The Tunnel Under the World

Frederik Pohl had become a powerful presence in GALAXY immediately upon the appearance (beginning in the issue of June 1952) of the famous three part serial GRAVY PLANET in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth and that presence was magnified with the publication of THE MIDAS PLAGUE in April 1954 and the second three part Kornbluth collaboration, GLADIATOR AT LAW, beginning two months later...but it was with this story that Pohl established himself as one of GALAXY's most powerful and perhaps exemplary contributor. Kornbluth had been regarded as the moving force and senior partner of the two collaborations and THE MIDAS PLAGUE was a story Pohl wrote unwillingly to editorial order...but THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD in its striking and despairing audacity caught everyone's attention. One of the earliest stories set in a landscape of virtual reality, the story portrays the advertising industry and its ethic in a fashion which seems surrealistic but that surrealism (in a technique which anticipates Kurt Vonnegut's later novels) is only a cover for an absolute and grim reality. Pohl has two anecdotes about the aftermath of this story: in the first a stranger met at a party said learning that Pohl was a science fiction writer "I don't like science fiction at all but I read this story years ago which I cannot get out of my head" and then proceeded to unreel the plot of THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD in ghastly detail. In his second anecdote, Pohl described receiving a fan letter praising the story and concluding "This is the way that the world would be run if the advertising agencies ran the world." Pohl responded, "Everyone who ever got into writing did so in the hope that at least once he or she would be completely understood. That letter showed me that at last, if only once, I had met that test."