Is The Space Merchants still worth reading , it’s an old book. You say it’s a classic, so I will still read it, but I’m sure it’s out-dated in many parts by now. Is there a modern version of that book? Thanks very much.
Based on my recollection, it'd still be very much worth reading. The conflict of desires and ethics is timeless and the notion of advertising taking over the world was prescient and, with television's "the So-and-so Halftime Show" and "the Two-Minute Warning brought to you by..." not being good enough but being replaced by internet Big Data and its targeted ads, it's actually more timely than ever. Pohl actually did release a revised version sometime this millennium, I think, but I haven't read it and I think all he did was change the names of companies and products and whatnot. I'd stick with the original, myself, because it's what made the impact and any parts that may be outdated would only be in details (well, aside from Venus even theoretically being habitable) but it's easy enough to just translate that in your head. The actual point of the book is still, as Buffy said, "totally pointy."
The Jack Campbell seems like a series, would you recommend the entire series? I mean do the all contain anti-corp elements or just the ones you mentioned?
Also from what I have read on Amazon about the Eclipse Trilogy by John Shirley, there seems no mention of anti-Corp, anti-megacorp or anti-capitalism. It seems more like that type of theological science fiction where theology is center stage?
Thanks for the recommendations either way. Best
Yeah, the Campbell is a series (actually a group of them) and may not be precisely what you're looking for in terms of emphasis as it's more pro-democracy than anti-corporation, but it definitely points out the dangers of unfettered capitalism to freedom. The first, main, series is directly modeled on Xenophon's
Anabasis in structure/concept but I think the actual thematic inspiration derives from 9/11 and shows how a forever war of extremism can result in a society committing suicide by sacrificing its own values. In this case, one side has become a purely corporate autocracy and the other side has become an militarized mishmash of undemocratic civilian control and an almost anarchic military. So no one book is specifically anti-corporate (and I feel that Campbell isn't making a strictly anti-corporate pitch - just pointing out how when elements of a society are extreme and not in their proper place, the society suffers), but the theme is a core element of the series. Then the Lost Stars series (which follows the first and runs parallel to the "Beyond the Frontier" series which directly sequels the first one) is set in those Syndic corporate-fascism worlds as one of them tries to become more democratic while dealing with the remnants of other corporate-fascist worlds.
Finally, on
Eclipse, this is another book that's remarkably prescient. It's dated in that we didn't have a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union but its depiction of the rise of the far-right in Europe (and here - and largely instigated by the zombie of the Soviet Union that is Putin's Russia) is dead-on. The core prescient corporate element is that Europe is essentially run by a Blackwater-like private mercenary corporation that, along with religious fundamentalists (who are actually just another form of corporation) basically run everything, except for Our Heroes, the pitiful band of rebels who resist them. It's a trilogy (also recently revised as one updated book which probably wasn't necessary, though I can't say because I haven't read it) and each book is arguably not quite as good as its predecessor but it still ends pretty strongly, which is a testament to how great the first book is. Extremely gritty and visceral and powerful. It includes a piece that was published as a separate story, called "The Incorporated," which is an extremely harrowing tale of the horror of corporate control so powerful that it has spouses in paranoid homicidal conflict with each other as one is committed to her Company and the other is beginning to question The Way Things Are. The first book has an extremely audacious ending and allows for, but doesn't
require, the sequels if you're hesitant about getting involved in a series.
