Jem: The Making of a Utopia was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1979, and its subtitle is the cruelest joke in Pohl’s career. The novel imagines a near-future Earth divided into three power blocs — Food (the agricultural nations), Fuel (the oil-producing nations), and People (the heavily populated developing nations) — that discover a habitable planet called Jem (after the astronomer who found it) and proceed to colonize it with representatives from each bloc.
Jem is inhabited by three indigenous species — burrowing Krinpit, ballooning Balloonists, and intelligent Creepy-crawlies — and each human faction allies with and exploits one species, reproducing on Jem the same geopolitical rivalries that are destroying Earth. The colonial competition escalates from economic rivalry to sabotage to open warfare, until both human civilization on Jem and the alien civilizations are devastated.
The “utopia” of the subtitle is what the colony was supposed to be — a fresh start, free from the mistakes of the past — and the novel’s argument is that fresh starts are impossible because human beings carry their failures with them. The colonists don’t create a utopia on Jem because they can’t: their political structures, their economic assumptions, and their capacity for violence are embedded too deeply to be left behind.
Collecting Jem
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1979): Cloth binding, dust jacket. National Book Award winner (before the category was eliminated).
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20