Recent Reads : Gladiator-at-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Many years ago, I wrote a rather bad short story in which attorneys, rather than arguing their cases before juries or judges, literally fought like gladiators on live television. It was intended to be an absurd satire of the American legal system and television audiences' love of vicarious violence. I didn't realizehow quickly the O.J. Simpson trial, The People's Court, and so-called "reality TV" would approach that level of absurdity in the next few years.

When someone on a fiction-related listserv mentioned the title of this book, I knew I had to read it. So I got a copy by interlibrary loan and read it over the course of my next few lunch breaks at Busy Bee College. I was somewhat relieved to see that despite the title, Pohl and Kornbluth did not have quite the same idea as I had expressed in my clumsy piece of satire.

Despite the title, and despite the rather misleading cover illustration on the 1986 Baen paperback reprint, the book does not actually feature attorneys resolving legal disputes with flaming clubs and elbowspikes. (There are gladiatorial combats in the book, but the attorney-protagonist enters the arena only once, toward the end of the book, and not as a combatant.) It's another of Pohl and Kornbluth's forays into social science fiction, projecting corporate and mass media trends into the future much in the style of other collaborations such as Venus, Inc. and The Merchant's War (originally published separately; later combined as The Space Merchants). In this book, as in the other two, society is portrayed as being dominated by giant, amoral corporations run amok. The seething masses of the population are kept (mostly) docile by updated versions of bread-and-circuses, including sadistic gladiatorial spectacles. In Venus, Inc. and The Merchant's War, the protagonists are in the advertising business, and the focus is on the potential excesses of that trade. In Gladiator-at-Law, the protagonist is an attorney, and the novel deals with the cutthroat world of corporate control.

There's plenty of social satire along the way, as P&K take swipes at shoddily-constructed suburbs, violent entertainment, the social deadweight of "old money", and other targets. There are other similarities between the books as well. P&K seem to have used a similar plot pattern in all three books: complacent drone begins by failing to recognize the flaws in his society, gets pulled into someone's attempt to right a wrong, becomes a target of his erstwhile employers/patrons, recognizes the evils of his society, and finally attempts to correct them through some clever stratagem.

The humor is about as black as it can be, as in this disquisition by a stadium manager planning an evening's program:

"Of course, it's rough -- the emotional values need bringing out. The comedy stuff with the vitriol pistols ought to follow a tense thriller like Man Versus Scorpions instead of another comedy number like the Octogenarians With Flame Throwers. But that's easy enough to fix. Race Against Man-Made Lightning is out too; Stimmens told me himself we couldn't get the equipment from Schenectady...."

The appeal of these books is in their satirical projection of a hypothetical future, not in their characterization, poetic prose, or innovative literary structure. For the most part, they work, even though a few of the authors' projections in Gladiator-at-Law fall flat from today's perspective. Suburbs, as a rule, have not decayed into anarchistic slums like the Belle Reve/"Belly Rave" portrayed in the story, although if gasoline prices continue to rise, and if other inventions projected in Gladiator-at-Law ever come to pass, it's still possible that they could. We do not -- yet -- have entertainment programs in which the contestants are stabbed with spears, incinerated with flamethrowers, or eaten by pirahnas. And yet what we do have is close enough that Misters Pohl and Kornbluth can be rightly regarded as minor prophets.

There are other faults. The female characters are not much more than plot devices. This is not surprising in a story originally published in 1953. Still, when a female character shows early signs of being something other than an ornamental prop, it would be nice if the authors followed up by having her do something other than get kidnapped and have to be rescued.

On the whole, though, it's a good adventure yarn laced with cautionary paranoia about corporate power and occasional flashes of blacker-than-black humor. And, as it happens, I enjoy such things. Recommended.