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A review by brizreading
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl
4.0
Took me a while to warm up to it - given its very Golden Age, good ol' boy sci-fi style - but it eventually won me over with its awesome, scathing worldbuilding.
This is like good Phillip K. Dick, or excellent M.T. Anderson, or even the ur-text The Machine Stops. That is, Frederik Pohl (whose Gateway I ADORED) extrapolates forward from current trends - and it's horrifying. I would recommend this to (a) any libertarian/person who took Econ 101 and never learned about negative externalities in Econ 102, and (2) all social media users. Apropos, I would also shelve this by The Attention Merchants.
Pohl unveils the horror slowly: a world where government is subsumed by corporations, hideous inequality with a subclass of "consumers" and an almost priestly caste of "copysmiths" (Mad Men-style advertisers), sales and consumption and increasing GDP raised to moral ideals, the constant degradation of the environment and even just a humane life. E.g. being nickel and dimed by public 5-minute "salt showers", and being told this is a luxury! Brainwashing lifestyle commercials for products with addictive additives! I.E. PROCESSED FOOD, HELLO.
Anyway, much of this is now par for the dystopian near future course. My favorite example of a corporocratic eco-disaster Earth remains Kim Stanley Robinsons's magisterial Red Mars, since - while both Pohl and Robinson are discussing the same basic premise (corporocratic, eco-greedy Earth set to spoil another planet in our solar system) - Pohl feels tongue-in-cheek, whereas Robinson feels GRAVELY SERIOUS (heavy stare, Karl Marx eyebrows, gong noise).
But this story's great. In usual dystopian style, we follow a brainwashed (male) drone as he is awakened by a femme fatale/manic pixie dream girl emancipator. (Seriously, this is how all dystopias are structured: Brazil, Children of Men, Code 46, Gattaca, even The Lives of Others (about a real-world dystopia - Stasi East Germany!).) The drone is Mitch Courtenay, a totally brainwashed advertisement Mad Man, who's just been given the "Venus account" to manage - how to convince millions (billions?) of people to embark on a treacherous space journey to a known-shitty planet so that his employer, Fowler Shocken, can harvest great profits?
Everything is peeled back, layer by plot-like-a-freight-train layer, and so it's an easy, enveloping read. You're like omggggg through much of it. Now I get Cory Doctorow's semi-fanfic, Chicken Little, (which I remember LOVING) so much more.
Anyway, fun and fast, so: recommended!
This is like good Phillip K. Dick, or excellent M.T. Anderson, or even the ur-text The Machine Stops. That is, Frederik Pohl (whose Gateway I ADORED) extrapolates forward from current trends - and it's horrifying. I would recommend this to (a) any libertarian/person who took Econ 101 and never learned about negative externalities in Econ 102, and (2) all social media users. Apropos, I would also shelve this by The Attention Merchants.
Pohl unveils the horror slowly: a world where government is subsumed by corporations, hideous inequality with a subclass of "consumers" and an almost priestly caste of "copysmiths" (Mad Men-style advertisers), sales and consumption and increasing GDP raised to moral ideals, the constant degradation of the environment and even just a humane life. E.g. being nickel and dimed by public 5-minute "salt showers", and being told this is a luxury! Brainwashing lifestyle commercials for products with addictive additives! I.E. PROCESSED FOOD, HELLO.
Anyway, much of this is now par for the dystopian near future course. My favorite example of a corporocratic eco-disaster Earth remains Kim Stanley Robinsons's magisterial Red Mars, since - while both Pohl and Robinson are discussing the same basic premise (corporocratic, eco-greedy Earth set to spoil another planet in our solar system) - Pohl feels tongue-in-cheek, whereas Robinson feels GRAVELY SERIOUS (heavy stare, Karl Marx eyebrows, gong noise).
But this story's great. In usual dystopian style, we follow a brainwashed (male) drone as he is awakened by a femme fatale/manic pixie dream girl emancipator. (Seriously, this is how all dystopias are structured: Brazil, Children of Men, Code 46, Gattaca, even The Lives of Others (about a real-world dystopia - Stasi East Germany!).) The drone is Mitch Courtenay, a totally brainwashed advertisement Mad Man, who's just been given the "Venus account" to manage - how to convince millions (billions?) of people to embark on a treacherous space journey to a known-shitty planet so that his employer, Fowler Shocken, can harvest great profits?
Everything is peeled back, layer by plot-like-a-freight-train layer, and so it's an easy, enveloping read. You're like omggggg through much of it. Now I get Cory Doctorow's semi-fanfic, Chicken Little, (which I remember LOVING) so much more.
Anyway, fun and fast, so: recommended!