CBS Radio Workshop: Space Merchants Part 1 & Part 2 (Based on a novel by Kornbluth and Pohl)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Space Merchants Part 1
Space Merchants Part 2

In a world run by ad agencies, Mitch Courtenay wins the plum job of convincing consumers to move to the new colony on uninviting Venus. The malevolent Consies, wreckers seeking to undermine this utopian world of the future, oppose the project and some of them are far closer to Courtenay than he suspects.

There's some nice scene setting in the beginning of this but when I was listening to this I was really struck by how little agency the protagonist has. This is structured like he's undergoing character growth but really, it comes across as a process a lot closer to Stockholm Syndrome.

This is an example of the so-called Garbageman Novel (where a short term trend is extended to the point of absurdity). It was a very influential novel as well. From Wikipedia:

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 a number of 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The main character in the much later sequel had more agency - unlike Courtenay who was (somehow) unaware of the evils of his class, the sequel's main character was well aware of them, so it mattered more when he consciously decided to oppose them. Judging from the last scenes of "Space Merchants," Courtenay is still in denial about the role of a master copysmith in the new Venus colony...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

The existence of Hap Arnold's Project RAND in 1946 ought to suggest that "R and D" predates the 1952 publication of "Gravy Planet."

Here's a 1949 example. Here's a 1948 example.