Gladiator-At-Law
Encyclopedia
Gladiator-At-Law is a satirical
science fiction
novel by Frederik Pohl
and Cyril M. Kornbluth
. It was first published in 1955 by Ballantine Books
and republished in 1986 by Baen Books
.
the world was ruled by advertising agencies, in this novel corporate lawyers, especially the secretive firm of "Green, Charlesworth" have gained a stranglehold on the world. Business Law is an extremely lucrative career, while Criminal Law pays enough to afford some of the luxuries of life but not enough to save for the future.
Success means living in a luxurious automated "bubble home" constructed by "GML", a corporation which is nominally public but whose shares are never traded openly. All work contracts include GML housing as part of the pay scale. Not having a contract job means having to live in a community such as "Belly Rave", originally a post-war suburban development for returning soldiers, now a slum ruled by teenage gangs. Its original name was "Belle Rêve".
For the common people, there are bread-and-circuses entertainments in the form of gladiatorial games of various kinds, with monetary rewards for the winners. Some games pit elderly people against each other armed with padded clubs, but others are more deadly.
There are two main protagonists. One is Norvell Bright, a nebbish designer of game spectacles for a second-rank corporation who is thrown out of his job, and his GML home, a victim of office politics. His gold-digger wife, instead of leaving him, returns with him to her roots in the slum, kicking her daughter out to join a gang and bring in some money.
The other is Charles Mundin, an attorney scratching a living in criminal practice, barred from more lucrative commercial work by the licensing monopolies of the large law firms.
By chance they encounter siblings Norma and Donald Lavin, who inherited 25% of GML stock from their father, the inventor of the Bubble House. Donald placed the share certificates in safe deposit box, and then was kidnapped and "conditioned", as are many common criminals. He can no longer tell anyone where the stock certificates are, and any attempt to obtain duplicate certificates from GML will surely result in more foul play.
Helping the Lavins, they discover the truth behind GML and confront "Green, Charlesworth", whose true nature is more bizarre than anyone could imagine.
, New Jersey. The city proper consists of luxurious GML bubble homes which can change shape at the whim of their occupants, and anticipate their every need. At the edge of Monmouth City is the slum of Belly Rave, originally a gimcrack suburb built on a landfill and sold to unsuspecting young couples.
Charles Mundin and Norvell Bligh first meet when Bligh is trying to adopt his stepdaughter, mostly at the behest of his upwardly mobile wife, Virginia. Bligh then returns to work on the next gruesomely spectacular Field Day to be organized by his company, while Mundin visits Republican Party headquarters, where he is introduced to the Lavins by his friend, the local Ward Chairman whose brother also knows Bligh.
Bligh finds himself tricked out of his job by his assistant, abetted by one of the secretaries who is keen to marry a man with a job whose benefits include a GML home. Bligh is arrested when he tries to drown his sorrows, only to find his company credit card has been cancelled. Mundin uses his political connections to have Bligh freed, but then Bligh and his family are unceremoniously dumped in Belly Rave. Virginia is no stranger to the place, but Bligh needs the help of a local, who calls himself Shep.
With Shep's guidance Bligh negotiates the "public assistance" system which ensures that nobody starves, without actually making life worth living. Shep scrapes together materials so he can paint "rainscapes", views of Belly Rave in the rain. Other residents indulge in a kind of barter, or petty theft, extortion, and gang crime, or simply anaesthetize themselves with liquor made from the desserts in their ration packs. Virginia, opportunistic as ever, begins eyeing Shep as a replacement for Norvell.
Mundin eventually visits the Lavins, who live in a different part of Belly Rave, and meets Ryan, a broken-down corporate attorney addicted to "yen-pox", an opiate
in the form of crude pills. Ryan has a plan for recovering the shares which Donald Lavin hid away before he was brainwashed, but the initial effort at obtaining records from GML result in Norma Lavin being kidnapped.
Ryan is strangely elated, as it is evident that GML seems to think their activities are a threat, which could give him some leverage in negotiations. He decides to send Mundin to a shareholder's meeting. This entails buying a GML share on Wall Street, which has become a hybrid stock-market and public casino. Mundin braves the touts and thugs of the market to trick his way to buying a share, normally impossible because of the activities of certain brokers. Hiding out in Belly Rave, he meets Bligh, who has become adept in negotiating with the gangs there. Bligh arranges Mundin's safe passage to the company meeting, in a deliberately obscure building on Long Island.
