'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Space Merchants about?
Co-written with C. M. Kornbluth. In a future run openly by advertising agencies — Congress represents corporations, conservationists are terrorists, and addiction loops are product design — star copywriter Mitch Courtenay lands the Venus account: sell colonisation of a poisonous hellworld to a public that must never learn the truth. Then someone erases his identity, and Mitch gets to experience the consumer's-eye view from the very bottom. Written by two ad-men manqués, its satire of focus groups, contract law and engineered cravings has aged from outrageous to documentary.
Why it matters
The founding classic of sociological satire SF, endlessly cited (Kingsley Amis devoted much of New Maps of Hell to it) and never out of print.
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Animal Farm
The most effective political allegory in the language, permanently in print and on syllabuses worldwide; with Nineteen Eighty-Four it made Orwell's name an adjective.
Brave New World
One of the two definitive dystopias of the century, the necessary complement to Orwell: control by pleasure rather than pain.