< previous page page_162 next page >

Page 162
they assume that the world might be saveable (Gladiator-at-Law) or at least leaveable (The Space Merchants).
In both novels we start with worlds controlled by greedy capitalists, typified in Space Merchants by a pair of older men running fantastically powerful ad agencies, and, in Gladiator, by some old "Titans of Industry," and by Green, Charlesworth: two downright ancient incarnations of money-power and pride. In Space Merchants the world is an ecological disaster area, with the population divided politically into (1) the very rich, (2) the executive and "staff" class, and (3) the wretched consumers. In Gladiator the world of the novel is a United States where contract workers serve their corporations for pay and for the privilege of living in magnificent GML "bubble houses"and where those who lack contract status live in horrible suburban slums, represented mostly by Belly Rave (once Belle Reve). In these brave new worlds the people in general are confined, spied upon, oppressed: most are slaves or only a little better than slaves. Both worlds are dystopian and sterile, in need of saviors. And it comes to pass (in the fulness of time, undoubtedly) that our heroes appear in the midst of these wastelands.
Now heroes, of course, are often the highly unlikely sort: seventh sons of seventh sons, talented (if unsightly) frogs, babes found abandoned or in mangers; but Pohl and Kornbluth go quite far in the direction of the Antihero. In Space Merchants, Mitch Courtenay is "an ill-tempered, contriving, Machiavellian, selfish pig of a man," so resistant to education that he flunks his first initiation and has to go through the entire Heroic cycleincluding the Return and the Reconciliation with the Fatherbefore he is ready to begin doing what can be done to save humanity. In Gladiator, Charles Mundin is a criminal lawyer who lusts after the remunerative glories of corporation law: he begins the novel as part of the problem more than part of the solution. Moreover, he shares the Hero's journey with Norvell (usually called "Norvie") Bligh: a lost soul who starts the story as a writer of "scripts" for gladiatorial spectacles; a man dominated and manipulated by his wife, daughter, boss, associates, and "friend"; a man who shuts out the world with psychosomatic deafness.
Odd men, indeed, for the archetypal tasks of rejuvenating a wasteland or saving humankind! Saviors they are, though, and we would do well to examine the highly displaced methods their creators use to initiate them into their heroic roles.
Richard D. Erlich, "Odysseus in Gray Flannel: The Heroic Journey in Two Dystopias by Pohl and Kornbluth," Par Rapport No. 1 (Summer 1978): 127

 
< previous page page_162 next page >