In 1959, after two decades of work, Ayn Rand finally published her 1100 page novel, Atlas Shrugged. It offered a speculative dystopic vision of an America gradually transformed into a socialist state that caves and crumbles because it has demonized and chased away its true engines of creativity and progress: Rich capitalists.
This diary is NOT about that book. Oh no. It's worth mentioning though because it might come up in the context of the rest of this diary which is about Fredrick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1954 scifi novel, published five years earlier, the Space Merchants, which is the flip side of Atlas Shrugged and possibly the best critique of laissez-faire capitalism in fiction. Rand's book ended with the capitalists coming back home and the new US Constitution written to preserve the unfettered right of business to do whatever the hell they wanted without regulations. Pohl and Kornbluth's book, on the other hand, starts with exactly that kind of society and shows us where it can go.
I would say the two novels make beautiful matching book ends for your bookshelf, but your shelf would probably tip over to the right and everything slide off, since Rand's 1100 book is much heavier than Pohl & Kornbluth's 180 page book. ($17 hardcover at Amazon).
More below the squiggle...
Fredrick Pohl died just last week at the ripe old age of 93. He was a prolific and successful writer with a long career. His recent death was the inspiration for this diary.
C.M. Kornbluth is a bit tragic. He was one of the best scifi writers of the fifties. He is probably most famous for his two classic short stories, The Little Black Bag, and The Marching Morons. I hate to pick winners and losers, but of the two authors, Kornbluth was the better guy. Sadly, he died at the age of 30 from a heart attack, possibly caused by trauma he received in WWII. He collaborated with Pohl on a number of other works, including Gladiator at Law, which is also in the same spirit of whacked out corporatism gone wrong. If you can snag a copy of it (I only see it for $1.99 Kindle version at Amazon), I also recommend a short story collection, The Best of C.M. Kornbluth. Kornbluth is amazing.
Pohl was a "card-carryin' Commie." He was proud to be one up until 1939 when Stalin signed the Ribbentropp Pact that allied the USSR with Hitler; Pohl tore up his card. For a while, in the forties, he worked doing advertising copy. The things he learned on that job helped him design the main character of The Space Merchants, Mitch Courtenay, a star class Copywriter for the Fowler Schocken and Associates advertising agency.
About the title
The title sucks. I almost never read it because of that title. The original, more interesting title was Gravy Planet.
Amazon describes the book thusly:
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 executives.
Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel.
One of the charms of the book is how gradually you learn the world isn't as prosperous as it seems, with much of the world's bounty having been already squandered. Whatever is left is marketed aggressively.
Ben Winston stood up and baritoned: "Speaking for Industrial Anthropology, no! Listen to today's progress report—you'll get it in the noon bulletin, but let me brief you now: according to the midnight indices, all primary schools east of the Mississippi are now using our packaging recommendation for the school lunch program. Soyaburgers and regenerated steak"—there wasn't a man around the table who didn't shudder at the thought of soyaburgers and regenerated steak—"are packed in containers the same shade of green as the Universal products. But the candy, ice cream, and Kiddiebutt cigarette ration are wrapped in colorful Starrzelius red. When those kids grow up . . ."he lifted his eyes exultantly from his notes. "According to our extrapolation, fifteen years from now Universal products will be broke, bankrupt, and off the market entirely!"
He sat down in a wave of applause. Schocken clapped too, and looked brightly at the rest of us. I leaned forward with Expression One—eagerness, intelligence, competence—all over my face.
Aggressive marketing extends to selling addictive products.
Harvey relaxed again. "Well, about this Coffiest," he said. "We're sampling it in fifteen key cities. It's the usual offer—a thirteen-week supply of Coffiest, one thousand dollars in cash, and a weekend vacation on the Ligurian Riviera to everybody who comes in. But—and here's what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation—each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest—three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar."
In the board meeting that begins Space Merchants, a major plot element is revealed that a spaceship is being prepared to send colonists to Venus. Fowler Shocken wants that Venus account! Fowler tells them:
"There's an old saying, men. 'The world is our oyster.' We've made it come true. But we've eaten that oyster." He crushed out his cigarette carefully. "We've eaten it," he repeated. "We've actually and literally conquered the world. Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer. And there—"he waved at the screen behind him, "there you have just seen the first of those worlds."
[Later...]
