This is one of the classics of the genre during the early 50s (in fact, it was included in the Library of America omnibus American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956). I'll admit that I thought it was going to be about a trading spaceship visiting different planets, but it's nothing like that. The book is set in a near future (for the 50s) where humans live in a dystopian society, heavily controlled by corporations and where the environment is very deteriorated. In fact, environmentalists are considered social deviants and ruthlessly persecuted. A big corporation specializing in marketing buys the contract for the colonization of Venus (which in the book is a very inhospitable planet but not as much as we now know it to be). The first thing they need to do is create a marketing campaign to convince people that they want to volunteer as colonists. We follow the point of view of the executive in charge of this campaign. In the meantime, there are plots by commercial rivals and by an underground environmentalist organization that try to interfere.

One problem with SF written before the computer era is that the futures they depict fail to predict how ubiquitous computers have now become, and the implications for humanity. I do not really consider this a failure, because these people are writers, not fortune tellers, but when reading it it's true that nowadays we need to suspend disbelief in this sense and accept this "retrofuture" with no internet and no smartphones. Also, socially it's extrapolated from the 50s, so the marketing companies depicted work a bit like what we see in the Mad Men TV show.

Pohl did work as a marketing copy writer, so he knows his stuff and it shows. The dystopian element is also very relevant now, with echoes of Huxley's Brave New World. Unlike Brave New World, this novel adds a thriller/action plot, so it's not going to be considered respectable literature. It's well-written, and although it does have outdated elements I still thought it entertaining and worth-reading, particularly if you enjoy classic SF. ( )

I really like Pohl and admire some of his work. I had head so many good things about this book I had to have it. Now that I've read it I am less enthusiastic. It is a OK SF book and I'm sure it was well ahead of it's time in the 1950s. His "Gateway" books are better. ( )

Not my usual cup of tea, and read as part of my university course, but very engaging and entertaining nonetheless. ( )

Good sci. fict. novel. ( )

3.8 stars! Amazingly true to these times, even written many years ago. ( )