At the meeting Mundin, learning to play off the power brokers against each other, gains access to Norma who was a "guest" of one faction. Mundin also gains an ally in Bliss Hubble, a "Titan of Industry" who sees in the Lavin's shares a way to unseat the faction currently in control of GML. Recruiting a few more Titans to his cause, he takes the entire party to his elaborate GML bubble-house, which is currently configured as a Gothic mansion, thanks to a household servant with a grudge.
With Bliss's backing, Ryan and Mundin are suddenly a full-fledged law firm with expensive offices. The plan Bliss hatches is to bankrupt GML rather than indulge in a proxy battle. Mundin is dispatched to sabotage certain GML houses, including the model in the Smithsonian, at the same time spreading rumors through his political connections. Bliss bankrolls some illegal medical treatment for Don Lavin, in order to reverse his brainwashing. After this, they are able to recover the Lavins' stock certificates from a bank in Ohio, where GML was founded.
Norvell, meanwhile, is becoming an important man in Belly Rave. His experience catering to crowds in the Field Days allows him to organize the otherwise listless residents to clean the place up and even try some local policing. Shep, meanwhile, has become too close to Virginia, and Bligh has applied corrective action with a piece of lead pipe.
At this point the much dreaded firm of "Green, Charlesworth" intervene. They occupy the entire Empire State Building
on the otherwise uninhabited island of Manhattan
. Rather than send their minions to shut down the plot, they grant Norma Lavin and Mundin an "audience" at their headquarters. Here they are revealed to be a grotesque pair of ancient human beings, a man and a woman, trapped in husks of bodies in glass cases, but able to exert influence with their minds, their devices, and their money. They own GML and have used it to rule their world. They claim to be centuries old, having "fixed Mr. Lincoln's
wagon" and they threaten to do the same to Mundin and the Lavin's. Mundin identifies them as the Struldbrug
s described by satirist Jonathan Swift
.
Returning to their offices, Mundin and Norma find that only Bliss Hubble and the increasingly comatose Ryan are still on their side. They resolve to carry on regardless, but then chaos ensues as listening devices planted by Green, Charlesworth explode around them. In the confusion, Donald disappears, responding to a subliminal signal as if he is still brainwashed.
They find him at the Field Day, entered in an event where he walks a tightrope across a pool of piranha fish while under a hail of rocks from the crowd. Despite their efforts at bribing the mob not to throw anything, aided by threats from Bligh's teenage gangsters, Donald falls into the pool. Bligh is ready to sacrifice himself to save Donald, but instead the tortured artist Shep throws himself in with the fish.
Declaring war on GML and Green, Charlesworth, they return to Wall Street where Mundin starts a run on the market by carefully selling off large chunks of the GML stock. After a while the selling takes on a life of its own, despite the efforts of various people, acting unwittingly on behalf of Green, Charlesworth, to have Mundin arrested on trumped-up charges, or to discourage him from selling.
As the market collapses, the plotters are left with large amounts of cash, which they use to buy up GML and other companies at bargain prices. At the end they are counting their riches and savoring their triumph, just as Green, Charlesworth, across the water in Manhattan, destroy themselves in a nuclear explosion.
that brings together the "high technology" of the 1950s, these being plastics, electronics and cybernetics
. The house has movable walls, shape-shifting components and an "electronic brain" allowing it to adjust to its inhabitants needs, even to cooking meals, and to be configured according to their whims. It was created to satisfy a vision of housing for Everyman, similar to the Levittown
ideal.
However the inventors were unable to interest any corporations in building the houses to sell at a price the average person could afford. The operation was taken over by a man named Moffat (the "M" in GML) who masterminded an operation which leased the houses to large companies to house their workers. Eventually the lease arrangements began to include shares in the client companies, so that GML came to own major interests in almost every company in the world, giving it effective control. In turn the GML house enabled companies to impose terms amounting to indentured servitude on their workers, the alternative being to live in a slum on public assistance.
Lavin was cut-out of GML business and his stock was impounded on a pretext. He died in poverty, but some time later a legal error allowed his children to regain control of the stock, whereupon Donald was kidnapped and brainwashed to prevent him from revealing where he had hidden the certificates.
praised the novel as "a grimly unforgettable item that delivers an extra punch on a second reading."