This, I knew, was what Fowler Schocken had his eye on. The government money that would pay for the basic campaign was a nice addition to our year's billing, but Fowler Schocken was too big for one-shot accounts. What we wanted was the year-after-year reliability of a major industrial complex; what we wanted was the colonists, and their children, added to our complex of accounts. Fowler, of course, hoped to repeat on an enormously magnified scale our smashing success with Indiastries. His Boards and he had organized all of India into a single giant cartel, with every last woven basket and iridium ingot and caddy of opium it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially this was worth as much as every dollar of value in existence put together! A whole new planet, the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth—and every micron, every milligram of it ours.
Mitchell Courtenay lucks out and gets the big Venus account. People are jealous. He's going to have to watch his back.
His first task is to meet the first astronaut to go to Venus, a little man by the name of Jack O'Shea. By little, I mean he's only sixty pounds and forty five inches tall. Mitch needs to find a way of selling Venus to prospective colonists so they will want to go. Jack is discouraging:
Tell me what Venus has to offer."
"Damn little," he said, with a small frown chiseling across his lacquered forehead. "Where shall I start? Do I have to tell you about the atmosphere? There's free formaldehyde, you know—embalming fluid. Or the heat? It averages above the boiling point of water— if there were any water on Venus, which there isn't. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds? I clocked five hundred miles an hour."
That's not much to work with! Mitch is not so easily frustrated. He's a true believer, a go-getter. But the first sign that his problems might be bigger than he thought is when an assassin tries to kill him. The first time it seemed and accident, but the second time, it was obvious. He calls the police as the assassin is making his getaway. When I say the police, though, I really mean privatized security guards.
Surprised at my calm, I called the Metropolitan Protection Corporation.
"Are you a subscriber, sir?" their operator asked.
"Yes, dammit. For six years. Get a man over here! Get a squad over here."
"One moment, Mr. Courtenay. . . . Mr. Mitchell Courtenay? Copysmith, star class?"
"No," I said bitterly. "Target is my profession. Will you kindly get a man over here before the character who just took a shot at me comes back?"
"Excuse me, Mr. Courtenay," said the sweet, unruffled voice. "Did you say you were not a copysmith, star class?"
I ground my teeth. "I'm star class," I admitted.
"Thank you, sir. I have your record before me, sir. I am sorry, sir, but your account is in arrears. We do not accept star-class accounts at the general rate because of the risk of industrial feuds, sir." She named a figure that made each separate hair on my head stand on end.
Mitch later asks Fowler Schocken if the company is in a feud with any other agency that might be trying to kill him. Fowler tells him, not that they know of. In the future, a feud is more than just a feud. There are papers to fill out. You can't just kill people from other firms. You have to file the proper forms first. Still, Mitch feels that there's something going on.
Persuaded that another copywriter is trying to sabotage his Venus account, he follows him to a resort in Antarctica, where he is waylaid. In a dramatic twist that changes the direction of the novel, Mitch wakes up on a freighter at sea to find all of his identification gone, replaced with that of a low level consumer named William Groby. As Groby, he has signed an abysmally awful contract to work for the Chlorella Corporation skimming pond scum in Costa Rica.
The daily cost of just staying alive is higher than the wages he earns, but the company store grants him credit, credit which the Chlorella Corporation constantly chisel at. which means he'll be stuck there for the rest of his life. He quickly becomes addicted to the same products he marketed at Fowler Shocken.
I'd been paid again, and my debt had increased by eight dollars. I'd tormented myself by wondering where the money went, but I knew. I came off shift dehydrated, as they wanted me to be. I got a squirt of Popsie from the fountain by punching my combination— twenty-five cents checked off my payroll. The squirt wasn't quite enough so I had another—fifty cents. Dinner was drab as usual; I couldn't face more than a bite or two of Chicken Little. Later I was hungry and there was the canteen where I got Crunchies on easy credit. The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain. And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies . . . Had Fowler Schocken thought of it in these terms when he organized Starrzelius Verily, the first spherical trust? Popsie to Crunchies to Stairs to Popsie?
And you paid 6 percent interest on the money advanced you.'
Still being a company man at heart, he finds this heartening, in a way, knowing how well the products he helped launch are selling to people like him.
