James Nicoll Reviews

Frederik Pohl’s 1978 The Way The Future Was is an autobiography. Because of Pohl’s diverse roles in the science fiction field, Future is also a good introduction to the history of American¹ science fiction from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

Back when I was a teen, I knew who Pohl was. He was the unimaginably old writer who, before I was born, had written a lot of SF that I enjoyed (in reprint), who had somehow overcome the inevitable cognitive erosion imposed by advanced age to write some of the best SF of the modern era… which is to say the 1970s.

In 1978 he was about five years younger than I am just now.

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Frederik Pohl’s 1972 The Gold at the Starbow’s End is a collection of short science fiction stories.

Several are cautionary tales, that being one of Pohl’s fortes. At least one is a cautionary tale for hard-SF authors.

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Carol Pohl and Frederik Pohl’s 1976 Science Fiction Discoveries is the fourth and final anthology the Pohls edited together¹; their editorial collaboration did not survive their 1977 separation and 1983 divorce. It is an anthology of original science fiction. Rather like Orbit, you say? In a way, except there was just the one Science Fiction Discovery anthology. 

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Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1953 The Space Merchants is a near-future SF satire. It was followed by The Merchant’s War, written by Pohl alone. 

Earth is a utopia. Population continues to soar and with it the economy explodes unchecked. True, supporting such a vast economic enterprise demands bold solutions to the challenge of dwindling resources, but only the worst sort of Consie—the Conservationists, lowest of the low — would object. Nation-states are guided by what best serves the corporations who effectively own the governments. At the top of this most perfect society sit the advertising experts who shape opinion. 

Mitch Courtenay, a Fowler Schocken Associates advertising agency star-class copywriter, is one of the elite. He has his own lavish two-bedroom apartment, can afford unreconstituted food, and enjoys the confidence of Fowler Schocken himself. He is, in other words, a man on his way up.

There are one or two tiny flaws in his idyllic life.

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1954’s Search the Sky is a standalone(ish) science fiction novel. It was the second novel-length collaboration between Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth,.

Ross has lived his whole life on Halsey’s Planet. Somehow he senses what his fellows cannot or will not: population levels are slowly, inexorably declining. The future will be grim. 

Halsey’s Planet is just one of many worlds settled by humans. Contact with its sister worlds is intermittent, carried out by sublight longliners, smaller versions of the ships that delivered the original colonists to Halsey’s Planet fourteen centuries earlier. 

A longliner arrives with an inbred crew of happy idiots bearing an enigmatic message and doleful news about the other human worlds. Another Halsey merchant, Haarland, asks Ross to come meet with him. This is odd, as Ross works for a rival firm. It turns out that Haarland has some bad news to share. 

Spoilers.… 

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Frederik Pohl’s 1985 Black Star Rising is a standalone science fiction novel. 

The world is divided into two spheres, one dominated by India, one by China, These two powers were the only slightly damaged by an apocalyptic nuclear war that ravaged the United States and the Soviet Union. North America falls under China’s benevolent umbrella. Its aboriginal population is monitored by Chinese supervisors. 

Castor is an Anglo farmer with pretensions above his class. Denied entry into university, he is an autodidact, hoovering up knowledge of no relevance to his duties to the Heavenly Grain Rice Collective. Elevation from this humble but necessary role comes courtesy of two unrelated events: a brutal murder and what seems to be a First Contact event. 

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1977’s Gateway is the first novel in Frederik Pohl’s Heechee series. 

Robinette Broadhead has wealth and status, so why is he so miserable? The answer lies in the past, in the source of Broadhead’s money: the alien starport humans call Gateway. 

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Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s 1975 Farthest Star is the first novel in the Cuckoo duology, which was a fixup of the 1973 novella Doomship (1973) and the 1974 serial The Org’s Egg.

Farthest Star is an example of the Big Dumb Object school of science fiction. This makes it cousin to such classics as Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama , and Orbitsville, as well as to books like The Wanderer.

By the late 21^st century, humans have made contact with a loose association of alien civilizations. These civilizations are linked, not by physical spacecraft, but by near-instantaneous tachyon communication. Tachyon beams carry information; they cannot transmit matter, but material objects can be scanned., That information can then be transmitted by the tachyon transporter, to be duplicated at a distant location¹. This tech has allowed humans to join the association and travel, as copies, to other worlds. 

What if the traveller dies? Run off another copy. Or another dozen copies. Just ask the ill-fated Ben Pertin. 

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Frederik Pohl’s 1979 standalone novel Jem was one of my favourite Pohl books. I think it still has its strengths. ​“Aging gracefully” is not one of them, but perhaps the thick drifts of zeerust that festoon the novel can serve as a warning to modern writers. 

It’s … well, the year isn’t exactly clear but 

Handsome, hoary old Carl Sagan [looked] like a spry octogenarian instead of whatever incredible age he really was

so it’s at least set in 2024, possibly later¹.

In some ways the 21^st century is surprisingly familiar. It is plagued with the same energy and population concerns as the 1970s, albeit on a much larger scale — enough to have forced the world to abandon ideological alliances in favour of resource-based blocs. In other ways it is dramatically different: this is a world with functioning, if extremely expensive, faster than light travel.

It is also a world where nuclear proliferation has continued without check, which is good, because the possibility of nuclear Armageddon means there is a limit to international aggression (despite the pressures of population bomb and resource depletion). Petty harassment like sabotage and assassinations is OK, but nobody is stupid enough to push past the limits of the endless cold war because to do so is to risk the end of everything. 

At least, that’s the theory. 

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The 1960s and 1970s were an exciting time for science and SF. Robotic probes had given humanity its first close up look at the worlds of our solar system: Lunar farside in 1959, Venus in 1962, Mars in 1965,Jupiter in 1973, Mercury in 1974 and Saturn in 1979 (the other worlds would have to wait until the 1980s). The flood of increasingly detailed information about the worlds of our solar system gave riseto a short-lived genre, one that it existed in the tension between how SF had imagined the neighbour worlds to be and what our spaceprobes were revealing. 

Carol and Frederik Pohl’s 1973 anthology, Jupiter, is perhaps my favourite exemplar of that mayfly genre. It is filled with classic SF stories, most of which had been published between the 1930s and the 1950s (1971’s ​“A Meeting with Medusa” is the outlier). All these stories doomed to obsolescence thanks to human ingenuity [1]. However, they still make good reading, for the most part.

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