Not to keep on kicking the Slate.com movie reviewers To go on kicking the Slate movie reviewers: there’s a hyperbolic review on that site of Mike Judge’s little-seen Idiocracy entitled “The DVD That Will Save America”. The title is no doubt meant to be ironic, irony being easier than saying what one means.
The plot of the movie sounds an awful lot like the future in Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” (which was adapted to fit the Kornbluth/Pohl collaboration Search the Sky). These stories all have something to them, but Idiocracy seems to mimic their most repulsive premise. That is: upper/middle class people have less children than lower-class people do, and therefore the future will be full of morons. This can only be true, even for the sake of argument, if upper/middle class people are genetically superior to lower class people, a sentiment open to doubt.
I never have been able to warm up to the science fiction/dark satire stories that Pohl and Kornbluth and Leiber and others wrote in the 50’s. They just always seemed pointlessly dark. It may just be a case of having had to be there to appreciate them.
Exception: Leiber’s “The Silver Eggheads,” which is one of my favorite novels of that period. Perhaps it’s because he was lampooning publishing, and not trying to comment on the world. Definitely nothing dark about it, just fun.
It may just be a case of having had to be there to appreciate them.
I don’t think so–not in my case, anyway. I first read the Pohl/Kornbluth things in the 1970s, and I liked them as adventure stories set in odd backgrounds. The message-y part of the books didn’t really strike home. It was already clear back then that advertisers were not (and would not become) a brilliantly sinister cabal with the power to warp the human mind to their design. But that was the premise of The Space Merchants so I rolled with it for the sake of the story, much as I did with the equally-unlikely premises of, say, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
I know what you mean about The Silver Eggheads, though. Great comic plotting and vivid cartoony characters.