The newspapers say that he died in Antarctica. His wife is shown in pictures from the newspaper kissing little Jack O'Shea. He can't afford to make a telephone call to New York. He can send letters, but the letters have to pass through the Chlorella company censor. But... oh well, how bad can it be? Hadn't he written the copy about the vibrant life in Costa Rica?
I held my head to keep it from exploding. "It can't be such a bad place to work," I said. "Country life—farming—fresh air and sunshine."
[Later...]
"From the sun-drenched plantations of Costa Rica, tended by the deft hands of independent farmers with pride in their work, comes the juicyripe goodness of Chlorella Proteins . . ." Yes; I had written those words.
"Keep moving!" a plant-protection man bawled. "Keep it moving, you God-damned scum-skimmers!
It's a whole new view of the world for Mitchell! Trying to stay optimistic, he figures, well, I'll use this as an opportunity to better understand the mind of the average consumer. Market Research! Still, it's taking a toll on him. Until he impresses another worker in the same dorm as him, Herrera, one of the Chicken Little slicers. Herrera trusts and likes Mitch enough to give him a pamphlet inviting him to join the Consies.
The Consies, who have haunted the story from the beginning, are an underground terrorist organization that opposes the rampant corporate exploitation all around them. "Consie" is short for Conservationist, but by the way the term is used, it's obviously being used as a parallel to "Commie." Remember, this was written back in 1954 at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, so it was rather daring of them.
At first Mitch is horrified by the suggestion of joining the Consies. As a still loyal-in-his-heart star class copywriter, he despises them and considers them criminals and crackpots who don't understand how the real world works. "Preposterous," he says. "Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready! When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab!"
Being involved with the Consies is also a sure way to get yourself brain-burned by the police, turned into an agonized vegetable for the rest of your life. But Mitch wonders if playing along with the consies might be a good opportunity for him to get out of his predicament and recover his life.
The first meeting of his Consie cell is in the heart of Chicken Little. First, let me explain what Chicken Little is. Real meat being in short supply, the Chlorella Corporation has taken a chicken heart tumor and grown it until it fills up a building.
This isn't that ridiculous, except maybe in scale. There are immortal tumor samples today, for instance, like Hal Laing, (named after some poor guy named Hal Laing who died from cancer long ago). As my doctor once told me, "There are literally tons of Hal Laing in the world today!" Well, Chicken Little is one big, whopping Hal Laing-ey tumor, and the Chicken Little slicers like Herrera cut off pieces of it everyday that are given yummy flavors and sold to the rest of the world as protein.
So big is Chicken Little that Mitch's Consie cell have cleverly built their headquarters deep in the center of the throbbing Chicken Little. Here, Mitch is first exposed to the Consie literature, literature which he, as a star class Fowler Schocken copywriter, finds repulsively banal and without the proper pizazz. In particular, he is told to read Vogt and Osborne.
The other times I have read this book, I had no idea who or what Osborne and Vogt meant, and assumed it was made up names. There was, for instance, another famous scifi writer of the fifties named A.E. Van Vogt, and I thought perhaps it was an inside joke. However, very interestingly, through the miracle of the Intertubes, I was able to find out who Osborne and Vogt were. Fairfield Osborne was a conservationist of the forties and fifties who wrote the influential book, Our Plundered Planet:
Our Plundered Planet is a book published in 1948 that was written by Fairfield Osborn about environmental destruction by humankind. The book is a critique of humankind's poor stewardship of Earth. It typifies the earliest apocalyptic environmental literature, in which human beings are seen as destroyers of the natural world.[1] This book, along with William Vogt’s Road to Survival, also published in 1948, launched a Malthusian revival in the post War era, and would inspire Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb among many others. [2]
Maybe you're all better read than I am and would have known this. Congratulations.
Mitch is certain, at first, that the Consies must have been the ones sabotaging the Venus project. However, during his indoctrination phase, he is amazed to find out that they are all madly in favor of it. The way they see it, Earth has been so totally fucked over, they would love to start afresh somewhere else.
The Consies are impressed with Mitch, whom they only know as Groby. As a talented propaganda copywriter, working from within the heart of Chicken Little, he suggests new ways of reaching out to other workers with propaganda. Like:
My brain was chugging nicely. "Start a rumor going around the mess hall that they've got a way of making new protein. Say it tastes exactly like roast beef and you'll be able to buy it at a dollar a pound. Say it's going to be announced in three days. Then when the three days are up and there's no announcement start a wisecrack going. Like: 'What's the difference between roast beef and Chicken Little?' Answer, 'A hundred and fifty years of progress.' Something like that catches on and it'll make them think about the old days favorably."
