Frederik Pohl | |
|---|---|
 Pohl in 2008 at theJ. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Conference | |
| Born | Frederik George Pohl Jr. (1919-11-26)November 26, 1919 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | September 2, 2013(2013-09-02) (aged 93) Palatine, Illinois, U.S. |
| Pen name | Edson McCann, Jordan Park, Elton V. Andrews, Paul Fleur, Lee Gregor, Warren F. Howard, Scott Mariner, Ernst Mason, James MacCreigh, James McCreigh, Dirk Wilson, Donald Stacy |
| Occupation |
|
| Period | 1937–2011 |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Notable awards | Campbell Memorial Award 1978, 1985 Hugo Award (novel) 1976, 1977 |
| Website | |
| www | |
Frederik George Pohl Jr. (/poʊl/; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an Americanscience-fiction writer,editor, andfan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novelAll the Lives He Led.[1]
From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl editedGalaxy and its sister magazineIf; the latter won three successive annualHugo Awards as the year's best professional magazine.[2] His 1977 novelGateway won four "year's best novel" awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science-fiction writers, and the juried academicJohn W. Campbell Memorial Award.[2] He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellasThe Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first 40 years. For his 1979 novelJem, Pohl won a U.S.National Book Award in theone-year category Science Fiction,[3] and it was a finalist for three other year's best novel awards.[2] He won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards,[2] including receiving both for the 1977 novelGateway.
TheScience Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of theDamon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993[4] and he was inducted by theScience Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers.[5][a]
Pohl won theHugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, "The Way the Future Blogs".[2][6][7]
Pohl was the son of Frederik (originally Friedrich) George Pohl (a salesman of German descent) and Anna Jane Mason.[8] Pohl Sr. held various jobs, and the Pohls lived in such far-flung locations asTexas,California,New Mexico, and thePanama Canal Zone. The family settled inBrooklyn when Pohl was around seven.[9]
He attendedBrooklyn Technical High School, and dropped out at 17.[10] In 2009, he was awarded an honorary diploma from Brooklyn Tech.[11]
While a teenager, he co-founded the New York–basedFuturiansfan group, and began lifelong friendships withDonald Wollheim,Isaac Asimov, and others who would become important writers and editors.[12][13] Pohl later said that other "friends came and went and were gone, [but] many of the ones I met through fandom were friends all their lives – Isaac,Damon Knight,Cyril Kornbluth,Dirk Wylie, [and]Dick Wilson. In fact, there are one or two –Jack Robins,Dave Kyle – whom I still count as friends, seventy-odd years later...." He published a science-fiction fanzine calledMind of Man.[14]
In 1936, Pohl joined theYoung Communist League because of its positions forunions and againstracial prejudice,Adolf Hitler, andBenito Mussolini. He became president of the localFlatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. Pohl has said that after theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the party line changed and he could no longer support it, at which point he left.[15]
DuringWorld War II, Pohl served in theUnited States Army from April 1943 until November 1945, rising tosergeant as an eliteAir Corps weatherman. After training in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Colorado, he was mainly stationed in Italy with the456th Bombardment Group.[16]
Pohl was married five times. His first wife,Leslie Perri, was another Futurian; they were married in August 1940, and divorced in 1944. He then married Dorothy Les Tina in Paris in August 1945 while both were serving in the military in Europe; the marriage ended in 1947. During 1948, he marriedJudith Merril; they had a daughter, Ann. Pohl and Merril divorced in 1952. In 1953, he married Carol M. Ulf Stanton, with whom he had three children and collaborated on several books; they separated in 1977 and were divorced in 1983. From 1984 until his death, Pohl was married to science-fiction expert and academicElizabeth Anne Hull.
He fathered four children – Ann (m. Walter Weary), Frederik III (born and died in 1954, aged one month[17]), Frederik IV (a Los Angeles-based actor, writer, and producer),[18] and Kathy.[19] Grandchildren include Canadian writerEmily Pohl-Weary andchef Tobias Pohl-Weary.[20]
From 1984 on, he lived inPalatine, Illinois, a suburb ofChicago. He was previously a longtime resident ofMiddletown, New Jersey.[21]
Pohl began writing in the late 1930s, using pseudonyms for most of his early works. His first publication was the poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna" under the name of Elton Andrews, in the October 1937 issue ofAmazing Stories, edited byT. O'Conor Sloane.[1][22][23] (Pohl asked readers 30 years later, "we would take it as a personal favor if no one ever looked it up".[24]) His first story, the collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth "Before the Universe", appeared in 1940 under the pseudonym S.D. Gottesman.[4]
Pohl started a career as a literary agent in 1937, but it was a sideline for him until after World War II, when he began doing it full-time. Pohl stopped being Asimov's agent—the only one the latter ever had[25]—when he became editor from 1939 to 1943 of twopulp magazines,Astonishing Stories andSuper Science Stories.[26] In his autobiography, Pohl said that he stopped editing the two magazines at roughly the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Stories by Pohl often appeared in these magazines, but never under his own name. Work written in collaboration withCyril M. Kornbluth was credited to S. D. Gottesman or Scott Mariner; other collaborative work (with any combination of Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, or Robert A. W. Lownes) was credited to Paul Dennis Lavond. For Pohl's solo work, stories were credited to James MacCreigh (or for one story only, Warren F. Howard.)[22] Works by "Gottesman", "Lavond", and "MacCreigh" continued to appear in various science-fiction pulp magazines throughout the 1940s.
