Signed
The Space Merchants
Signed first edition, 1953
The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth is one of the definitive satirical dystopias of the postwar period, set in a future America where advertising agencies have supplanted governments as the real centers of power. Mitchell Courtenay is a star-class copywriter at the Fowler Schocken agency, assigned to sell the colonization of Venus to an overcrowded, resource-depleted public. When a corporate coup strips him of his status and identity, he is forced into the laboring underclass he once manipulated, and begins to understand what the society he helped build actually costs the people at the bottom of it. Originally serialized as Gravy Planet in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952.
Signed copy. Signed by Pohl on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Small, octavo boards. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (12). #10711.
Exceptionally, fine copy in dust jacket with one tiny nick at crown of spine and slightest wear at folds.
Signed copy. Signed by Pohl on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Small, octavo boards. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (12). #10711.
Exceptionally, fine copy in dust jacket with one tiny nick at crown of spine and slightest wear at folds.
Additional Details
The Space Merchants imagines a future in which the logic of advertising has been applied to everything, including governance, nutrition, and human aspiration. The overcrowded Earth of Pohl and Kornbluth's novel runs not on politics but on manufactured desire, and the corporations that generate that desire have quietly absorbed all meaningful authority. Senators are listed by their corporate affiliations. Fresh water is a luxury commodity controlled by the New York Water Supply Corporation. The protein that feeds the masses comes from a vast, mindlessly growing slab of chicken tissue in an underground vault, harvested daily by artisans who take a certain professional pride in the work.
Mitchell Courtenay inhabits this world comfortably until he doesn't. As a copywriter tasked with selling Venusian colonization to a public that would never go willingly, he is skilled at manufacturing enthusiasm for things no one actually wants. When rival corporate interests have him stripped of his identity and press-ganged into the consumer class, he experiences firsthand the conditions his advertising has always obscured. The workers who produce Chlorella, the synthetic food that sustains the lower classes, are kept docile and dependent through a product called Coffiest, which contains a mild addictive agent that ensures repeat consumption. This is the system working exactly as designed.
Pohl and Kornbluth wrote the novel in 1952, when American consumer culture was in full postwar expansion and the advertising industry was acquiring a confidence and cultural reach it had never previously enjoyed. The satire has aged well because the underlying argument, that a society organized around the manufacture of desire will inevitably treat people as markets rather than as citizens, has not lost its relevance. The novel is also genuinely funny, which is part of what gives it staying power. Courtenay is not a hero in any conventional sense, and the book's pleasures include watching someone whose professional skills are entirely oriented toward manipulation try to apply those skills to his own survival.
Mitchell Courtenay inhabits this world comfortably until he doesn't. As a copywriter tasked with selling Venusian colonization to a public that would never go willingly, he is skilled at manufacturing enthusiasm for things no one actually wants. When rival corporate interests have him stripped of his identity and press-ganged into the consumer class, he experiences firsthand the conditions his advertising has always obscured. The workers who produce Chlorella, the synthetic food that sustains the lower classes, are kept docile and dependent through a product called Coffiest, which contains a mild addictive agent that ensures repeat consumption. This is the system working exactly as designed.
Pohl and Kornbluth wrote the novel in 1952, when American consumer culture was in full postwar expansion and the advertising industry was acquiring a confidence and cultural reach it had never previously enjoyed. The satire has aged well because the underlying argument, that a society organized around the manufacture of desire will inevitably treat people as markets rather than as citizens, has not lost its relevance. The novel is also genuinely funny, which is part of what gives it staying power. Courtenay is not a hero in any conventional sense, and the book's pleasures include watching someone whose professional skills are entirely oriented toward manipulation try to apply those skills to his own survival.