[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 objects and advertisements. Then disparities begin to multiply: a new brand of cigarettes, an unusually strident advertising jingle, and so on. The main disparity, however, comes with Pohl repeating the opening line of the story and by freezing the passage of time at a single day. So although the protagonist Burckhardt wakes up several times the date stays at June 15th. As if that wasn't enough, he even discovers that his house is a metal replica! Thus two main determinants of reality—time and place—are brought into question through a series of perceptual shocks to the protagonist. The submerged plot of the story is given a metaphorical expression in a tunnel which Burckhardt discovers. Poised to enter it, he juggles with interpretive possibilities which anticipate Pynchon's fiction in their ambiguity: "He was sure of only one thing—the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel." These binary alternatives (extra-planetary/terrestrial, political/psychological) keep intact the master plot of conspiracy but do not identify the third possibility which is that, as a result of a massive industrial accident, Contro (read "control") chemicals has not only rebuilt the town but has housed the brains of some citizens (including Burckhardt himself) in robot humanoid bodies. "The Tunnel" then dramatises the power of commercial forces to construct reality on all levels. Burckhardt tries to leave the Contro plant and finds himself staring down into a void: "He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him." Burckhardt's vertigo marks the culminating point of his gradual loss of reality. Jean Baudrillard has described the modern shopping mall as an apotheosis of consumption, the "total organization of everyday life." Pohl anticipates this theoretical insight through a parable which puts the company into the position of creator not merely organiser of the environment. When Burckhardt steps out onto the ledge it is as if he temporarily leaves his own diegetic frame and gazes into a void empty of shape and dimension. Pohl thereby denies the reader the sentimental consolation of even a symbolic escape on the protagonist's part and the story concludes with a seemingly endless cycle of repetitions of one day, that is after yet one more shock—the narrator's realisation that he and his world have been miniaturised.

Such shock-effects play no part in a two-story sequence of 1959 where Pohl made his closest and most explicit connection between commerce and the Cold War. "The Wizards of Pung's Corner" is set in a small American town after a nuclear war has laid waste much of the country (America has won the war but the detail is played down as scarcely relevant). Pung's Corner has cut itself off from the residual federal authorities and the story essentially recounts the attempts of the latter to take over the town. The story expresses the tension between local communitarian values and government centralism in terms of military combat. The main antagonists in this struggle are Edsel Cogian for the government (a combination of tycoon, spy and electronics wizard) and the local Jack Tighe ("The Father of the Second Republic"). Cogian attempts to bring the town back into the national political mainstream by introducing subliminal advertisements on the TV and using subsonic messages to the local bank manager, but the community sees through these hidden persuaders and Cogian fails. The second phase of the action is a military offensive which goes farcically wrong when the government troops show a complete inability to handle their own technologically sophisticated weaponry. Surrender follows retreat, and Jack Tighe marches on Washington.

Pohl combines a number of important, thematic elements here. Firstly the story is told orally as a reminiscence of the "old days" to a projected reader who is assumed to have considerable knowledge of the present. This method of narration builds immediacy into the descriptions, incorporates both self-authenticating emphases, and anticipates possible queries from the listener/reader. In short the oral delivery naturalises the strange events by assuming the reader's credence from the outset. Secondly the story weaves potential resemblance between Jack Tighe and Lincoln, and between Coglan's arrival and such narratives as Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger". Thirdly Pohl transposes commerce on to military combat so that the government troops become the bemused consumers of new goods: the operating manual for their rifles is entitled The Five-Step Magic Eye Way to New Combat Comfort and Security. The companion story "Waging the Peace" develops an issue which Pohl could only glance at in "The Wizards," namely the unforeseen consequences of planning by a military-industrial complex. This history remains pure exposition in "The Wizards," but in its sequel the account of the dispersal and construction of underground factories, and their subsequent automation, supplies an essential context for the action. With Jack Tighe in power laws are passed forbidding advertising—"the very prescription for a Golden Age." The past, however, in the form of the "cavern factories" which are still churning out massive quantities of goods, proves to be the main obstacle to this reform. Hence the theme of the story emerges as a conflict between Utopian hope, the citizens' control of their own society; and on the other hand, the unforeseen consequences of its earlier economic system. The solution is battle, hence the paradox of the story's title, a battle to wipe out the factories. Once again the action follows two stages: a frontal attack on the factory entrance and underground sabotage. The latter virtually parodies the language of military heroism; ("They were unarmed and helpless against a smart and powerful factory of machines and weapons") and appears to conclude with victory celebrations when the factory has become immobilised. Except that it hasn't. The story concludes with an ironic twist in that production is continuing, even without raw materials.

