First book for the year at last (we are clearly not out of the reading slump yet). I’ve had ebook copies of the Library of America’s series of American SF of the 50s and 60s, and I decided to finally kick the year off by breaking into those… starting off with messrs Pohl & Kornbluth’s Space Merchants from 1952. I’ve never been 100% sure how I feel about SF literature, but I have admittedly simply never read a lot of the generally acknowledged classics in the genre, so I should probably do that…
Anyway, I liked this one, some time in the future the US is very much ruled by competing advertising agencies (corporations have senators and the presidency is inherited), and our hero is an exec at one of these agencies charged with solving the ultimate problem: how to sell the colonisation of Venus. Basically what ensues is a kind of futurist corporate thriller (the other big agency is not happy at the exploitation of Venus being stolen from them) embedded in a somewhat acrid satire of 50s American concerns, with a conservationist organisation clearly meant as a stand-in for communism; plot isn’t always the clearest when it comes to who’s doing what and why, some aspects are only thinly explained, but on the whole a decent read from start to finish.
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