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Easily the best known of these three novels is The Space Merchants, a good example of a science-fiction dystopia which extrapolates much more than the impact of science on human life, though its most important warning is in this area, namely as to the use to which discoveries in the behavioral sciences may be put.

The novel, which is not merely dystopian but also brilliantly satiric, describes a future America where one-sixteenth of the population, the men who run advertising agencies and big corporations, control the rest of the people, the submerged fifteen-sixteenths who are the workers and consumers, with the government being no more than `` a clearing house for pressures ''.

Like ours, the economy of the space merchants must constantly expand in order to survive, and, like ours, it is based on the principle of `` ever increasing everybody's work and profits in the circle of consumption ''.

The consequences, of course, have been dreadful: reckless expansion has led to overpopulation, pollution of the earth and depletion of its natural resources.

For example, even the most successful executive lives in a two-room apartment while ordinary people rent space in the stairwells of office buildings in which to sleep at night ; ;

soyaburgers have replaced meat, and wood has become so precious that it is saved for expensive jewelry ; ;

and the atmosphere is so befouled that no one dares walk in the open without respirators or soot plugs.