The Commission on Dying

Piers Anthony built a career on prolificity and premise, and HARD SELL is one of his leaner exercises — a fix-up of linked stories about a man who cannot stop being sold things and cannot stop selling them, set in a future where every human transaction has been swallowed by the logic of the pitch. Fisk Centers drifts from one commission-based nightmare to the next: Mars real estate, black market babies, fusion car races, pre-need burial plots, death insurance, matter transmission. Each chapter is a sales call. Each sales call is a trap. The satire is blunt, sometimes clumsy, but the underlying architecture — a world where personhood has been fully absorbed into consumer identity, where your credit balance determines whether you eat or breathe — reads less like 1972 satire and more like a user manual for 2026. Anthony didn't predict the specific mechanisms (no algorithms, no platforms, no data harvesting), but he understood the trajectory: a society in which you are your purchasing power, and the loss of that power is indistinguishable from death. Fisk's depleted credit balance locking him out of basic services is uncomfortably close to the reality of deplatforming, credit scoring, and the slow algorithmic strangulation of people who fall off the grid. The baby adoption chapter, played for dark comedy, now sits in the shadow of actual commercialized fertility markets, international adoption scandals, and the commodification of surrogacy — none of which Anthony could have specified, but all of which his premise contains in embryo.

What he got right, structurally, is the salesman as everyman. Not the executive, not the inventor, not the rebel — the salesman. The person whose survival depends on persuading others to want things they don't need. In 2026, that's most of us. Content creators, influencers, gig workers, adjunct professors pitching their own courses, nurses selling wellness supplements on the side. The gig economy is HARD SELL's world minus the flying cars. Yola's recruitment as a promotional figure for Matrans — essentially an influencer deal, complete with the language of "reeducation" and "public perception management" — is the chapter that lands hardest now. Anthony wrote it as a curiosity. It became an industry.

The blind spots are period-typical. Yola exists primarily as her father's dependent and eventual marketing asset; she has no interiority that isn't filtered through Fisk's anxieties. The future is white, American, and male in its defaults. The environmental decline of Earth is gestured at but never interrogated — it's scenery for the sales pitch, not a crisis with political dimensions. And Anthony, for all his cynicism about commerce, never imagines that the marks might organize, that consumer resistance might take collective form, that the sold-to might become dangerous. His future is one of atomized individuals facing corporate monoliths alone, which is both a limitation of his imagination and, unfortunately, a fairly accurate description of how things went.

The death insurance conceit deserves particular attention. A society capable of reanimation that must then create an industry to protect people's right to stay dead — this is Anthony working at the edge of something genuinely unsettling. In 2026, with AI-generated deepfakes of the deceased, digital afterlife services, and estate law struggling to address posthumous data rights, the question of who controls your death has moved from science fiction to litigation. The DIA isn't real, but the problem it addresses is. Anthony treated it as one more sales gag. The world turned it into an ethical crisis.

HARD SELL sits in the second tier of early-seventies satirical SF, below Sheckley's best work and Pohl and Kornbluth's THE SPACE MERCHANTS, from which it borrows liberally, but above most of the disposable social-commentary paperbacks of its era. It gave little to successors directly — Anthony's later fame rested on Xanth, not this — but it belongs to a lineage that runs through John Brunner's consumerist nightmares and forward into the corporate dystopias of the cyberpunks. Its particular contribution is tonal: the weariness. Fisk isn't outraged. He's tired. He sells because he must. That exhaustion, more than any specific prediction, is what makes the book feel current. So here is what it now asks, fifty-four years on, that it could not have asked in 1972: if every human relationship has become a transaction, and every transaction requires a seller, what happens to a society that has finally run out of buyers?