The merchants' war
Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in TheFamily Tradeand The Hidden Familythat her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporateand betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose. Now, in The Merchants' War, Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty shooting war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she's really going to hate--if she lives long enough to find out.
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What Hacker News says
- I would also recommend "Merchants war" by Fredrick Phol. WWIII was won by Madison Ave.
- I also recommend "The Merchants' War" from Frederik Pohl. Its satirical description of a word dominated by advertisement companies resembles ours painfully.
Cannot find quotes of it, it is not a very popular book as it seems.
- MOKEY-COKE! MOKEY-COKE! MOKEY-COKE!
(If you've never read Venus, Inc. it's even better than Manna and it's more on-point; and it was written in the 1950s!)
https://smile.amazon.com/Venus-Inc-Space-Merchants-War/dp/B0...
- I would recommend "The Space Merchants" by Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, and also the sequel, "The Merchants' War" by Frederik Pohl. They predate the cyberpunk era, but you'll find what you're looking for in them.
- I encourage you to read "The Merchants War" by Fredrick Pohl
- >That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!
Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the novel. The characters were rather two-dimensional and the plot was somewhat muddled.
That said, its depiction of a corporatist/authoritarian society incorporates some of the tropes (rewriting history, mass market influencing/propaganda, redefining "good" and "bad", demonizing the "other" etc.) included in 1984 and Brave New World (BNW), but in a far right wing context. Which, as I mentioned, is more apropos to current circumstance than are the left wing "utopias" depicted in 1984 and BNW.
As such, while I don't discourage you from reading The Space Merchants (or its 1984 sequel, The Merchants' War -- which I haven't read), I'm not saying it's a fabulous piece of literature. Pohl[0][2] has written much better stuff, with similar cynicism but significantly better plotting and character development and takes on technology (cf. Heechee Saga[1] -- which I highly recommend -- and others).
In any case, I agree with your assessment of BNW WRT today, but with a far right wing dystopic bent rather than a far left wing dystopic one -- hence my reference to The Space Mechants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga
[2] Pohl was, as were many mid 20th century Sci-Fi (and other) authors, alarmed by the rapid population growth after World War II, especially as Malthus[3] was widely read at the time and we had not yet seen the fruits of the widespread agriculture technology deployment of the 20th century (Green Revolution[4]).
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Edit: Clarified prose. Added footnotes for more detail.
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