by Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth
In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world's most powerful executive...
This book was in many ways a surprise. It was written by two authors and is seamlessly written, so that you cannot tell where one writer leaves off and another begins. I expected some sort of Heinleinesque adventure of Space Merchants plying the space ways and trading amongst the stars. It is not...
This follows Mitchell Courtenay, and the television series Mad Men has nothing on this advertising executive of the future trying to sell the idea of colonizing Venus. This is a world where Advertising executives are the ruling class--and the rest of the gray mass are "consumers." OK, at the risk o...
The Space Merchants is a classic scifi satire about advertising and over consumarism. The book was a fast & fun read for me, the ending was not as promising as the way there though. At the beginning of the book we get to know the protagonist who is working for the Fowler Schocken conglomerate as adv...
This is a book that has aged well. The first half is way better than the last one and the prose seems somewhat disjointed in the second half comparatively, but even then this was a good experience. It has a dystopian setting where the world is divided essentially in two parts. The producers and the...
I was blown away by this satirical and cynical novel. I couldn't believe how fresh it felt, even sixty years after it was originally published, it's still so pertinent, so topical. I would not have been surprised to find out it was written twenty years after it was.Reading up about the origins of th...
Pohl came up with a fantastic setting here, a world of capitalism run amuck with people constantly bombarded with advertising and individuals treated as little more than commodities, but he did not really have a story to tell. Kornbluth added an identity theft plot and got the ball the rolling for ...