space merchants (recent & current reading)

 

Margaret Renn’s ‘Paul Foot: A Life in Politics’ (out last month from Verso) narrates the life of this celebrated figure from a family who have been political for generations (former Labour leader Michael Foot was his uncle; before that, mostly Liberals) who, never falling away from revolutionary left convictions acquired in his twenties, edited the Socialist Worker for a time during the 1970s, wrote columns for the Sunday Telegraph (a somewhat odd fit), Private Eye and the Mirror, and found time to campaign on numerous miscarriage of justice issues as well as writing a book on Shelley. Not a hagiography (and not hagiographic about either the democratic or revolutionary Left either), but an exemplary life.

(With the family background, the connections, the money, the house in Hampstead etc, it’d be possible to rubbish Paul Foot as ‘a champagne socialist’ – as according to one tired right-wing set of tropes any socialist must either be POOR and therefore marginal, motivated by the politics of envy etc or RICH and therefore a hypocrite, a champagne socialist etc. Don’t fall for it – and if you’re a socialist *and/or* a price-conscious consumer, sign up to Verso’s mailing list for the regular 80%-off ebook sales!).

Alec Nevala-Lee’s ‘Astounding’, a literary history of the American magazine of that name (and particularly of its hugely influential editor across three decades or so from the 1930s through to the very early 1970s), later rebranded as ‘Analog’, which effectively defined so-called ‘Golden Age’ science fiction. L Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, later Scientology, features largely in this book – two things which I feel I learned from reading this were, first, just how unpleasant a human being Hubbard was (and how malign a movement Scientology was, right from the get-go) and, second, just how deeply implicated and involved much of early 1950s science fiction culture, some of its leading lights certainly, in this nascent movement. Indeed, Scientology could be seen – as this book implicity does – as a sort of mirror-image (or Jungian shadow) of some of 1950s America’s best hopes.

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth’s ‘The Space Merchants’ (1952) is a fortuitous library find, having just finished the above (that distinctive Gollancz yellow does tend to draw the eye). Asimov and Heinlein I feel I know… but this, with its ecologically wrecked planet Earth, its Consies (think the International Workers of the World, aka the Wobblies, crossed with Extinction Rebellion), and its politics and space colonisation efforts driven almost entirely by over-mighty advertising agencies, somewhat gives the lie to any one-dimensional view of science fiction’s Golden Age as Truman-era American boosterism, fictionalised. (Perhaps Alfred Bester already did that). I mean, one imagines Adam ‘HyperNormalisation’ Curtis buying a ticket for this train…

I’m also midway through ‘Paradise Lost’, again (about once a decade, particularly at times of personal challenge or change) and also Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’ – which I’ve begun a couple of times before and which has previously defeated me. I think I begin to grasp what this book is, does, and is ‘for’ now (her famous early 1970s ten-years-later preface is good on, among other things, how and why certain books only land with us at specific phases of our lives and also on how this book in particular has interacted with its readership, then and since).