The Marching Morons

About the book

John Barlow awakens in a future whose spectacular machines and confident public language conceal severe incompetence. A small group performs the difficult work required to keep a much larger population alive and entertained, and its members are desperate for relief. Barlow brings neither scientific expertise nor public spirit, but he understands salesmanship, manipulation, and the appeal of an attractive promise. That experience makes him unexpectedly useful to people confronting a problem they have failed to solve. Kornbluth's satire attacks commercial persuasion and mass spectacle while building its society on troubling assumptions about inherited intelligence and human worth. The story's central tension concerns what happens when technical responsibility seeks an answer from someone skilled chiefly in deception.

• Manipulation and advertising
• Expertise and dependence
• Dehumanizing solutions

Why read it

Examine a biting science-fiction satire whose proposed social remedies are as disturbing as its imagined crisis.

English story from Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1951