The Mechanical Chicken: Psyche and Society in The Space Merchants

Brennan, John P. "The Mechanical Chicken: Psyche and Society in The Space Merchants." Extrapolation 25.2 (Summer 1984): 101-14.

Analyzes the image of "Chicken Little" in F. Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's Space Merchants and explains how that image is central to this novel's attack on psychologies that "are aggressively mechanistic, quantitative, and behaviorist" (106); attempts to show how these psychologies veil the true ideologies of the rulers of a world whose decorous metonym is "the Mechanical Chicken" (110).