The Space Merchants

A 1952 satire of a world governed by advertising agencies. Star copywriter Mitch Courtenay is assigned to sell the colonization of Venus — a planet no sane person would want — to a public that buys whatever is pitched well enough. In Article 4 it stands for the moment when the pitch outranks the product: in a saturated market, whoever controls attention controls everything.

Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven. He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family. As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians. His first publication, a poem, …