The Joy Makers

The Joy Makers is a fix-up novel assembled from three stories Gunn published in pulp magazines in 1955, and is one of the more pointed satires 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. 

First British edition and first hardcover publication, issued by Gollancz in 1963. Publisher's retained file copy with stamps to the front pastedown, title page, and rear dust jacket panel. Includes the scarce "Choice for September" wraparound band.

Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, red paper-covered boards with gilt lettering on spine. London: Gollancz, 1963. #10680.
Corners folded over on a few of the final pages and one minor ding to the bottom edge of boards, else a fine copy in fine dust jacket with slight wear at crown of spine.