival ad agencies; police replaced by private firms and congressmen representing corporations rather than voters.
We see this world through the eyes of a character who is both near the top of the advertising system that deliberately shapes the culture for corporate ends, and who has also himself been indoctrinated into the system. The quasi-religious way in which he sees his profession as noble, and his clearly dystopian world as a good one, is chilling, and becomes more so on reflecting back on the book after finishing it. An element of Orwellian doublethink is present--the character can't bring himself to think, let alone voice, thoughts that go against the system--but unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four this is only implied rather than spelled out.
The world presented in The Space Merchants is actually very similar to that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main difference being that here it is profit-driven corporations, not governments, that dominate the world. This book may prove to be the more prescient of the two.
We see this world through the eyes of a character who is both near the top of the advertising system that deliberately shapes the culture for corporate ends, and who has also himself been indoctrinated into the system. The quasi-religious way in which he sees his profession as noble, and his clearly dystopian world as a good one, is chilling, and becomes more so on reflecting back on the book after finishing it. An element of Orwellian doublethink is present--the character can't bring himself to think, let alone voice, thoughts that go against the system--but unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four this is only implied rather than spelled out.
The world presented in The Space Merchants is actually very similar to that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main difference being that here it is profit-driven corporations, not governments, that dominate the world. This book may prove to be the more prescient of the two.