It was easy. It wasn't the first time I'd turned my talent to backing a product I didn't care for personally.
Bowen was taking it down on a silenced typewriter. "Good," he said. "Very ingenious, Groby. We'll try that. Why do you say 'three days'?"
I couldn't very well tell him that three days was the optimum priming period for a closed social circuit to be triggered with a catalytic cue-phrase, which was the book answer.
It works remarkably well and the Consie cell higher up is impressed and think he's wasted in Costa Rica. Working together, they manage to secretly engineer for him one promotion after another inside Chlorella until he is promoted to buyer, which means he is transferred to New York.
Once in New York, the story becomes more exciting as Mitch tries to recover his identity, find out who and why he was shanghaied, who was trying to kill him, and who was sabotaging the Venus project. Fowler Shocken is surprised and overjoyed to find out Mitch is still alive and takes him back into the corporation and puts him back in charge of the Venus project, which Mitch puts back on the right track.
Mitch tries to warn Fowler that they both need security protection from assassins, but Fowler, having heard Mitch's whole story about Costa Rica and Chicken Little and consie cells and secret plots only listens to him sympathetically, thinking Mitch had a temporarily nervous breakdown and is has hallucinated the whole thing. He orders enhanced security for Mitch, but not for himself. A week later Fowler is garroted, by a rival firm. In the ensuing proxy fight, Mitch discovers that Fowler has bequeathed to him controlling shares, and Mitch becomes CEO of Fowler Shocken Associates.
But Mitch has been changed by his experiences. "It was done. I was master of Fowler Schocken Associates. And I had learned to despise everything for which it stood." As a Consie sympathizer, he installs Consies in vital positions within Fowler Shocken and engineers it so that all the Venus colonists will be Consies.
As the Venus Project nears completion, Mitch is invited by the president, an obsequious little tool if every there was, and allowed to address a joint Session of Congress and deliver a stirring speech.
Fowler Schocken was a pious old hypocrite and Fowler Schocken was a grinning fraud, but if it hadn't been for Fowler Schocken I could never have got through that speech. I could hear his voice in my ears: "Sell 'em, Mitch; you can sell them if you'll keep in mind that they want to buy." And I sold the assembled legislators precisely what they wanted to own. I touched briefly on American enterprise and the home; I offered them a world to loot and a whole plunderable universe beyond it, once Fowler Schocken's brave pioneers had opened the way for it; I gave them a picture of assembly-line planets owned and operated by our very selves, the enterprising American businessmen who had made civilization great. They loved it. The applause was fantastic.
Things look good for Mitch, but trouble rears its ugly head, as ugly heads so often do rear, and it is revealed by a Fowler Shocken competitor that Mitch was once a Consie! Mitch is forced to flee, and the only safe place for him is the soon to launch Venus colony spaceship. It hadn't been his intention to emigrate to Venus, but it's safer for him with the Consies on Venus than what he may soon face on Earth.
Tada. The end.
I've deliberately left out a number of spoilers here. I generally disrespect the whole notion of honoring spoilers, but in this case I will because although they are vital to the entertainment value of the story, they're not vital to the essence of it, which is a brutal and funny takedown of corporate Madison Avenue America, mocking the image of capitalism as an ideal by taking it to its extreme.
I read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and was inspired. I still think it's one of the best books I've ever read, even though I know that saying that sets people off who can't separate good writing from the politics. The Fountainhead wasn't very political though, as Atlas Shrugged was. Although I was inspired for a long time to be a Libertarian by my youthful reading of Atlas Shrugged, I can say that over time, Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants always stood out in my memory as a bright contrast to the laissez-faire capitalist message.
And which one more accurately reflects America today? Remember, they were both written about the same time, 1954 for Space Merchants, 1959 for Atlas Shrugged. How have things turned out? Have we experienced a socialist meltdown as all the brilliant John Galts left for parts unknown, leaving us in all our squalor to fend for our incompetent selves? Or has corporate America squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed some more, making them richer and us poorer, widening the wealth divide, plundering the planet and covering it up with BP commercials, and outright buying Congress critters? Pohl and Kornbluth's critique has held up fairly well. Sadly.