The Space Merchants

Whilst serving in the US Army Air Force during the Second World War, Pohl had been posted to Stornara, in south-eastern Italy, as a weather forecaster. Shortly after learning of his mother's death in 1944, and feeling somewhat homesick, he decided to start writing a novel about New York. He chose to write about the advertising industry, thinking it to be the most interesting topic in the city, and patiently wrote "a long, complicated, and very bad novel" with the title of For Some We Loved.[3]

After the war ended, in early 1946, he re-read the manuscript, and decided that its major flaw was that he had written it despite knowing nothing about advertising. Before rewriting it, he applied for advertising jobs to gain some background, and on 1 April 1946 joined a small Madison Avenue agency as their chief copywriter. He later moved to Popular Science, finding that he enjoyed the work so much he lost track of why he originally took the job.[4]

Some years later, Pohl returned to For Some We Loved. In early 1950, he read through the original manuscript, but found the writing to be completely unsalvageable; he burned it, and decided to forget the idea. The following year, he began drafting a science fiction novel, loosely themed on advertising, under the name of Fall Campaign, and had reached twenty thousand words by the summer, working at weekends and in the evenings. At this point, Pohl's old friend Cyril Kornbluth arrived, having quit his job in Chicago to freelance as a science fiction writer, and offered to look over the manuscript. A short while later he returned, having incorporated some plot suggestions made by Philip Klass and written a new twenty-thousand word middle section; the two men collaborated on the final third, and after Pohl gave it a final revision, the novel was complete.[5]

Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, had read the draft before Kornbluth had become involved, and offered to print it when it was complete, tentatively scheduled to follow Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. In the event, it was serialised in the magazine from June to August 1952, as Gravy Planet.[6]

However, finding a publisher for the novel itself was not easy. Pohl offered it to every American publishing house which printed science fiction, without any success. Eventually, he met Ian Ballantine, an old colleague of his wife's, who had just founded Ballantine Books and was looking for new titles. Ballantine agreed to publish it—Pohl joked that "he was just too inexperienced to know that it was no good"—and it was released in May 1953 in simultaneous paperback and hardcover editions.[7] The book edition dropped the previously published concluding chapters, reportedly added for the magazine version at the request of Galaxy editor H.L. Gold.[8][9]

Twenty-five years after first publication, writing in The Way The Future Was, Pohl estimated that it had sold perhaps ten million copies in twenty-five languages.[10] Pohl's 2011 light revision of the novel includes references to some commercial phenomena in the Reagan–Bush era, including Enron and AIG.

In 2012, it was included in the Library of America omnibus American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953–1956, edited by Gary K. Wolfe. The omnibus was part of a two-volume set of 1950s science fiction, the first LOA project to include an extensive online companion site.[11]

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."[12] 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."[9] 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."[13] Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg described it as "a marvellously entertaining story" and "A brilliant future satire."[14] P. Schuyler Miller compared the novel to Brave New World, finding it "not so brilliant, but more consistently worked out and suffering principally... from its concessions to melodrama."[15] At the 1976 MidAmeriCon convention in Kansas City, Alfred Bester referred to the novel as "one of the top two science fiction novels of all time."[16]

It was rated the 24th "all-time best novel" in a 1975 Locus poll, jointly with The Martian Chronicles and The War of the Worlds.[17] In 2012, the novel was included in the Library of America two-volume boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe.[18] The novel was also included in David Pringle's list of 100 best science fiction novels.[19]

As with many significant works of science fiction, it was lexically inventive. The novel is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded source for several new words, including "soyaburger", "moon suit", "tri-di" for "three-dimensional", "R and D" for "research and development", "sucker-trap" for a shop aimed at gullible tourists, and one of the first uses of "muzak" as a generic term. It is also cited as the first incidence of "survey" as a verb meaning to carry out a poll.[20]

The Space Merchants has also been praised for its investigation of themes relating to 'prosumption', and the impact of overconsumption. Critic Mike Ryder (2022) argues that one of the most significant themes is the ‘robotization’ of producers and consumers, such that the very nature of humanity itself comes into question. [21]

The film rights were sold for $50,000, though an adaptation was never made. It was adapted for radio by the CBS Radio Workshop.[22]

The novel was followed in 1984 by a sequel, The Merchants' War; as Kornbluth had died in 1958, it was written solely by Pohl.