SOURCE: "The New Tyrannies," in Science Fiction and the New Dark Age. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, pp. 86-146.

In the following excerpt, Berger examines Pohl's heavy-handed treatment of the theme of advertising in "The Tunnel under the World" and "The Wizards of Pung's Corners. "

Frederik Pohl's advertising agency background has evidently filled him with disdain for the business world's coercive methods, for some of his best work deals with the cupidity of the huckster and the vulnerability and vacuity of consumer-man. Pohl is far less concerned with the world being blown up than with it being turned into a marketplace for the buying and selling of men, a harvest carnival where all the cornucopias are filled with idiocy. [He] has the satirist's touch. But Pohl's matter can also try the nerve of horror: a man discovering that he and all his neighbors are merely tiny androids in...