dresese

The Space Merchants

While lying around sick yesterday, I did some reading. I re-read one of the great classic sci-fi books, The Space Merchants. I have an old, beat up copy of this book, from the first printing of the paperback edition in 1953. At the time, it cost $0.35. The hardbound edition? $1.50. Amazing.

At any rate, it had been a while since I read it, and I'm just amazed at how dead-on of a satire it still is. For example, in the future of the book, there are no longer senators from states. That is an outdated concept. Instead, each corporation has a senator that will represent their interests. Compare that to today, where it seems that everyone knows who the "Senator from Disney" is.

The narrator, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copyright exec, one of the most important men at the most important advertising agency. He falls victim to what appears to be several conspiracies mixed into one, and ends up shanghied into a low-class labor contract in Costa Rica. The system there is expoitative, and is only a slight exaggeration of what happens in overseas sweatshops. He's paid a small amount of money, and has to pay for factory-supplied refreshments, which of course one needs when doing back-breaking labor. Mitch finds he racks up debt faster than he is earning money.

Mitch returns only by joining his old enemies, the conservationists (consies, for short). When he gets back, he discovers how no one is prepared to see how exploitative the system is, so no one believes his story.

My story was blasphemy against the god of Sales. He wouldn't believe it, and he couldn't believe that I - the real I - believed it. How could Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, be sitting there and telling him such frightful things as:

The interests of the producers and consumers are not identical;
Most of the world is unhappy;
Workmen don't automatically find the job they do best;
Entrepreneurs don't play a hard, fair game by the rules;
The Consies are sane, intelligent, and well organized.

Great book, as is the sequel, The Merchant's War. Of all the distopian futures, this one is the closest to actually being reality, and it's getting closer to reality all the time, as a story today illustrates. The whole thing reminds me of this Futurama quote, after Fry gets an ad in his dream:

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.