Constructing the Normative: Male Subjects and Others in the Dystopias of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth‪.‬

Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's 1955 text, Gladiator-at-Law, has received nothing like the critical attention bestowed on another of their collaborations, The Space Merchants, which was lauded by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell and has received sustained attention since. I wish to approach this somewhat forgotten text as a narrative which figures the male subject as a fragile and anxious entity, reconstructed through codes of aggressive and combative behaviour: the "Gladiator" of the title. Pohl and Kornbluth were both a part of the "Futurians" group of science fiction writers of the 1940s, some of whom, like Pohl, came directly out of leftist politics of the 1930s, a politics characterized by the broad anti-fascist umbrella of the Popular Front period. Pohl describes in his autobiography his time with the Young Communist League, and his subsequent suspicion of, and departure from it. The United States of the 1940s and 1950s saw a movement away from the politics of the Communist-influenced left towards a centrist and 'liberal' consensus. Christopher Brookeman, in his American Culture and Society since the 1930s, describes "that disenchantment with communism and explicit ideological commitment that became a hallmark of the 1940s and 1950s" (2). Perhaps under the pressures of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), active in this period though only gaining notoriety in the McCarthyite early 50s, and the burgeoning dictates of a nascent Cold War and National Security State, socialism itself was identified with Stalinist totalitarianism. Brookeman writes that/p pre [t]he problems of sustaining ideological positions and loyalties within the contradictions of world history led many American writers and intellectuals to seek what Arthur M. Schlesinger called the "vital center," a core of agreed basic democratic values that could act as a focus of critical enquiry, not subject to the sudden ravages of history, revolution and ideological