Selling Venus by the pound

No plot spoilers.  I tend to review on readability, plot, character and the quality of the writing – which is distinguished from readability in that the former refers to how easy or fun a book is to read and the latter concerns the structure of the words.

So, I just read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth and here’s my immediate review without taking time for much cogitation.

This is in some ways a disturbingly prescient story.  As SF does, especially SF of this time, the story tried to describe a possible future extrapolated from what the authors saw as the significant – or what would become significant – social trends of the time.  Nothing has happened quite the way the book predicts, but some of it has come close.  Of course using hindsight I could be very critical, but that wouldn’t be fair, and these things could happen yet.

Also like much SF of the 50s this is a short novel, but the authors got a lot into those pages.  Some of the plot points are sudden pivots, but, well, events are compressed a bit.  The concepts keep coming and the ideas and attitudes that the authors want to explore permeate the story.  There isn’t much character development, come to think of it, there isn’t any character development, but this story is not about the characters.  It’s about the ideas and attitudes.  Things are painted in very broad and very bold strokes and some may find it heavy handed.  There are more subtle satires, but this is not out of step with the times or the genre.

The Space Merchants is an enjoyable read.  It is intelligently written and well paced and fairly well thought out.  There are a few conceits that I thought were out of place, used just to emphasize the futuristic nature of the setting.  You get the idea that this is the future very concisely in the first few pages, which I like and which I think is enough.  The rest is just superfluous and, I think, not as well reasoned.  But that was only a small part of it and probably easily ignored by everyone else.

The gender roles are only superficially advanced from standard 1950s fiction.  Job titles without active roles by the female characters may get people thinking but they don’t adequately counter the problem.  I wouldn’t normally focus on this in a book from 1952, but since there is a hint that there might be stronger action from the female characters I was disappointed when it didn’t pan out.  It could have been done easily and in line with the other social commentary in the story.

Be aware of what you’re getting into with a 1950s SF novel, but don’t avoid it because of that.  That’s a reason to read it.  The book is now as much a look at the past as it was an attempt to give a view of a possible future.  This is well written, clever and entertaining.  Things happen fast and you’re pretty much hit over the head with the class dichotomy, but that’s often how things were done back then.  This is a good look at some of the best of early SF and a landmark novel.