In the 1940s science fiction author Frederik Pohl set out to write a mainstream novel about Madison Avenue, but found himself stymied by one key fact: he knew nothing about advertising. So he spent several years working for ad agencies, where he became increasingly disgusted at the idea of manipulating people into buying products they didn’t need.

Michael R. Page, who recently published a book-length study of Pohl, says this line of thinking eventually led to the classic novel The Space Merchants.

“[Pohl] was a science fiction guy,” Page says in Episode 219 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So as time went forward he realized, ‘Why don’t I project this into the future? What will the future be like when advertising becomes more ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives?'”

The Space Merchants, which Pohl completed with help from his friend Cyril Kornbluth, is a grim satire in which schoolchildren are given daily ‘cigarette rations’ in order to get them hooked early. This eerily prefigures the current trend of schools serving fast food.

“It’s just extraordinary to me when I’ve been in schools in more recent years,” Page says. “They’ll have pizza vendors that have a kiosk, and they have ice cream bar machines in every hallway. So yeah, [Pohl and Kornbluth] really anticipated that sort of marketing to kids.”

In The Space Merchants, hyper-consumption leads to an ecologically devastated future in which high-end luxuries include a “fresh-water tap” and “real tree-grown wood.” The novel is just one example of how science fiction writers were talking about environmental issues long before it became fashionable. Page believes that their efforts may have even helped spark the modern environmental movement.

“The Space Merchants is one of the greatest works of environmental fiction that’s ever been written,” he says. “Science fiction was looking at these possible futures, and it certainly triggered a lot of the imagination that leads to dealing with these problems.”

Despite the fact that Pohl’s warnings about rampant consumerism and ecological collapse went largely unheeded, he never lost faith in the promise of the human future.

“He said that he was a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist,” Page says. “He believed that human beings would overcome our difficulties, that we’ll rise to the challenge, that we’re problem-solvers.”

Listen to our complete interview with Michael R. Page in Episode 219 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Michael R. Page on predicting future technology:

“In a lot of stories, if we look back at them, we can notice that some of these information and media technologies that we now have are in some ways present in a lot of the early stories, but they just didn’t have a name for it, or they didn’t have it fully conceptualized. And certainly in the case of The Age of the Pussyfoot, it’s not actually a phone like we would think of it—as a little pocket device—it was actually like a sceptre, but it had all these capabilities that we would now associate with a smartphone—and just the fact that you’d have your personal computer device that you could carry around from place to place. So in that respect [Pohl] sort of anticipated wireless receivers too.”

Michael R. Page on cryonics:

“Robert Ettinger was one of the early proponents of [cryonics], and Pohl became a spokesman of sorts for that process. What’s interesting about it is he said—particularly as he got older—that he wasn’t interested in being frozen cryonically, like some others had been. He kind of passed on it. I think he said, ‘Hey, I’ve lived a great life, and I can’t imagine wanting to do any more.’ But that theme of [cryonics] shows up in a lot of his work after about the mid-’60s. That’s a big part of The Age of the Pussyfoot, and also his novel The World at the End of Time. But he also kind of anticipated it too, in his novel Preferred Risk.”

Michael R. Page on McCarthyism:

“Given the fact that he’d had a communist background—however slight it was—had he been one of the writers in the mainstream, he might have gotten that kind of [scrutiny]. But since Joseph McCarthy may not have been able to understand science fiction—if we think of Samuel Delany‘s idea that you have to learn how to read it—that may have protected some of the science fiction writers from that kind of attention. James Gunn actually wrote a story where it’s quite blatantly a parody of Joseph McCarthy, but by that time I think McCarthy might already have fallen, in terms of his influence.”

Michael R. Page on “Day Million”:

“[Pohl] wrote that during the New Wave era, when he wouldn’t have been considered a New Wave writer. He was one of the ‘old guard,’ so to speak, and yet he wrote the quintessential New Wave breakout story. … ‘Day Million’ is the quintessential example of ‘the world will be different, people will be different, what we might think is strange now will not be strange in the future.’ And one of the things that really resonates with that story when we use it in class these days is that, at this particular moment in culture, there’s very much a discourse and a discussion about the fluidity of gender, and here Pohl’s dealing with that in this story. So it really speaks to students in 2016.”