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. is an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years — from his first published work, "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna" , to his most recent novel, All the Lives He Led .He won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Jem...
and Cyril M. Kornbluth
Cyril M. Kornbluth
Cyril M. Kornbluth was an American science fiction author and a notable member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner and Jordan Park...
. It was first published in 1955 by Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...
and republished in 1986 by Baen Books
Baen Books
Baen Books is an American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy...
.
Plot introduction
The plot is typically topsy-turvy. Whereas in the earlier novel The Space MerchantsThe Space Merchants
The Space Merchants is a science fiction novel, written by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth in 1952. Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine as a serial entitled Gravy Planet, the novel was first published as a single volume in 1953, and has sold heavily since...
the world was ruled by advertising agencies, in this novel corporate lawyers, especially the secretive firm of "Green, Charlesworth" have gained a stranglehold on the world. Business Law is an extremely lucrative career, while Criminal Law pays enough to afford some of the luxuries of life but not enough to save for the future.
Success means living in a luxurious automated "bubble home" constructed by "GML", a corporation which is nominally public but whose shares are never traded openly. All work contracts include GML housing as part of the pay scale. Not having a contract job means having to live in a community such as "Belly Rave", originally a post-war suburban development for returning soldiers, now a slum ruled by teenage gangs. Its original name was "Belle Rêve".
For the common people, there are bread-and-circuses entertainments in the form of gladiatorial games of various kinds, with monetary rewards for the winners. Some games pit elderly people against each other armed with padded clubs, but others are more deadly.
There are two main protagonists. One is Norvell Bright, a nebbish designer of game spectacles for a second-rank corporation who is thrown out of his job, and his GML home, a victim of office politics. His gold-digger wife, instead of leaving him, returns with him to her roots in the slum, kicking her daughter out to join a gang and bring in some money.
The other is Charles Mundin, an attorney scratching a living in criminal practice, barred from more lucrative commercial work by the licensing monopolies of the large law firms.
By chance they encounter siblings Norma and Donald Lavin, who inherited 25% of GML stock from their father, the inventor of the Bubble House. Donald placed the share certificates in safe deposit box, and then was kidnapped and "conditioned", as are many common criminals. He can no longer tell anyone where the stock certificates are, and any attempt to obtain duplicate certificates from GML will surely result in more foul play.
Helping the Lavins, they discover the truth behind GML and confront "Green, Charlesworth", whose true nature is more bizarre than anyone could imagine.
Plot summary
The action takes place in and around a future Monmouth CityMonmouth County, New Jersey
Monmouth County is a county located in the U.S. state of New Jersey, within the New York metropolitan area. As of the 2010 Census, the population was 630,380, up from 615,301 at the 2000 census. Its county seat is Freehold Borough. The most populous municipality is Middletown Township with...
, New Jersey. The city proper consists of luxurious GML bubble homes which can change shape at the whim of their occupants, and anticipate their every need. At the edge of Monmouth City is the slum of Belly Rave, originally a gimcrack suburb built on a landfill and sold to unsuspecting young couples.
Charles Mundin and Norvell Bligh first meet when Bligh is trying to adopt his stepdaughter, mostly at the behest of his upwardly mobile wife, Virginia. Bligh then returns to work on the next gruesomely spectacular Field Day to be organized by his company, while Mundin visits Republican Party headquarters, where he is introduced to the Lavins by his friend, the local Ward Chairman whose brother also knows Bligh.
Bligh finds himself tricked out of his job by his assistant, abetted by one of the secretaries who is keen to marry a man with a job whose benefits include a GML home. Bligh is arrested when he tries to drown his sorrows, only to find his company credit card has been cancelled. Mundin uses his political connections to have Bligh freed, but then Bligh and his family are unceremoniously dumped in Belly Rave. Virginia is no stranger to the place, but Bligh needs the help of a local, who calls himself Shep.
With Shep's guidance Bligh negotiates the "public assistance" system which ensures that nobody starves, without actually making life worth living. Shep scrapes together materials so he can paint "rainscapes", views of Belly Rave in the rain. Other residents indulge in a kind of barter, or petty theft, extortion, and gang crime, or simply anaesthetize themselves with liquor made from the desserts in their ration packs. Virginia, opportunistic as ever, begins eyeing Shep as a replacement for Norvell.
