Sure, he's one of the top executives at the world's most powerful advertising agency. And, sure, he's just been handed the reins of the company's biggest account yet—an ad campaign for the American government aimed at convincing people to colonize the (rather inhospitable) planet Venus. But Mitch Courtenay's marriage is on the rocks. His estranged wife, Kathy, is refusing to renew their marriage contract. Mitch is determined to win her back.

Selling a whole planet's not going to be easy, though. To begin with, he's got a rival co-worker, Matt Runstead, who's gunning for his job, and a rival ad agency willing to do just about anything to swipe the account. Then there's Jack O'Shea—astronaut, first man on Venus, person of small stature—whom Mitch is supposed to consult with in order to give the Venus campaign more authenticity—that is, if he can keep Jack sober and stop him from womanizing long enough to get anything out of him. And on top of it all, there are the Conservationists (or Consies, what most call them), an underground, subversive labor organization hell-bent on seeing Venus' (and Earth's) ecosystem preserved instead of developed and exploited for profit.

Things turn downright nightmarish, however, when Mitch becomes convinced that somebody's out to kill him. But is it Runstead? A rival agency? The Consies? Someone else altogether? A man of action, Mitch decides to seek out Runstead himself, only to be kidnapped in the process. When he wakes up after his attack, Mitch finds himself aboard a Labor Freighter bound for the Chlorella plantations of Costa Rica—his identity changed from star-class copysmith to occupational class 2, locked into a horrible labor contract for some time to come.

Eventually getting his bearings in the exhausting, oppressive, debt-ridden world of the plantation worker, Mitch starts to plan his escape, his return to New York, to his star-class job, to Kathy. But it turns out that his only chance of getting out of Costa Rica lies in the hands of the Consie cell he's discovered among his fellow laborers.

Terribly timely dystopian satire

To readers today, it may seem nothing short of amazing that a book like The Space Merchants was published where and when it was—in an America enthralled by the hysterical moral panic that was McCarthyism and driven by a post-war economic boom that had the United States plotted on a steep upward trajectory. The Space Merchants was a radical book back then, and it's a radical book today. It's also still terribly—that is greatly and horribly—timely.

Pohl's and Kornbluth's deeply satirical dystopia is really no less potent an indictment of advertising "culture" (empowered as it is by manipulation and exploitation) and rampant capitalist consumerism (riddled as it is with contradictions and abuses) in the early years of the 21st century than it was in the 1950s. A reader need not be wildly cynical or a paranoid conspiracy theorist to (at least) crack a wry smile of the it's-funny-because-it's-true variety at notions like: Congressmen representing businesses instead of states (as in "the senator from Du Pont Chemicals"), an adman speaking with joy and moral resignation about the incredibly addictive properties of a popular consumable (like the novel's "Coffiest"-brand drink or "Kiddiebutt" cigarettes), people having to wear anti-soot noseplugs because of environmental degradation, or a multinational corporation proudly billing itself as the agency that succeeded in "merging a whole subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex" (thereafter known as "Indiastries").

But The Space Merchants isn't just good polemical satire, it's also often quite a page-turner of a novel. At times reading like a corporate espionage thriller, at others like an account of revolutionary struggle and at others still like a modern-day romance, Pohl and Kornbluth's storytelling succeeds on many fronts. The most often cited weak point of the novel is this relationship between Mitch and Kathy, however, which can make the story fairly pulpy, even melodramatic at times. Many have also found the ending fairly disappointing, too. But the characters do work, on the whole—both when this novel is operating like a spirited satire and when it's doing some rather thoughtful and complex analysis of the role of and stresses on the individual in what we might today called the globalized world.