Ultimately then mankind loses the struggle with its own creations. Pohl builds both his stories on a sardonic account of the rise of business design starting from the premise that "it doesn't much matter what you build, it only matters that people should want to buy it." The inducing of unnecessary desires feeds an unquestioned imperative of production, that it should always rise, and Pohl blurs this mounting spiral into another process of military escalation:

Against an enemy presupposed to grow smarter and slicker and quicker with each advance, just as we and our machines do. Against our having fewer and fewer fighting men; pure logic that, as war continues, more and more are killed, fewer and fewer left to operate the killer engines. Against the destruction or capture of even the impregnable underground factories, guarded as no dragon of legend ever was—by all that Man could devise at first in the way of traps and cages, blast and ray—and then by the slipleashed invention of machines ordered always to speed up—more and more, deadlier and deadlier.

Pohl brilliantly evokes increase and acceleration through repetition and even through a rhythmic pattern to his phrases which suggest a process with an internally consistent logic ("just as A, so B") based on a premise of attack which is never questioned. Pohl uses post-holocaust Detroit as an image of the ludicrous end result, above ground a blackened radioactive ruin, below ground a streamlined factory churning out motor cars which could never be used. Unfortunately in neither of these stories does Pohl allows such images their full force. Instead they are deflected into an ironic comedy of humanity's failure to regain control of its own production methods. Military combat in both stories can be read as historical prediction but also as the literalisation of the metaphor of promotion as "campaign" and competition as battle.

Pohl and Kornbluth's dramatisations of the takeover of American social and political life by advertising companies received startling factual confirmation in 1957 with the publication of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders. He presented a well-documented argument that since World War II the techniques of motivational research and depth psychology had been used increasingly by companies to promote their goods and even to win political elections. In his note for the British edition of his book Packard strikes an explicitly emotive note by declaring that "Americans have become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain." The political implications ran counter to the then ideological contrast which the United States was drawing between itself and the manipulatory Communist regimes. Packard showed that manipulation was now a routine fact of everyday life in the USA and that such practices were approaching the "chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother." Nineteen Eighty-Four indeed functions as an intertext within The Hidden Persuaders, supporting the latter's oppositions between secrecy and openness, depth and surface. The individual psyche becomes a politicised space which the ad-men usurp: "The most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit . . . is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds." One year earlier than Packard's book William H. Whyte had also drawn on Orwell for a similar prediction of change in America, but this time towards a benevolent therapeutic dictatorship:

And what a terrible world it would be! Hell is no less hell for being antiseptic. In the 1984 of Big Brother one would at least know who the enemy was—a bunch of bad men who wanted power because they liked power. But in the other kind of 1984 one would be disarmed for not knowing who the enemy was, and when the day of reckoning came the people on the other side of the table wouldn't be Big Brother's bad henchmen; they would be a mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.

Packard and Whyte both evoke a situation of brainwashing on the domestic front which reflects their perceptions of how power was shifting and in the course of a 1963 discussion on Orwellian tendencies in American life Pohl confirmed the message of The Hidden Persuaders by stating: "what speaks for society, first and foremost—thanks to the subliminal excavations of motivational research—is advertising."