I was a Joan Baez loving liberal in college, Then I grew up.

As good as Asimov’s Foundation series is, reading it now has that same effect. Still damn good, but…

There’s no querstion its the same book. Who could forget Chicken Little? The writing seems amateurish, the politics over-simplified, and the satire overdone. It still is entertaining, and makes some very clever, right-on-target points. Some of the environmental and consumer issues brought up sound like they are right out of the 70s, not the early 50s. But it isn’t the masterpiece I remembered.

Maybe I’m just getting older and cynical. Maybe I should re-read “Player Piano” and see how well its held up.

I liked Nichols and May, too. I used to have one of their albums.

Marketing, eh? That explains a lot.

I started it last night and started to have some recollections.

I recall being fascinated with the marketing techniques mentioned in the book. A biting satire it was. I didn’t see it as anyway related to communism. It was a time when Mike Nichols and Elaine May were doing a lot of political satire and I took it as all for laughs.

The ad tricks mentioned got me interested in things like subliminal projection, etc. It may be partly responsible for me majoring in Marketing

From the Wikipedia Entry

In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them. However, the most basic elements of life are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel.

…

In his study of the pioneers of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), the novelist Kingsley Amis states that The Space Merchants “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far.” It is also ahead of its time in stressing the importance of limiting population growth and conserving natural resources. On its initial publication, Groff Conklin called the novel “perhaps the best science fiction satire since Brave New World.” Boucher and McComas praised it as “bitter, satiric, exciting [and] easily one of the major works of logical extrapolation in several years. . . . a sharp melodrama of power-conflict and revolt which manages . . . to explore all the implied developments of [its imagined] society.” Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg described it as “a marvellously entertaining story” and “A brilliant future satire.

I must have been in high school when I read both, so I don’t remember many plot details of either, and I’ve never re-read them as an adult. But I do remember that I felt distinctly uneasy while reading them. I was already being programmed by society to be suspicious of anything critical of “The System”.

Unlike “Piano”, which I recall as gripping, but somewhat depressing, I remember “Merchants” as being very funny, relying more on humour than pathos to get its subversive message across.

Either one makes an excellent antidote to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”.

Both were prolific short story writers. They churned out at least 1-2 every month.

The only Fredrick Pohl novel I read was “The Space Merchants”. It was a brilliant work that I would need to reread to fully describe it. It involved recruiting volunteers for a Venus colony. I remember liking it a lot but much of the details are lost in my synapses.