Mundin eventually visits the Lavins, who live in a different part of Belly Rave, and meets Ryan, a broken-down corporate attorney addicted to "yen-pox", an opiate
Opiate
In medicine, the term opiate describes any of the narcotic opioid alkaloids found as natural products in the opium poppy plant.-Overview:Opiates are so named because they are constituents or derivatives of constituents found in opium, which is processed from the latex sap of the opium poppy,...
in the form of crude pills. Ryan has a plan for recovering the shares which Donald Lavin hid away before he was brainwashed, but the initial effort at obtaining records from GML result in Norma Lavin being kidnapped.
Ryan is strangely elated, as it is evident that GML seems to think their activities are a threat, which could give him some leverage in negotiations. He decides to send Mundin to a shareholder's meeting. This entails buying a GML share on Wall Street, which has become a hybrid stock-market and public casino. Mundin braves the touts and thugs of the market to trick his way to buying a share, normally impossible because of the activities of certain brokers. Hiding out in Belly Rave, he meets Bligh, who has become adept in negotiating with the gangs there. Bligh arranges Mundin's safe passage to the company meeting, in a deliberately obscure building on Long Island.
At the meeting Mundin, learning to play off the power brokers against each other, gains access to Norma who was a "guest" of one faction. Mundin also gains an ally in Bliss Hubble, a "Titan of Industry" who sees in the Lavin's shares a way to unseat the faction currently in control of GML. Recruiting a few more Titans to his cause, he takes the entire party to his elaborate GML bubble-house, which is currently configured as a Gothic mansion, thanks to a household servant with a grudge.
With Bliss's backing, Ryan and Mundin are suddenly a full-fledged law firm with expensive offices. The plan Bliss hatches is to bankrupt GML rather than indulge in a proxy battle. Mundin is dispatched to sabotage certain GML houses, including the model in the Smithsonian, at the same time spreading rumors through his political connections. Bliss bankrolls some illegal medical treatment for Don Lavin, in order to reverse his brainwashing. After this, they are able to recover the Lavins' stock certificates from a bank in Ohio, where GML was founded.
Norvell, meanwhile, is becoming an important man in Belly Rave. His experience catering to crowds in the Field Days allows him to organize the otherwise listless residents to clean the place up and even try some local policing. Shep, meanwhile, has become too close to Virginia, and Bligh has applied corrective action with a piece of lead pipe.
At this point the much dreaded firm of "Green, Charlesworth" intervene. They occupy the entire Empire State Building
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...
on the otherwise uninhabited island of Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. Rather than send their minions to shut down the plot, they grant Norma Lavin and Mundin an "audience" at their headquarters. Here they are revealed to be a grotesque pair of ancient human beings, a man and a woman, trapped in husks of bodies in glass cases, but able to exert influence with their minds, their devices, and their money. They own GML and have used it to rule their world. They claim to be centuries old, having "fixed Mr. Lincoln's
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
wagon" and they threaten to do the same to Mundin and the Lavin's. Mundin identifies them as the Struldbrug
Struldbrug
In Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name struldbrug is given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal. However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging...
s described by satirist Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
.
Returning to their offices, Mundin and Norma find that only Bliss Hubble and the increasingly comatose Ryan are still on their side. They resolve to carry on regardless, but then chaos ensues as listening devices planted by Green, Charlesworth explode around them. In the confusion, Donald disappears, responding to a subliminal signal as if he is still brainwashed.
They find him at the Field Day, entered in an event where he walks a tightrope across a pool of piranha fish while under a hail of rocks from the crowd. Despite their efforts at bribing the mob not to throw anything, aided by threats from Bligh's teenage gangsters, Donald falls into the pool. Bligh is ready to sacrifice himself to save Donald, but instead the tortured artist Shep throws himself in with the fish.
Declaring war on GML and Green, Charlesworth, they return to Wall Street where Mundin starts a run on the market by carefully selling off large chunks of the GML stock. After a while the selling takes on a life of its own, despite the efforts of various people, acting unwittingly on behalf of Green, Charlesworth, to have Mundin arrested on trumped-up charges, or to discourage him from selling.
As the market collapses, the plotters are left with large amounts of cash, which they use to buy up GML and other companies at bargain prices. At the end they are counting their riches and savoring their triumph, just as Green, Charlesworth, across the water in Manhattan, destroy themselves in a nuclear explosion.
