Yesterday was Poul Anderson’s birthday. Today (November 26) is Frederik Pohl’s. Unlike Anderson, Pohl (1919-2013) wrote science fiction pretty much exclusively.
Pohl was a little older than Anderson, so he began writing for the pulps before World War II. He started out writing for the lower-end pulps and went on to become editor of two pulps, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories in 1940 and 1941, The war put an end to that.
Pohl was a member of the fabled Futurians. He was involved in some of the more famous (or infamous, if you prefer) fan fueds of the time. That topic deserves its own post.
One of the Futurians who died far too young was Cyril Kornbluth, who wrote under the name C. M. Kornbluth. He and Pohl were close friends until Kornbluth;’s’ death. They collaborated on a number of stories and novels, such as The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Search the Sky. Several collaboratie short works were published in the early to mid-seventies. In 1973, “The Meeting” won the Hugo for best short story.
Kornbluth wasn’t Pohl’s only collaborator. He and Lester del Rey wrote a novel, Preferred Risk, in 1955 at the request of H. L. Gold. who was running a contest in Galaxy magazine. The submissions were so bad that Gold had Pohl and del Rey submit the novel under the psuedonym Edson McCann.
Aside from Kornbluth, though, Pohl’s most frequent collaborator was Jack Williamson, another favorite here at Adventures Fantastic. They wrote The Starchild Trilogy, The Undersea Trilogy, and several other novels.
One of the ideas Farthest Star and Wall Around a Star involved a type fo transport device in which a copy of a person appears somewhere else and the original is still where they were.
Pohl used this idea again in his Eschaton sequence. That was the last major series he did, and he still had what it took.
Pohl became editor of Galaxy, Worlds of If, and Worlds of Tomorrow in the sixties. He also edited the Star anthology series for Ballantine Books in the fifties.
Aside from The Space Merchants, the Heechee series probably stands as Pohl’s magnum opus. The premise is that a number of alien artifacts are found, starting on Venus. The technology is advanced, and the people who find them are often able to use what they find to become rich.
Among these artifacts are spaceships. The way it work is that you get in and go to where the ships are preprogrammed to go. The programming cannot be changed. The ships travel between two points.
The person going doesn’t know where they are going or how long it will take. They don’t know what they will find when they get there. If they are lucky, they will find something that they can bring back that will make them rich.
It they aren’t lucky, they are never seen again. At least not alive. Sometimes a ship returns with a corpse in it.
The series builds in scope from there.
Pohl was a prolific short story writer who wrote short fiction all of his career. Sadly, his work is rapidly being forgotten today. Paper copies of his collections are getting hard to find at inexpensive prices, and there are few electronic versions of his work available.
One thing I noticed about Pohl’s work, which I greatly like, is that he tends to have a pessimistic view of life. Anderson had a strain of fatalism running throuigh his work, but ultimately he took an optimistic view of people and the future. (See, I’m getting to the reason for the title of this post.)
Pohl, not so much. I would much rather live in one of Anderson’s futures rather than one of Pohl’s. Generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course. I like both of these writers a lot. That doesn’t mean I want to live in the worlds they imagine.
Both of these writers are favorites. I’ve been reading them since I was in junior high school. I haven’t read everything either of them has written, but I’ve read enough to have a good feel for their themes and styles.
But they were very different writers, and not jsut because Anderson wrote fantasy and science fiction and Pohl only wrote science fiction.
If you’ve read Pohl, what was your favorite book or story.