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 is pleasantness embodied, a total comedown from my recent brush with the lunatic fringes. Pohl tells of his youngster’s love of science fiction, his work with the first glimmers of organized fandom, and his early career shilling and editing paperback pulp for a dime. He started the game young, editing two different science fiction magazines before he was twenty and heading up the local fanclub chapters like a champ. The Early Pohl is full of adorable details about what it was like to be a nerd before the word “nerd” existed: Cyril Kornbluth making cheap brandy with a homemade distiller in the bathroom of their shared house, putting together mimeographed fan mags, and hanging out at a soda fountain after the basement meetings of the Brooklyn Science Fiction League so much that the place named a sundae after them. Pohl lovingly recalls his involvement with the Futurians, a New York-based fan group that nurtured the careers of Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Hannes Bok, and Isaac Asimov, and their fierce competition with other fan groups for regional prominence.

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

On a future and much-decayed Earth,
Of babies there’s long been a dearth —
But everyone cheers
When a spaceship appears
packed with goods of immeasurable worth.

Something has gone wrong with mankind:
evolution has gone deaf and blind.
One guy is somehow exception,
and so it’s his perception
that the solution is his to find.

He is a space merchant named Ross,
Whose life is essentially a loss.
His world begins to unravel,
When he learns of space travel
And the Universe becomes his to cross.

(As he begins his mad journey,
Ross almost ends up in a gurney…
He meets Amazonian dames,
and old coots with mad claims,
And one imbecile friend named Bernie).

But his mission is rather elemental:
Find out if the race has gone mental.
Somehow crack the code
of why progress has slowed.
The results: really quite transcendental.

Not in the wildest stoner prognostications of Carl Sagan, nor the fetid dreams of any sci-fi writer ever before or since, has there been anything like the The Reefs of Space. Not the book, which is fairly standard, but the titular reefs themselves. In Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s novel, the Universe is not a dead thing. It’s not a void, nor a vacuum. Rather, it’s a sea, rich in basic elements prepared to fuse together and create life over millennia of time. Just beyond the reaches of our solar system, there are the reefs of space: massive, planet-sized systems made of tiny creatures, all of which generate energy by fusing hydrogen atoms in the same facile way a plant might photosynthesize. Autonomous worlds of life, crawling with space animals capable of surviving in the abyss. And the larger creatures float through space like whales through the sea. And among the gnarled caves of crystal and metal, strange space fruit (edible) and glowing, pliable vines. Fairyland, in a word.

This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are island in an infinite ocean of life — strange life, which we had never suspected.

The idea is so arcane that it’s almost avant-garde. This living Universe seems to come from a pre-science fiction mind, a mind steeped in magic and mythology — the same kind of mind that might see the world as flat and ending right at its edges, giving way to an abyss of unimaginable monsters. Certainly, it has a kind of logic to it, just as shooting men to the moon from a giant gun had a kind of logic to it in Jules Verne’s From Earth To The Moon, because that was the limit of imaginable technology in Verne’s time. The thing which is remarkable about The Reefs of Space is that it’s not particularly arcane (1963), nor limited by the technology of its time; rather, it comes from an era of real life whizz-bang rocket ships and global space-conquering dreams. Unlike most sixties science fiction, which is usually forward-thinking, optimistic, countercultural, and rich with technolust, The Reefs of Space takes a giant, dreamy step backwards. With its spaceborne creatures, its phosphorescent caves of floating minerals and cool green clouds of life, it’s a story displaced from its time, an ancient cosmology all its own.

Which reminds me why I love science fiction in the first place, because it privileges the idea over everything else. It’s one of the few genres where style, even story, is totally irrelevant to the value of a novel. A dishpan writer can be relatively, if not totally, successful on the value of their ideas alone — they need not be remotely good at what they do! The science fiction shelf is the permanent home of the hack writer, but it’s also where all the best ideas are. And those phenomena, in my opinion, are related.

Of course, I seek out and appreciate great writing, but if I’m stuck with staid dialogue and rasping monsters, it’s never a total loss. It’s science fiction’s openness to scores of half-brained, wild-fancied writers that allows it to be such a consistently provocative genre — and so abundant with the kinds of thought-images that end up in your dreams, and which perhaps exist independently of plot or style. I haven’t mentioned the plot of the Reefs of Space (and won’t), for example, because it doesn’t matter; the lovely vision of the reef itself suffices. This isn’t to say that Pohl and Williamson are hacks, but that they come from a long and distinguished tradition of hackery, and largely write to it. They know that for a kernel of idea to be implanted into the overmind of popular culture, a lowly paperback is the best mode of transmission.

For in my stack of paperbacks, between endless pages of stuffy exposition, I have androids, floating ecosystems in space, secret drugs, tyrannical computers, and body-snatchers. I have one million years of the future, sentient clouds, and talking newts. I have entire worlds of fatuous and romantic ideas, ideas which are as independent from the establishment — and sometimes, as in the case of Reefs, independent from their time — as they are unencumbered by its literary norms. And they are out, wild and free in the world, plugged into the minds of sixties schoolboys (and 2009-era science fiction bloggers) for perpetuity.

NEXT BOOK: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY