Remembering Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law

For me one of the high points of American science fiction history was Horace Gold's tenure at Galaxy magazine. Mr. Gold may not have been the most personable of editors, but the work that ended up in the pages of his magazine was consistently spectacular, such that perusing the contents of old numbers of the publication it can seem as if the magazine only published tales worthy of becoming classics (as so many of the pieces are). The place where Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, and Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. all appeared, the magazine's roll of honor certainly includes the collaborations of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. The best known of these, The Space Merchants, presents a world where admen are on top in a globalized world economy where capitalism run amok (it didn't take it long to dispose of Soviet socialism, without a world war) has produced mind-bogglingly corrupt oligarchy, and with it social and ecological catastrophe on a worldwide scale--this in 1953, a vision of the future that has proven far more relevant than the Cold Warrior fever dreams about what they so euphemistically called "totalitarianism" that so dominated the period then and our memories of it since. Not that the book or its authors get any credit for that from our literary or ideological gatekeepers, of course, who do not even speak of a book like The Space Merchants when the matter of "dystopia" comes up, that label reserved only for the dramatizations of the nightmares of the right, of course.

The authors' subsequent Gladiator-at-Law (1955) treads the same path, and if in respects less tightly imagined (it feels to me like Pohl and Kornbluth, instead of running with one big theme the way they did in The Space Merchants were running with a grab-bag of several here, not all of which get even treatment), it may in its way be even more ambitious, and some of its ideas if anything more striking in their uncanniness at hinting what lay ahead. Here the legal profession dominates an America where an immiserated public is kept distracted by the vulgar stupidities of reality TV as, the suburban dream rotting away, the enjoyment of decent housing has become a privilege enjoyed only by the few--another vision that rings true as we look back from our outrageously overlitigated present, where reality TV is indeed making society dumber (that one now hears of "Kardashian supporters," and that others not only defend this stupidity but attack those who have a critical word to say of the loathsome Kardashian phenomenon, isn't even the worst of it, not by a longshot), and those who seek homes to satisfy the human need for shelter rather than as a speculative investment are having a very hard time of the matter indeed. Not only is it the case that the cost of housing has, like the price of nearly everything, risen steadily relative to incomes for half a century, worsening the lot of a mortgage-slave, but instead of the independence and security home ownership was supposed to mean people find themselves under the thumbs of homeowner associations that with their fees and rules make them feel less like owners than renters--a fact that along with the dark trinity of condemnation, eminent domain and gentrification mean that even with the mortgage totally paid off and their taxes paid up one's home is not their castle. It is the worst of both worlds, the cost and responsibility that go with ownership, combined with the lack of control or security that goes with being a renter, and indeed a renter kept on a very short leash under a regime ever on the side of the landlords. Indeed, not only do the visions of Pohl and Kornbluth in their treatment of such matters remind us of the foolishness of the haste to dismiss genuinely thoughtful science fiction writer having something meaningful to say about where the world is going, but it seems that if anything their imaginings, outrageous as they may have seemed when Eisenhower was in the White House, were in cases outstripped by the reality, not least because so many displayed that stupid flippancy toward their visions when they should have thought long and hard about them instead.