The Space Merchants Book

Are you one of those people who miss Madmen desperately? Do you also have a taste for classic science fiction? If so, here is a book that could have been created just for you. Published in 1953, The Space Merchants tells the story of the USA some centuries hence, a land still stuck in the morals and mores of the Madmen era, with sexist men who take their privilege as a given and take their sexy (and intelligent, and capable) women for granted.

But things are much worse in the future than they were in the 50's. Population is soaring, nature polluted, wildlife decimated, fossil fuels exhausted. The quality of peoples' lives, the wealthy not excepted, is poor: even luxury apartments are tiny, food is synthetic and tasteless, and the bicycle rickshaw has replaced the limousine. It's a good thing they have addictive snacks and drinks'like "Coffiest"'to drug everybody into thinking they are happy.

Now who would you put in charge of a world like this, a world where the most important thing is to make people who have every reason to be miserable think they aren't miserable after all? Why, advertising agencies, of course!

Enter our hero, Mitch Courtenay, an advertising executive, who'like most great salesmen'is an expert at fooling himself. He has been put in charge of his agency's efforts to win as a "client" the colonization of Venus (the total package, including promotion, exploration, logistics, and construction), but mysterious forces have begun to interfere. Are these the machinations of his firm's powerful rival? Or of the dreaded Consies (ecological terrorists)? Or could it be somebody else entirely? Then Courtenay is kidnapped, his identity wiped from the records, and soon he finds himself a virtual prisoner, condemned to slave labor. It is then that he learns, to his dismay, about the rank human misery his civilization creates to fuel its survival.

You could do a lot worse than to give this book a try. It is outdated, but that is part of its charm. Its prose is straightforward and muscular, and what it lacks in elegance it makes up for in clarity and the briskness of its pace. Besides, it gives you the opportunity to meet "Chicken Little." (Who--or what--is "Chicken Little"? Don't ask. There are some horrors, o reader, you must discover for yourself.)