THE SPACE MERCHANTS by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth Ballantine, 175 pp paperbound 35¢ 192 pp hardbound $1.50
When this came out in Galaxy as "Gravy Planet", it seemed to be merely an entertaining hunt-and-chase with the background of advertising horrors for laughs, a satire on the way things are now. Since then I've taken a closer look at the gruesomeness of the advertising we have grown numb to and it begins to look mole like a trend than a joke.
If advertising is used to sell cigarettes, chewing gum, labor unions, opinions of the NAM, candidates for election, and movies, why shouldn't it make the smart deadly move of selling itself? Self-preservation is the business law that works every time.
Could the American public be sold on the idea that advertising men are the aristocracy of the Earth? Could they believe that advertising is the foundation of American business? Could they be convinced that the first duty of a patriot and a man of principle is to buy things the advertisements tell him to buy, whether he wants them or not?
If people can be muddled by pictures of girls in bathing suits into buying something that they would not want if they were left alone—(And they can be) why shouldn’t they be muddled into buying anything.
"GLORIA GLAMOURPUSS SMOKES BLANKS. "They're milder!" GLORIA GLAMOURPUSS DRINKS PUKO. "It’s stronger!” GLORIA GLAMOUSPUSS READS NOTHING BUT ADVERTISEMENTS. "They’re exciting!"
Or the Sententious voice announcing, "Doctors say—Drink nutracola!” "Economists say—Don’t save money, Buy things!" "Investigating Senator Blank Says—Read advertisements. They’re American!”
Is there a dividing-line beyond which people will stop believing anything presented by advertising methods, or isn't there? And, if so, where is it?
Two businessmen I have spoken with since I read “Gravy Planet", in Galaxy have told me solemnly. "American Business Is Founded On Advertising.” Strange ideas like that don't come by spontaneous generation—at least, I don't think they do.
The nuisance-value ad is a recognized device on the radio. Ad agencies don't seem to care what they do to you if they can only get you to buy something thereby. Front ads which irritate by loud squawking voices, which rely on you not to be quick enough to turn off the radio before you hear the pitch, to 3D ads which squirt a foul stench at you and bellow "Do You Smell Like This?" is a short step. And from a here-and-now captive audience on a bus, unable to turn off the bus radio which pumps advertisements at them, to a law that it is a seditious unAmerican Restraint of Advertising to hold your nose when the deoderant ads squirt the sweat-smell at you, or to turn off your radio at all, might not be such a funny exaggeration as it seems at first glance.
In its revised form, "The Space Merchants", this novel is even smoother and more entertaining in plot, but I have not been able to read more than a few pages at a time before the background gives me the willies.
Will the Senator from Nutra-Cola please take the floor?
WORLD OUT OF MIND by J. T. M’Intosh 222 pp Doubleday $2.75.
I like the poker-game plot, with life or death hanging on whether the hero makes the rights sequence of logical moves, and this book has enough of that.
The background is a pleasant world set up —utopia compared to what we have now—with everything mild and moderate and pleasant and normal, except the one gaudily-different clement of an aristocracy of abilities. It's put right out in the open, with a fascinating universal I.Q. puzzle-test, and badges of different color in the spectrum scale for those that test out on different IQ ranges. There is a democratic flavor to it, because the difference of job-treatment and respect given people wearing each color is largely a result of the experience of the population as to how people with such badges behave, rather than fixed law.
An attractive sounding system for s. f. fans, whom I would naturally expect to get a better break in that kind of system and strut happily in red circle badges, or better.
The plot is the good old chestnut of the guy who can's remember, but finds himself in some kind of a deadly game as an important piece; he has to apply his high-powered brains to finding out what kind of game it is and what side he wants to play on.
For a good puzzle-story, this puts the reader on par with the hero and they are equally surprised by whatever happens, and can solve the problems with the same evidence. Fair play.
The hero is a likeable character, rather human and pleasant, as are the other characters, although they are only lightly presented, He gets a little superdooper toward the end, but this is a small complaint for a smooth and entertaining book.
The jacket design is a dull looking mishmash with no connection to the plot that I could figure out, but don't let the dullness of the outside deter you. In its reasonable English way, this is essentially a gaudy story, written to please.
HELLFLOWER, by George O. Smith, Doubleday, 265 pp $2.25
A busted and disgraced spaceman is used as a decoy-duck to catch interplanetary drug-smugglers, trying to pull himself up by his bootstraps back to self-respect and the respect of the world. There's considerable romancing, and occasional shooting. It's not always plausible toward the end, but keeps the pace going and the suspense too tight for any leisure to pause and criticize. The solution seemed to me more of a rescue of the characters by George O. Smith than anything they worked out for themselves, but who cares? Good straight adventure.
—Katherine MacLean
HERMITAGE HOUSE, Inc., is the publisher of L. Sprague de Camp's "Science Fiction Handbook", which is one in a series; the publishers aim to build up a professional library for writers.
Their case is well-stated in the "Note on The Professional Writers Library", page 7.
Remarking the need for such a series, it is asserted that, "The texts on composition, rhetoric, grammar which the writer studied in school and college are not adequate. They cling to an artificial treatment of the forms of discourse and resist the natural processes by which language grows and changes. Of the unacademic texts on writing, many have assumed a beginning writer, a rank amateur, as their solo reader, and they have not even served him well. They have been properly viewed with scorn by the professional as hack -manuals by inexpert rhetors."
From my own experience, I would say that this is no exaggeration; with the exception of Jack Woodford's "Trial and Error”, and Scott Meredith's more recent, and better, “Writing to Sell” I’ve seen little that I could recommend to either the beginner or the writer who has sold some work, but isn't sure why. And, since no a volume of this nature exists (a couple of symposiums on science fiction and science fiction writing have appeared, but neither offers anything in the nature of an organized and integrated definition of the field and its requirements), this volume is unprecedented.
Let me say without further preamble, that the book achieves its purpose splendidly. While the meat is instruction on science fiction writing qua writing fiction in general, the fact remains that the field does contain special aspects with which a beginner—either a beginning writer, or a writer who's beginning science-fiction— must be familiar. Thus the first six chapters offer a brief but solid definition of the field, outlining its special differences; this is collated with a valuable bibliography, both of published science fiction and scientific texts, in the back.
I found but one error in the book, and that a minor one; however, for the record, it should be stated that John Michel had no part in the litigation mentioned on page 138.
The specific market requirements are of course, that part of any such book which will go out of date first; the author feels that his information will regain reasonably current for some years to come, though warning readers not to take his listings for granted. I suspect that there will be more and earlier alterations than Sprague does, but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will prove which of us is right
In the meantime, I intend to re-read this book for my own instruction, and urge all of my fellow authors who have not already reached the stage a ultimate perfection, and 100% sales from here to obscurity, to do likewise.
RWL