The Joy Makers

The Joy Makers is a fix-up novel assembled from three stories Gunn published in pulp magazines in 1955, and is a satire of the American postwar happiness industry. The premise is a future society built around "Hedonics, Inc.," a corporation whose psychologists and technicians have industrialized the production of contentment, making their services first desirable and eventually mandatory. The novel is structured as three linked novelettes tracing the system from its origins to its endpoint, including a satellite colony managed entirely by an AI designed to keep its inhabitants in a permanent state of engineered bliss. Gunn built the concept around a single line he found in a 1950 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on emotion: "The true science of applied hedonics is not yet born." The novel works as a direct companion to Brave New World in its examination of what a society actually looks like when it achieves the happiness it claims to want. Bantam paperback original, 1961.

Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Bantam A2219 ($0.35). New York: Bantam Books, 1961. #10676.
Nearly fine copy with minor crease on cover.