On listening to X Minus One

[james_davis_nicoll]

OK, just how many Madison Avenue-related SF stories were there back in the 1950s? Am I going find Don Draper hawking cough medicine on Mars?

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hours of research into back issues of MAD magazine have convinced me that the doings of Madison Avenue were the focus of the greatest cultural obsession of the age.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

The Space Merchants, no?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

OK, just how many Madison Avenue-related SF stories were there back in the 1950s? Am I going find Don Draper hawking cough medicine on Mars?

There were a lot.

I wouldn't have thought very many of them were made into radio dramas, but there is "The Tunnel under the World" out there someplace.

[(Anonymous)]

In his blow-off letter to commercial sf at the turn of the ‘60s, “Don’t Call Us”, Donald Westlake lists all the reasons why his uncompleted sf novel won’t be acceptable to the various magazines, including “it isn’t a silly satire about a world controlled by advertising agencies or insurance companies or the A&P so it can’t be serialised in Galalaxy magazine”.
So Galaxy really was seen to have become a cliché on this matter at that time.
An interesting point might be, who was writing these stories from personal experience in Madison Avenue and who was just leaping on the band wagon and making a few extrapolations from general knowledge and so just contributing to recycling all the same-old assumptions.

- matthew davis