This was better than I expected and not as satirical as the C. M. Kornbluth’s and Pohl’s collaboration The Space Merchants.

It was, of course, the advertising industry that dominated the world in that novel. Here it’s an insurance company, simply called the Company. As Pohl explains in his afterword, “The Art and Agony of Collaboration”, Pohl’s conceptual inspiration for the story is that, rightly or wrongly, money guides peoples’ behavior. What if you had a system where someone made a profit mitigating the evils of life?

The Company is that someone, a single insurance company that came to dominate the world after the Short War (seemingly a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR). It not only writes policies for life insurance. It has food and medical policies too. And, as our hero Tom Willis would be happy to tell you, it’s eliminated war and want.

At least that’s what he’d say if you asked him when he arrives in Naples, Italy in the wake of a local war fought between that city and Sicily. The world has balkanized under the Company and only America has maintained something like its old size.

Willis is something of an unusual convert to the Company. And convert is the right word. He regards the Company as something like a sacred institution that has solved the worlds problems, run by incorruptible men including its sainted founder Carmody. Willis even has Company scripture he carries about, the Adjustor’s Handbook. But Willis didn’t always feel that way. In fact, after the early death from disease of his wife Marianna back in America, he publicly denounced the Company, vandalized some of its property, and was jailed only to be bailed out by one of Marianna’s relatives, Defoe who is the Company’s Chief Underwriter.

On arriving in Naples, Willis will meet Zorchi, a strange man who will play a prominent role in the story and who has become wealthy by staging grisly accidents that maim him so he can collect the insurance. He’ll also meet Rena dell’Angela, a beautiful local girl whom he will fall in love with.

Willis will learn, after meeting his new boss who heads the Naples office, that Company officials aren’t all creatures of virtue, competence, and incorruptibility. And he’ll also meet, through Rena (deemed uninsurable), anti-Company rebels who point out that not only has war not ceased under the Company’s rule but medical research and social mobility has stagnated.

That’s crazy talk as far as Willis is concerned, but he wants to talk the beautiful Rena out of her ideas before she comes to real harm. And, so, Willis finds himself embedded with the rebels in a story that will take us into the ancient catacombs under Rome to a gun battle in the ruins of Pompeii to the new medical catacombs, where the Company parks people with the promise to revive them at a future date when they can be cured,.

Pohl and del Rey don’t rig the political perspectives of the story. There are benefits to Company rule as well as downsides. Some of the rebels have crazy, dangerous plans. And those plans aren’t going to work out as expected. But then neither are the Company’s.

The novel ends on a rumination that no system of government is perfect, that eternal revolution seems to be humanity’s lot.

To be sure, at least one major plot twist was predictable, but, for the most part, this story takes some unexpected turns in both character and plot, a quick and enjoyable read

In Pohl’s and del Rey’s afterword, “Risk, But Not Preferred”, they talk about how their friendship survived their collaboration and how they annoyed each other with their very opposite approaches to writing. Del Rey liked to plot everything in advance, and Pohl liked to make it up as he went along.

They also talk about how a novelette they gave to H. L. Gold became this novel. Gold was running a novel contest for the magazine Beyond Fantasy Fiction. The deadline had passed, and Gold didn’t like any of the entries, so he proposed Pohl and del Rey turn their novelette into this novel. It was a guaranteed winner. It would become the one and only publication credit for Edson McCann. ( )

review of
Edson McCann's Preferred Risk
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 28-March 4, 2022

As a person whose opinions about insurance companies cd hardly get any more negative, I got a good laugh out of the inside front page blurb:

""To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company's concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster—even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once—the affected population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures.

""To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the race.

""It was time to find out which of us was right.""

The front cover has a sort of Surrealist artwork that I like very much but that's completely irrelevant to the story. This bk's from 1955 originally, but printed in 1962. The cover price is 40¢. Looking online it seems that the average price for such a thing these days might be $16. According to an online inflation calendar that 1962 40¢ shd be worth $3.72 in 2022. What am I missing here? Well, one thing that's interesting is the way POD (Print On Demand) printers (such as Amazon) have effected the market. I love POD printing.. but, at the same time, I know from dealing w/ these printers that they demand the setting of prices based on 1. what they're charging you for the printing, 2. the discount you're expected to offer book dealers. The gist of it is that they force your price up to hypothetically accomodate a 30 to 55% discount to dealers, wch effects the price dramatically, but the dealers aren't going to buy POD bks no matter what. Hence, the prices are dramatically driven up for purely hypothetical reasons that're presented to the person setting those prices as somehow 'real'. If I pay the POD printer $9 to print a bk I can't then sell it for $10, I have to sell if for over $20 to hypothetically make a profit. The POD company won't allow me to sell it for less. I'm not a businessperson, despite having owned a business, so there's probably something I'm missing here that someone else can explain better but it seems to me that the price for getting that bk made then becomes, essentially, $20. But I digress.

I was telling a friend that I was reading this & that it was very good & that I'd never heard of the author before. I further explained that pulp writers often use pseudonymns & that I figured that was the case here. A little research revealed that "Edson McCann" was Frederik Pohl & Lester del Rey & that this was the only bk they coauthored under that name. The cover of the bk proudly exclaims that it's the "winner of the galaxy-simon & schuster science-fiction contest". This bk having been written in 1955 but this edition having been published in 1962 coupled w/ Pohl having been the editor of Galaxy from roughly 1959 to 1969 might explain the fictional author identity if there was some perceived conflict-of-interest along the way. Furthermore, Pohl hired Judy-Lyn del Rey as his assistant editor at Galaxy & If. I don't mention these things in some sort of spirit of 'muck-raking', I just find it interesting imagining why some people might use pseudonymns.

