SOURCE: "Take-over Bids: The Power Fantasies of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth," in Foundation, Vol. 59, Fall, 1993, pp. 42-58.

Below, Seed discusses what he considers Pohl's "preoccupation with the working of commercial processes" in three early short stories, including "The Tunnel under the World," "The Wizards of Pung's Corner, " and "Waging the Peace. "

Pohl's preoccupation with the working of commercial processes in society emerges in one form or another in most of his fiction and in 1984 he published a sequel to The Space Merchants entitled The Merchants' War which recapitulates the same themes as the earlier novel. However, three stories from the 1950s stand out as major extensions of the narrative methods used in The Space Merchants. "The Tunnel under the World" (1954) addresses the nature of the environment. It opens with an evocation of the normal day-to-day routine of a business executive, defining his environment entirely through familiar consumer...