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Frederik Pohl
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 Frederik Pohl, writer and editor, is one of the pivotal figures in the science fiction field between
the 1930s and the 1990s. Although he edited pulp science fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super
Science Stories, in 1940-41 before he was twenty-one, he did not become prominent until the 1950s, for
his novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth -- including the classic
The Space Merchants (1953); for a number of powerful and satiric short stories including "The Midas Plague" (1954 ) and "The Tunnel Under
The World" (1955); and for editing anthologies -- the most innovative all-original anthologies (and the first such
in paperback) of the decade were the six volumes of Star SF (1953-9). In 1960, Kingsley Amis, in his
provocative survey of science fiction literature
New Maps of Hell, called Pohl "the most consistently able
writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced."
In 1961, he took over the editorship of Galaxy and If for the decade, and was certainly the most
important American magazine editor of the sixties, while he wrote several novels and a number of short stories, of
which "Day Million" (1966) is perhaps the best. He was a public enemy of the excesses of the New Wave,
but a defender of higher standards in sf writing (and of the linking of science and fiction that the New Wave
denied). Satire, once the major mode in his fiction, became less salient than serious and rigorous
speculation based on scientific ideas. As the 1970s opened, Pohl became an editor in mass market publishing and in
1971 published two of his finest novellas, "The Merchants of Venus" and "The Gold at the Starbow's End."
Reaching the peak of his powers as a novelist, he published
Man Plus (1976) and Gateway (1977), sweeping up
major awards and becoming one of the dominant name writers of the decade. He has since devoted himself
to writing, publishing many novels and stories, and to peripatetic appearances throughout the science fiction
world as an influential public figure (he was a founder, and remains a principal supporter, of World SF,
the world organization of science fiction professionals).
Never a supporter of John W. Campbell, Jr. (who did not publish Pohl's stories), ever since his teens
Pohl has remained as much a devotee of reason and of science as his teenage pal in the Futurians, Isaac Asimov.
Although Pohl's chosen mode has frequently been extrapolation of politics and society, with a deep and
canny bow to psychology and psychiatry, his rigorous methodology has lent an underpinning of "hardness," to
much of his best fiction (especially his work since 1970) that places it rightfully beside the best of Asimov,
Clarke, Herbert, and Heinlein.
"Day Million" is a virtuoso performance, a story set in a future so distant and different that we can
only glimpse it in mysterious reflections and intriguing images. It is an exercise in the application of an
unconventional style to the solution of a science fiction problem. What's so hard about it? The attitude is right, giving
it the texture and feel of hard sf. It is written for the reader who understands the hopelessness of a
universe without physical constants (Latham's "The Xi Effect"), the necessity of "The Cold Equations."
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||||||||||||||||||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.