The main character, Adjuster Wills, works for The Company & starts off as a somewhat predictable Company Man, loyal.. & naive. He's been transferred & promoted to a branch in Italy.

"I got as far as the exit to the train shed. There was a sudden high, shrill blast of whistles and a scurrying, and out of the confusion of persons milling about there emerged orders. At every doorway stood three uniformed Company expediters; squads of expediters formed almost before my eyes all over the train shed; single expediters appeared and took up guard positions at every stair well and platform head. It was a triumph of organization. In no more than ten seconds a confused crowd was brought under instant control." - p 6

"Expediters" being a euphemism for Company soldiers. The Company has ostensibly stopped war, fires, disease, etc.. but, oh well, there was a little nuclear war in the area that Wills has arrived at not so long ago.

"—still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government's bureaus and departments, almost everyone of them non-cancellable. It amounted to billions and billions of lire. Just looking at some of the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though they would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us. But the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Siciliy, less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Comapny's reserves back hundreds of millions of dollars." - p 20

"It was plain in history, for all to see. Once the world had been turbulent and distressed, and the Company had smoothed it out. It started with fires and disease. When the first primitive insurance companies—there were more than one in the early days—began offering protection against the hazards of fire, they had found it wise to try to prevent fires. There were the advertising campaigns with their wistful-eyed bears, pleading with smokers not to drop their lighted cigarettes in the dry forest; the technical bureaus like the Underwriter's Laboratory, testing electrical equipment, devising intricate and homely gimmicks like the underwriter's knot; the Fire Patrol in the big cities that followed up the city-owned Fire Department; the endless educational sessions in the schools. . . . And fires decreased." - p 21

But, HEY! They weren't counting on the highly anomolous Mr. Zorchi who cd go thru any sort of ordinarily fatal experience & recover - even to the extent of growing back missing limbs. & Zorchi cd collect insurance money.. over & over. Can't have that.

"He said resentfully, "You see what we're up against? And none of the things you are about to say help. There is no mistake in the records—they've been double- and triple-checked. There is no possibility that another man, or men, substituted for Zorchi—fingerprints check every time. The three times he lost his arms, retina prints checked. There is no possibility that the doctors were bribed, or that he lost a little more of his leg, for instance, in each accident—the severed sections were recovered, and they were complete. Wills, this guy grows new arms and legs like a crab!"" - p 24

& then there're the vaults, the deep-freezes where currently untreable patients are cryogenically preserved until such time that they can be cured - or is that all that they're being used for?

""I mean, I was wondering what you were doing here."

"The surprise became overt. "Vaults," he said succinctly. I prodded no further. I knew what he meant by vaults, of course. It was part of the Company's beneficent plan for ameliorating the effects of even such tiny wars as the Naples-Sicily affair that those who suffered radiation burns got the best treatment possible. And the best treatment, of course, was suspended animation. The deadly danger of radiation burns lay in their cumulative effect" - p 40

Have you ever noticed how many 'beautiful' women turn men from being nice normal passive slaves to the propaganda into people who begin to have 2nd thoughts. Well, Rena does this to Wills.

"["]They won't kill him—they don't have to! They just want him out of the way because he sees the Company for what it is."

"And what is that?"

"She whispered. "Tyranny, Tom."

""Rena, that's silly!" I burst out. "The Company is the hope of the world. If you talk like that you'll be in trouble. That's dangerous thinking, young lady. It attacks the foundations of the whole society."" - p 84

Ha ha! If you know me &/or have read my writings of the past 2 yrs, you'll know that I consider humanity to be now living under the tyranny of the Medical-Industrial Complex - ostensibly for our own good but really mainly for the good of the tirelessly greedy & power-hungry oligarchy. This novel, like so much science-fiction written by people intelligent enuf to see the writing on the wall, predicts the nightmare world humanity's currently being subjected to. Rena's a Thought Criminal & so am I. She's fictional but I'm not. Tom Wills, on the other hand, is SHEEPLE. He's both fictional & all too real.

""I said sharply, "You can't convince me that the Company deliberately falsifies records. Don't forget, Rena, I'm an executive of the Company! Nothing like that could go on!"

"Her eyes flared, but her lips were rebelliously silent. I said furiously, "I'll hear no more of that. Theoretical discussions are all right; I'm as broad-minded as the next man. But when you accuse the Company of outright fraud, you—well, you're mistaken."" - p 88

"From the moment I had heard those piercing words from Slovetski's mouth, I had been obsessed with a vision. A hell bomb on the Home Office. America's eastern seaboard split open; New York a hole in the ocean, from Kingston to Sandy Hook; orange flames spreading across Connecticut and the Pennsylvania corner.

"That was gone—and in its place was something worse.

"Radiocobalt bombing wouldn't simply kill locally by a gout of flaring radiation. It would leave the atmosphere filled with colloidal particles of deadly, radioactive Cobalt-60. A little of that could be used to cure cancers and perform miracles. The amount released from the sheathing of cobalt—normal, "safe" cobalt—around an fissioning hydrogen bomb could kill a world. A single bomb of that kind could wipe out all life on earth, as I remembered my schooling." - p 125

Well, obviously, the ante has been considerably upped by p 125 as the quote above demonstrates. Somewhat oddly, tho, the reason why this passage 'caught my eye' is not b/c of the perfectly reasonable & justified fear of nuclear annihilation particularly common to scientists & science fiction writers in the 1st 2 decades ensuing after the unforgiveable bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki but, instead, the mention of "Sandy Hook", a place I'd never heard of until the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 14, 2021. To have that shooting imagistically connected to a nuclear holocaust resonated strangely in my mind.

All in all, I'm very glad I stumbled across this bk. Science Fiction, my favorite genre, is filled w/ highly inspired work that tends to become obscure entirely too fast. Hence, it's my job to remind people of what's out there. ( )