Аннотация

Win Brant was king of literary agents in the Vacarion Movement, the new approach to art and life which was transforming all society. The “Vikes” controlled publishing, movies, and television, and their slogan was: “The make-believe is better than the reality!”
Paperback novels extolled the merits of vicarious adventure; advertising emphasized clothes, cosmetics, expensive vacations, and innumerable other luxuries that the common man could never afford. But fiction, improved three-dimensional movies, and television took him right out of the dull, real world.
And Van Brant labored to create dreamworlds for everyone, while the little man began to forget the frustrations around him, and concentrate on the pure vicarious aspects of living. The Vike made his entire world a make-believe one. Narcotics, made legal under the pressure of the Vike lobby in Washington, became as common as cigarettes. All Vikes counted the hours, the minutes until Happy Time. Sex, so often disappointing in real life, was branded disgusting by the Vikes; it became entirely vicarious.
Then came the greatest sensation ever, and Van Brant threw his entire holdings into the newest discovery, the Individual Sensory movie. Now every male in the audience would actually feel everything the hero felt on the screen, every female would actually experience all the sensations that the heroine knew. Vision, color, sound, smell, taste and feeling — a complete dream-world for everyone, at popular prices!
But there were still the Realists, a large section of society which opposed the Vikes, who denounced their form of entertainment and their mode of living. So far, the Ree efforts had been futile sniping — blistering reviews of Vike literature, and other products they offered labeling them lewd, disgusting and degrading. Brant and his colleagues read the comments of Dino Pelazi, leader of the Realists, and laughed.
They laughed too soon! Pelazi and the Ree opposition were preparing a new campaign, and suddenly Brant and the entire Vike Movement found that the life-and-death struggle for existence had begun.
And out on the streets, mobs of Vike hoodlums mugged Ree kids caught alone, while hands of young Rees crashed the lush, decadent Vile Parties, where girls with painted bosoms played sexless games and reached for gleaming hypodermics, filled with the latest narcotic mixtures, when Happy Time came.
Here is powerful, shocking novel of tomorrow, the story of a world on the verge of doom as its brilliant elite jest at the wrath to come, and one man realises that both the Vike and the Ree are sick.