THE MERCHANT'S WAR

Been reading quite a bit of Golden Age sci-fi recently, although my wanderings have occasionally taken me out of the golden age and into the silicon age, like 1984s sequel to The Space Merchants - The Merchant's War.

As this is the sequel to The Space Merchants, one of the greatest sci fi novels of all time, I had high expectations for this book. Okay, C.M. Kornbluth, Pohl’s co-writer on the first book, was long dead by the time he got around to writing this sequel in the early 80s, but still, Fred Pohl is the guy who wrote Gateway, so, safe hands, right?

Wrong.

It’s difficult to convey quite how bad this book is. Oh, okay, I’ve read far worse. When I say ‘bad’, I’m talking about the disparity between the talent of the author and the level of the performance, because, dammit, Pohl is a great writer! It’s just so frustrating to see him waste his talents, because despite a great premise, and plenty of penetrating satire, The Merchant’s War is a narrative vehicle whose wheels just keep spinning, but never get anywhere.

The Story

some time has elapsed since the first novel. Venus is colonised, though still harsh to live in, and all advertising is banned, a fact that provokes some (highly amusing) observations on life without adverts. Here is a Venus ad:

      All cocktails are canned premixes and taste like it.

      The red wine is corky and not a good year. The white is a little better.

Our hero is “Tarb”, a (bizarrely gullible) Star Class Copysmith (like Mitch Courtney in the first book) secretly operating out of the Earth embassy on Venus. In the first few pages you are led to think that something terrible is going to happen, involving planted agents, or kidnapping, or something. Only it never does. Or rather it does, but way, way later. Meanwhile, Tarb moves to Earth. Tarb accidentally gets addicted to a chocolatey drink called ‘Mokey Coke’ and his career fortunes suffer. Tarb starts working hard, and his fortunes revive. Then, suddenly, he gets shipped off in a troop carrier to Mongolia, where he drinks more Mokey Coke and gets sunstroke…

Yes, we are in ‘One Damn Thing After Another’ territory, the curse of the improvisatory writer, where lots of stuff happens, but none of it really matters. You could take the chapters from the middle of The Merchant’s War and, honestly, you could shuffle them around and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to the story, because there isn’t any development or plot line to speak of. It’s safe to say that the strongest, in fact the only motivation that Tarb really has, is to find out where his next Mokey Coke is coming from.

Sadly, that isn’t enough to make the book interesting. Frustratingly, potentially great scenes, such as Tarb finally going to a rehab camp for consumer addicts, are rushed and reach nothing like their full potential. "Darn, that should have been a good scene!" I kept thinking. But it wasn't. Towards the end of the book, Pohl remembers the plot he was setting up at the beginning, and things start to come together a little, but only a little. Then it ends, abruptly. Incidentally, the characterisation is shocking, even by science fiction standards, and the world-building here is slapdash at best.  

Why couldn’t Pohl pull it off? Let’s go back to The Space Merchants, the original novel Pohl co-wrote with Cyril Cornbluth way back in the early 50s. There have been differing views over the years on what contribution each author made to the original story. Kingsley Amis, in his survey of the science fiction field, New Maps of Hell, suggested that Kornbluth’s role was “to provide the more violent action while Pohl filled in the social background and the satire”. I think that was partly true. Cornbluth certainly knew how to keep a story moving. Damon Knight (see In Search of Wonder) actually suggested Space Merchants was “at least three-quarters Kornbluth”, but later revised that opinion as unfair. Pohl’s own account of the novel’s creation (see his memoir, The Way the Future Was) has it that he had already completed the first third - that is, the set up - before getting stuck. He then turned it over to Kornbluth for the (action-packed) middle section and then wrapped up the ending, before revising the whole thing for style and consistency. 

My own feeling, from the longer Pohl works that I have read, (Gateway, Jem, In the Problem Pit) is that Kornbluth also provided much-needed development and structure. In all these works I mention, Pohl’s heroes suffer from depression, lack aim and dither from one (sometimes great) scene to the next, without really caring about the outcome. In Gateway, this doesn’t matter so much because the whole story is about a guy struggling with his lack of resolution. That's probably why Gateway works and the others don't really come off. 

If all this sounds like there are no redeeming qualities to The Merchants' War, that's not the case. It has a lot of great ideas and funny satire. It's a book that's full of potential which is just never realised. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t a Kornbluth around who could kick this story into shape.

Interestingly, if you pick up a copy of 'Our Best', which is an anthology of shorter collaborations between Pohl and Kornbluth from back in the 50s, you can read the original Epilogue to Gravy Planet (The original magazine title for what would become The Space Merchants). It was never used in the book reprints, and Pohl says it went in a direction he didn't want for the sequel. Shame. Those 2 1/2 chapters have better writing, more action, more story, than anything in The Merchants' War.