Frederik Pohl is a lesser Grand Master. Lifelong nerd, proto-fanboy, editor of old-timey pulp rags, union president, he is one of those eminently readable, largely innocuous fiction writers who has slogged his way into the canon via sheer persistence. I love Pohl, who has a beautiful imagination and a craftsman’s sense of story, but he is to folks like Heinlein and Clarke as a banana-flavored Mamba is to the fruit on the tree: delicious, but not quite the real thing.
Still, no tour of the space canon is complete without due diligence paid to the originals. And Pohl is an original, a founding father. Know your history, readers!
The Early Pohl
Interspersed between these yarns — which detail his life from birth to just about after the war — are Pohl’s earliest stories, written in the late 1930s and early 40s for magazines like Amazing Stories, Astonishing Stories, and Planet Stories. They have scintillating titles like “Conspiracy on Callisto” and “Highwayman of the Void,” and march along diligently through picaresque tableaus with rough-around-the-edges/hearts o’ gold spacemen riding to neatly-wound conclusions. Still, they are clever and represent the pinnacle of genre at the time.
Of the glory days, Pohl writes:
“Science fiction was purely a pulp category in those days…I learned how to invent ray-guns and how to make a story march, but it was not for a long, long time that I began to try to learn how to use a story to say something that needed saying.
In fact, when I look back at the science-fiction magazines of the twenties and early thirties, the ones that hooked me on sf, I sometimes wonder just what it was we all found in them to shape our lives around. I think there were two things. One is that science fiction was a way out of a bad place; the other, that it was a window on a better one.”
Pohl’s early career unfolded over the background of the Great Depression and the Second World War, a climate of unimaginable fear and uncertainty. Yes, the science fiction of that era was glorified kiddie tales, but it hadn’t yet learned to pick up on the gloomy aspects of progress — to Pohl’s generation, science represented the potential for escape from the disaster of economic failure and war. No one was looking for a downside; they only saw the virgin capacities of uncolonized planets, and dreamt of a people united in the betterment of the species through new technology. “In those early days,” Pohl writes, “we were as innocent as physicists, popes and presidents. We saw only the promise, not the threat.” Incidentally, it’s telling of my own generational bias that the phrase “popes and presidents” inspires a completely opposite sentiment in my breast.
It’s fascinating to read about the actual birth of the thing. When Pohl was 13, science fiction as a popular genre was completely new; he helped construct its development, inventing its tropes, designing the first glimpses of alien civilization and rocket whiz-banggery. He and his friends took the structure of other pulp serials and applied layers of otherworldliness to it, changing the cowboys to cosmonauts, the untilled frontier to barren asteroids. Everything that came afterwards — from the golden age to the new-wavers, from the cyberpunks to the steampunks — issues from this genesis.
I find it beautiful and sad to read the evolution of science fiction from an essentially optimistic, escapist occupation into the primary expression for modern anomie. The more modern it is, the more it tends to be dystopian, or at least frank in its appraisal of technology’s complications and implications. In Pohl’s heyday, the future seemed unfettered and far off, a glamorous Valhalla for the warriors of efficiency. As the future catches up to us, and as we live with the consequences of the previous generation’s blind march towards progress, we just can’t feel that way anymore. Still, it only goes to show both the value and flexibility of science fiction that it can still feel relevant today despite what appears to be a complete reversal of its function.
From the Archives:
Space Canon review of Pohl’s JEM (in limerick, haiku, and sonnet format)
Space Canon review of Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s The Reefs of Space
Space Canon review of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s Search The Sky
Bonus: Frederik Pohl’s first ever published work, a poem called Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna
, Le Guin wrote:
, that “the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.”
, “for the cyberpunks…technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.”
and write about my dreams immediately the next morning. As it turns out, I’ve woken up fuzzy; not only do I not remember my dreams, but I can hardly place where I was yesterday, or where I am now. I feel densely packed, as though with cotton-wool.
invasion, because the Greks do nothing but impassively sow the seeds of a destruction that we, gladly, willingly, bring to fruition. Their frightening force is not in nuclear ray-guns or spindly-legged robots. Its in their complete indifference to our well-being; unbearably calculating, they stand before us with expressionless faces and simply wait for our civilization to completely unravel.
, or the future-histories of 
. Of course, there’s ample science fiction which is distant only in time, not space; 
, for example, or some such other Terran dystopia. Some, too, takes place in the current moment, or even the past, in extrasolar space — say, 
. And still yet more is so psychedelically transcendent that it takes place nowhere and nowhen. Still, the sweeping tendency with sci-fi is the desire to get the hell off the planet and the hell away from now: it’s designed to relieve the anxiety of present existence, or to sublimate it into art through de-familiarization. More can (and has been) said on this subject, but I digress.
lives on the lower left-hand side of that graph, nestled right up to Lovecraft’s canon. It takes place not only on Earth, but within it, in a moon-formed chasm populated by an ancient, advanced race that has developed deep within the planet’s core, a classic “
, a little collection of early, thematically related short stories by 
, the writhing cesspool of reptilian eggs in the remade 
? Its protagonist is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. 
? A dark comedy about the machinations of a sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout (whose name, incidentally, is based on that of OG science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon). 
is about a Martian invasion and was nominated for a Hugo award. Ruptured timelines, atomic energy, questions of free will in a mechanized society, automata, apocalypse, alternate evolutionary histories…his themes could never be out of place in the landscape of science fiction. And yet Vonnegut was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, somehow free from the stigma of genre. Kudos, Kurt!
is his first novel, and hence lacks the dark irreverence of his later works, which — dotted with bawdy illustrations and fourth wall-breaking asides — never seem to give much of a damn about anyone’s expectations. Player Piano, on the other hand, does: it is a very earnest little tale, a little too serious, not quite believable with its glib attacks on the idea of a mechanized, corporatized future society. It takes place in Ilium, New York, a manufacturing center among many; America’s workforce has become almost entirely automated, eliminating the need for any human laborers. Everyone with an IQ below a certain point is relegated to the army or a corps of make-work laborers who don’t do much other than dig holes and fill them; intellectual standards on punch-cards dictate men’s fates like hellish fortune cookies. The result is a profound socio-economic disparity between the “managers and engineers,” the elite class who design and maintain the machines, and the common folk, whose new leisure and convenience has cost them their sense of purpose in the world. With no place for their skills, no way to earn their living, the working class is set adrift — with no real passion left but to destroy the machines who have replaced them.
, which is some 600+ pages long and spans 2,000 years of human history, is described as either “rutty” or “randy.” Robert A. Heinlein’s sexual politics are idiosyncratic to the point of being baffling. On the one hand, he’s groovy: polyamory is the norm in Lazarus Long’s future world, with all its desirable characters sharing a non-puritannical innocence about sexuality. At the same time, his female characters are basically barefoot and pregnant throughout, or eager to be, and the fine women Mr. Long encounters in his long life are all celebrated for a similar willingness to breed; likewise the manliness is machismo, despite some insinuations of normative homosexuality. It’s niche to say the least: Heinlein reaffirms the most cavemanesque gender roles while simultaneously advocating free love and fawning over so-called “powerful” women.
