Frederik Pohl e a criação de The Space Merchants

No longo obituário de 2013 no que à ficção especulativa diz respeito, o nome de Frederik Pohl surge destacado: Pohl era um dos mais consagrados decanos da ficção científica literária, vencedor dos principais galardões do género pela sua actividade como escritor, editor e fã - actividade que manteve no blogue The Way the Future Blogs até dias antes da sua morte, aos 93 anos de idade. Gale Anne Hurd, viúva de Pohl, decidiu dar continuidade ao blogue não só através de escritos próprios mas através dos inúmeros rascunhos e artigos completos que Pohl escrevera e acabara por nunca publicar. E entre esses artigos que estão agora a ser publicados encontra-se um, especialmente interessante, sobre a concepção, a escrita e a edição de The Space Merchants, a distopia publicitária que Frederik Pohl escreveu a meias com Cyril M. Kornbluth em 1953. The Story of The Space Merchants é o título do artigo; está dividido em cinco partes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), ao longo das quais o autor conta as origens da história ainda durante o período da Segunda Guerra Mundial, os vários rascunhos da ideia original, a investigação, a colaboração com Kornbluth, a publicação do romance completo na versão publicada em série nas páginas da revista "Galaxy", à época editada por Horace Gold, e a subsequente publicação em livro. Alguns excertos da primeira parte:

(...) I had a lot of free time on my hands. Much of it I spent exploring the nearby Italian towns and the just as nearby Adriatic Sea beaches. But I was also a little homesick for my beloved city of New York, and what I decided to do about that was to write something about it. That something became a novel, not science fiction, set in the city and concerning what seemed to me one of New York’s most interesting manifestations, the advertising business.

(...)

Then time passed. The war ended. Better times did come, and I was a civilian again with a neat little apartment and attached roof garden at 28 Grove Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. And one of the first things I did after moving in was to pull that manuscript out and read it over.

It was not a joyous experience. I quickly realized that the story had an incapacitating flaw. It was about the advertising business, which was a subject I knew nothing about. It showed.

After some thought, however, I could see a possible way of remedying that. I picked up a copy of the Sunday Times, turned to the Help Wanted pages and found three ads for advertising copywriters. I answered all three. (...)

(...) I once more pulled out that manuscript from my 456th Bomb Group days and read it over. As I read it, I perceived that it had another flaw I had not previously noted. Considered on its merits as a novel it was — what’s the word I should use? — well, lousy.

So as I read the manuscript, I fed it page by page into the fire. And when I was through, there I was, now with some notions about advertising that just begged to be put into a novel, and no novel to put them into.(...)

O artigo completo pode e deve ser lido na íntegra no The Way the Future Blogs. 

Fonte: Amazing Stories