Characters in Gladiator-At-Law
- Charles Mundin is not a particularly good lawyer, although he can easily out-think the likes of Wilhelm Choate IV, his friend who inherited a large corporate practice from his father Wilhelm Choate III and looks forward to passing the firm and its decades-long bankruptcy cases to his son, Wilhelm V. Mundin is fairly adept at cultivating political contacts, such as his friend Del Dworcas, the Republican Ward Chairman who steers work to him. Del's brother Arnie is an Engineer, which in his case is more of a title than a vocation. Arnie passes Norvell Bligh onto Del, who connects him with Mundin.
- Norvell Bligh is a Company man, eagerly organizing the bloody spectacles that keep his boss in business, though the boss chafes at being in a "minor league" operation, and rides his workers hard to compensate. At the beginning of the novel he has to wear a hearing aid, but as he grows as a human being, he suddenly finds that he doesn't need it at all. In parallel he frees himself from his fears of his boss, of his shrewish wife, of his fellow residents of Belly Rave, and finally of Death itself.
- Donald and Norma Lavin are the twin children of one of the two co-inventors of the automated, self-maintaining GML House. Donald is naive and childlike as a consequence of being brainwashed. Norma is typical of female characters by the authors, in that she resents the restrictions imposed on her by society, but even more resentful of being attracted to a man like Mundin who does not treat her like a woman.
- Bliss Hubble is rich enough for money not to matter to him. He is instead addicted to power and the pursuit of it. Initially he sees the Lavins as another tool, but when he learns the true nature of Green, Charlesworth he decides that his "power" was an illusion, and sticks with Mundin and the Lavins after his partners bail out.
- Virginia Bligh, the once and future Belly Raver, is a survivor. Sold by her parents, she was lucky to be merely a shill in a pickpocket operation instead of, say, a worker in a brothel. Lying her way into a job as a receptionist, she entices Norvell Bligh into marriage, carefully editing her past to elicit sympathy. She then persuades him to adopt her daughter Alexandra, creating a story of an abusive father. Alexandra is well on her way to becoming an obese parasite when Norvell is outfoxed by his subordinate, who is also being manipulated by a Belly Raver, dumping them back into the slum. Virginia kicks Alexandra out, telling her to join a gang and bring in some money. Alexandra joins "Goering's Grenadiers", a group of neo-Nazis. Unfortunately their house is in "Wabbit" territory.
- "Shep" is a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Big and beefy enough to survive on the streets of Belly Rave, he wants nothing more than to paint. He spends any money he gets sending the local gang members to fetch paints from outside the slum. He has entered the Games to raise money for painting, only to find that the emotional trauma of injuring someone to win the money prevents him from painting at all. Virginia Bligh tries to entice him, but Norvell reacts by threatening Virginia and eventually Shep himself. Shep for his part is too tortured by his inner demons to be interested in Virginia, or to resent Norvell's hostility.
The GML House
A GML House is an invention, a "machine for living in"Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
that brings together the "high technology" of the 1950s, these being plastics, electronics and cybernetics
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...
. The house has movable walls, shape-shifting components and an "electronic brain" allowing it to adjust to its inhabitants needs, even to cooking meals, and to be configured according to their whims. It was created to satisfy a vision of housing for Everyman, similar to the Levittown
Levittown
Levittown is the name of four large suburban developments created in the United States of America by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons...
ideal.
However the inventors were unable to interest any corporations in building the houses to sell at a price the average person could afford. The operation was taken over by a man named Moffat (the "M" in GML) who masterminded an operation which leased the houses to large companies to house their workers. Eventually the lease arrangements began to include shares in the client companies, so that GML came to own major interests in almost every company in the world, giving it effective control. In turn the GML house enabled companies to impose terms amounting to indentured servitude on their workers, the alternative being to live in a slum on public assistance.
Lavin was cut-out of GML business and his stock was impounded on a pretext. He died in poverty, but some time later a legal error allowed his children to regain control of the stock, whereupon Donald was kidnapped and brainwashed to prevent him from revealing where he had hidden the certificates.
Reception
Groff ConklinGroff Conklin
Edward Groff Conklin was a leading science fiction anthologist. He edited 40 anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories , wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects as well as a published poet...
praised the novel as "a grimly unforgettable item that delivers an extra punch on a second reading."