The Joy Makers (Standalone) 2Stars

 

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Title: The Joy Makers
Series: Standalone
Author: James Gunn
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 223
Words: 67K
Publish: 1961

Back in 2024 (waaaaaaay back then, a whole two years, whoooohoooooo), I did a series of posts asking for book recommendations. In one such post (Book Recommendations III), Marzaat recommended this book to me. The names “James Gunn” caught my interest because that’s the director for several Super Hero movies that I’ve enjoyed. Obviously this was a different Jame Gunn and one that I hoped was superior to that pathetic excuse of a human that trafficked in total mediocrity ;-)

If you’ve paid attention, you’ll have already seen my rating and deduced that it was not a smashing success for me.

Ever since I finished I’ve been wondering how to write what I really think without casting any aspersions on Marzaat for suggesting the book to me :-) It has been a real struggle, because despite my sometimes brash and gruff words, I care deeply what the people who know me think of me. If Marzaat was just some rando on Devilreads, I’d roast him without a thought. Which is why I don’t review books for people I know.

This was a philosophically oriented SF story. About hedonism. That’s the first strike. It is the rise and fall and then steadying out of Hedonism as a thoughtful philosophy to live your life by.

That is so ridiculous that I won’t even go down the rampaging path. Saying that Hedonism is a viable lifestyle for the human race is like saying that Moloch worship is a viable way for Humanity to live.

So I’m chalking this one up to Experience and moving on. I’m definitely not going to read any more by Gunn and I’ll leave him to those who enjoy his brand of ivorytower-SF.

★★☆☆☆

From TheRuinedChapel.com

The first section deals with a company called Hedonics, Inc., a business which promises to make people happy, or give them their money back. A hardboiled businessman thinks he sees through this obvious scam. But after awhile, he starts to find that maybe it isn’t just a scam after all.

In part two, Hedonics has basically taken over the world, to the point where there are professional “hedonists,” who are essentially doctors assigned to make sure that their charges are in a state of happiness. This section follows one such hedonist, whose name we learn very late in the section, is Morgan. Morgan gradually uncovers… let’s say… issues within the structure of the government-sponsored philosophy of absolute happiness.

The third section deals with a Venus-born man returning to Earth to warn of what appears to be an impending alien attack. What he finds on returning to Earth is that it has been nearly entirely taken over by machines, whose prime directive is ensuring that humans are happy at all times. And being machines, they followed this logic to its inevitable conclusion.