He also worked as an advertisingcopywriter and then as a copywriter and book editor forPopular Science.[10]
Pohl co-founded theHydra Club, a loose collection of science-fiction professionals and fans who met during the late 1940s and 1950s.[27]
From the early 1960s until 1969, Pohl served as editor ofGalaxy Science Fiction andWorlds of If magazines, taking over after the ailingH. L. Gold could no longer continue working "around the end of 1960".[28] Under his leadership,If won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine for 1966, 1967 and 1968.[29] Pohl hiredJudy-Lynn del Rey as his assistant editor atGalaxy andIf. He also served as editor ofWorlds of Tomorrow from its first issue in 1963 until it was merged intoIf in 1967.[30]
In the mid-1970s, Pohl acquired and edited novels forBantam Books, published as "A Frederik Pohl Selection"; these includedSamuel R. Delany'sDhalgren andJoanna Russ'sThe Female Man. He also edited a number of science-fictionanthologies.
Though he retired his pen names "Gottesman", "Lavond", and "MacCreigh" by the early 1950s, Pohl still occasionally used pseudonyms, even after he began to publish work under his real name. These occasional pseudonyms, all of which date from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, included Charles Satterfield, Paul Flehr, Ernst Mason, Jordan Park (two collaborative novels with Kornbluth), and Edson McCann (one collaborative novel withLester del Rey).
In the 1970s, Pohl re-emerged as a novel writer in his own right, with books such asMan Plus and theHeechee Saga series. He won back-to-back Nebula Awards withMan Plus in 1976 andGateway, the firstHeechee novel, in 1977. In 1978,Gateway swept the other two major novel honors, also winning theHugo Award for Best Novel andJohn W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel. Two of his stories have also earned him Hugo Awards: "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth) tied in 1973 and "Fermi and Frost" won in 1986. Another award-winning novel isJem (1979), winner of theNational Book Award.
His works include not only science fiction, but also articles forPlayboy andFamily Circle magazines and nonfiction books. For a time, he was the official authority forEncyclopædia Britannica on the subject ofEmperor Tiberius. (He wrote a book on the subject of Tiberius, as "Ernst Mason".)[31]
Some of his short stories take a satirical look atconsumerism and advertising in the 1950s and 1960s: "The Wizards of Pung's Corners", where flashy, over-complex military hardware proved useless against farmers with shotguns, and "The Tunnel under the World", where an entire community of seeming-humans is held captive by advertising researchers. ("The Wizards of Pung's Corners" was freely translated into Chinese and then freely translated back into English as "The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle" in the first edition ofPohlstars [1984]).
In his 1969 novel, "The Age of the Pussyfoot", Pohl speculated about a society where everyone could access knowledge and the means to communicate with others through a small handheld device similar to a smartphone. Although he set the novel 500 years in the future, he noted in an afterword that it might be as few as fifty years away. A short story "Day Million" suggested that society in the year 2737 might be as alien to us as contemporary society would be to someone from ancient times.
Pohl's Law is "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere will not hate it".[32]
He was a frequent guest onLong John Nebel's radio show from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and an international lecturer.[33]
Starting in 1995, when theTheodore Sturgeon Memorial Award became a juried award, Pohl served first withJames Gunn andJudith Merril, and since then with several others until retiring in 2013.[34] Pohl was associated with Gunn since the 1940s, becoming involved in 1975 with what later became Gunn's Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. There, he presented many talks, recorded a discussion about "The Ideas in Science Fiction" in 1973[35] for the Literature of Science Fiction Lecture Series,[36] and served the Intensive Institute on Science Fiction and Science Fiction Writing Workshop.[37]
Pohl received the second annual J. W. Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from theUniversity of California, Riverside Libraries at the 2009Eaton Science Fiction Conference, "Extraordinary Voyages:Jules Verne and Beyond".[38][39]
Pohl's work has been an influence on a wide variety of other science fiction writers, some of whom appear in the 2010 anthology,Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull.[40]
Pohl's last novel,All the Lives He Led, was released on April 12, 2011.[41]
By the time of his death, he was working to finish a second volume of his autobiographyThe Way the Future Was (1979), along with an expanded version of the latter.[42]
In July 2020, an academic description reported on the nature and rise of the "robot prosumer", derived frommodern-day technology and relatedparticipatory culture, that, in turn, was substantially predicted earlier byscience fiction writers, most notably by Pohl.[43][44][45]
In addition to his solo writings, Pohl was also well known for his collaborations, beginning with his first published story. Before and following the war, Pohl did a series of collaborations with his friend Cyril Kornbluth, including a large number of short stories and several novels, among themThe Space Merchants, adystopiansatire of a world ruled by the advertising agencies.[46]
In the mid-1950s, he began a long-running collaboration with Jack Williamson, eventually resulting in 10 collaborative novels over five decades.
Other collaborations included a novel with Lester Del Rey,Preferred Risk (1955). This novel was solicited for a contest by Galaxy–Simon & Schuster when the judges did not think any of the contest submissions was good enough to win their contest. It was published under the joint pseudonym Edson McCann.[47] He also collaborated withThomas T. Thomas on a sequel to his award-winning novelMan Plus. He wrote two short stories with Isaac Asimov in the 1940s, both published in 1950.[48]
He finished a novel begun byArthur C. Clarke,The Last Theorem, which was published on August 5, 2008.
Pohl went to the hospital in respiratory distress on the morning of September 2, 2013, and died that afternoon[49][50][51][52] at the age of 93.[53]
