HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Day Million by Frederik Pohl
Loading...

Day Million (edition 1970)

by Frederik Pohl (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1803149,943 (3.37)2
Member:bnielsen
Title:Day Million
Authors:Frederik Pohl (Author)
Info:Ballantine Books (1970), Mass Market Paperback
Collections:Your library, English paperback sf
Rating:***
Tags:Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Work Information

Day Million by Frederik Pohl (Author)

None
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 2 mentions

English (2)  Danish (1)  All languages (3)
Showing 2 of 2
This took me a little while to get through the book. Overall, the stories are hit-or-miss and very few stuck around in my head for any length of time. My favorite story was Schematic Man. It was a tale in conversational form, a nice short one, about a man who has transcribed his mind to computer storage with a disturbing ending. I also liked Day Million, a “love story” where the pair of lovers are only connected via a VR simulacrum of the other. One of the two would be considered transgendered. I was impressed by the progressive attitude of the story as it was first published in the 1960's.
There are also bits here-and-there that I found interesting.
The tapes had only four sounds – a “white” hiss as they entered, a five-minute 420-cycle whine for conversation, an ecstatic eep! eep! And an infrasonic drone diminishing at the end. It was the mind of the patron that put meaning into the electronic squeal, just as it was his mind that painted features on the caricature of a face and saw landscapes in the abstract play of light on the walls. [pg.65]
This passage reminds me of listening to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which I have done several times, the last time, about two weeks ago.
The colonel threw himself into a chair, breathing hard. “Later,” he said. “Oh, that roar! You have to come and hear it for yourself, Sutherland. But let me get my breath first. Grogan takes a lot out of you, you know. There’s plenty of them that can put out a dull beat, but for real emptiness there’s nobody like Grogan.” [pgs.83-84]
It Almost seems as if Pohl was predicting a combination of punk rock and hip-hop. However, that passage is from a story, Way Up Yonder, that I didn’t like very much. It’s a plantation drama with African slaves replaced with robots who practice ultrasonic voodoo in the dark while the other side in an interplanetary civil war brainwashes the leadership of this inexplicably antebellum Southern plantation planet through subliminal soundwaves hidden in transgressive music. It sounds much cooler than it was.
Which brings us to my least favorite stories. It’s a Young World, an adventure story where it follows a primitive tribesman as he avoids enemies and becomes a council member or something like that, it sucks. Under Two Moons, the last story in the book, was a future super-spy story which I just felt was blah. My least favorite story was Speed Trap. I found it uninteresting and utterly boring, I can’t even remember anything about it and I’m not going to try to refresh my memory either.
Overall, this book was okay. But I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone either, there are some interesting ideas in here but the reading experience for me was just bland. ( )
  Ranjr | Jan 2, 2024 |
This collection of Frederik Pohl stories left me disappointed. The title story "Day Million," which describes a brief courtship in a far future very different from today, is the best of the bunch. "Small Lords," about a group of explorers that encounter small, but deadly problems on an uncharted planet, and ""Way Up Yonder,"" about a plantation planet during an interstellar war, were passable. The rest were middling to worse. The final story, "Under Two Moons," was a James Bond spoof that seemed to be almost deliberately awful; only a very funny scene where the hero met the arch villain across the casino table for a high stakes game of . . . Monopoly! saved this story from a truly awful rating. "Speed Trap" is based on an idea that the brothers Strugatsky would use much more effectively in their novel Definitely Maybe. In sum, a few decent stories, but far from Pohl at his best. ( )
2 vote clong | Dec 26, 2007 |
Showing 2 of 2
no reviews | add a review

» Add other authors

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Pohl, FrederikAuthorprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Robertson, IanCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.37)
0.5
1
1.5
2 1
2.5 1
3 7
3.5
4 5
4.5
5 1

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 202,649,286 books! | Top bar: Always visible