Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who saw the future ..

Pohl and Kornbluth's  magnum opus The Space Merchants is 60 years old this year.A key science fiction text it is extraordinarily prescient with its vision of a world run by corporations ,its culture defined by advertising and its environment wrecked by overpopulation and pollution.When I first read it back in the 1960s when the Cold War was still in existence I was surprised to find no mention of either the Soviet Union or Communism which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.This seems to have been the most prescient feature of all of the novel   for the softly and silently vanishing away of Soviet Communism, Americas great Cold War bug bear is the most astonishing fact of our times.At the time the novel was written in the early 50s at the time of the Korean War such a demise for Communism would have seemed more far fetched than speculations about space travel.At the time of publication Senator McCarthy was hunting communists ,in The Space Merchants the enemy are not commies but consies ,conservationists the novels term for those we now call  greens.