Frederik Pohl (1919–2013)

My impressions on reading this novel in 1989.

I primarily read this book as a utopia, and it reads favorably in the light as well as a work of sf extrapolation. Like most utopian writers -- with the exception of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward -- Pohl feels the need to tamper with the family and sexuality. Utopian writers perhaps, and correctly, view sexuality and the family unit as a basic political, social, and economic building block of society. Pohl is relatively staid in utopian terms. show more He just proposes communes (for some -- Pohl is a humanitarian, libertarian whose utopian ideal has people following individual paths to happiness), group marriages, and some homosexuality.

Pohl expresses his interest in science and technology in his utopia. Computers, innovative urban architecture (Fuller domes and underground construction), and alternative energy schemes form the technological basis of society. There are many utopian novels which naively see technology as the key to utopia or propose silly methods of altering human nature. Pohl is not guilty of either. His concern is proposing political and social solutions to modern ills. While the book is too libertarian and pro-democratic for me, I liked it a lot and liked some of his proposals: civil service draft, a cafeteria approach to paying for services, and I particularly liked the proposal of paying five percent more in taxes and being able to determine where it all goes. Government agencies would, in effect, have to advertise.).

Pohl does what no other utopian writer I've read dared to: he tells in detail how we get from today's world to his utopia. Pohl doesn't isolate his utopia like Thomas More's Utopia or B.F. Skinner's Walden Two or lightly gloss over its founding like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. He takes a whole city in the beginning with its drugs, murderers, racism, child molesters, mobsters, and corrupt and obstructionist unions and gives us his vision. Along the way Pohl takes justified shots at lawyers and reveals a knowledge of political, economic, and legal detail that's impressive. I may not disagree with his faith in the common man, the saving value of his Universal Town Meeting and common man Supreme Court, the value of legalizing prostitution and drugs, but I admire Pohl for his daring, inventiveess, and ability.

Pohl also shows his world is not perfect. Pohl's punishment for criminals doesn't always work, his computer administration is open to corruption. As in The Age of the Pussyfoot, cryogenics changes peoples' mind on punishment for murder since the crime no longer has such permanent effect. Pohl gives a map for getting to near utopia. I may think the route sketchy and, in some parts, unworkable, but I admire him for being the only one to draw that map.
Litterarily, the novel is good. Pohl's clean, conversational style with its casual extrapolation (loved the cyborg and cybernetic judges and all they imply) looks easy but is very hard to emulate. The novel develops from grim, crime-ridden urban decay to urban paradise (with the cliched person of the future calling us barbarians). The first part of the novel has a bit of the blatantly artificial style of Pohl's "Day Million" along with its wit and smoothness. I liked the voices of people from the city's past. It fit in well with the epic grandeur of the novel's last paragraph. The novel's characters were not always pleasant but were real. show less

I enjoyed it a lot.

It's the story of a life heavily influenced by his love for science fiction. As a kid, a copy of one of the very early pulp magazines (Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, IIRC) got into his hands, and his mind was blown away. From then on, he was hopelessly hooked. We see him as a young fan in the 30's getting involved in the first attempts of fandom to establish contact and organize itself (remember, no internet then!). Fans actually first got in contact with each other show more through mail thanks to Hugo's magazine, since it printed a letter section that included the writers' addresses, and later it was Hugo Gernsback who, in an attempt to consolidate his audience, got the idea to encourage and organize fans through his magazine to form science fiction clubs (what he called the Science Fiction League). Young Fred Pohl took to that like a fish takes to water, and soon he became heavily involved in New York's nascent fandom.

Eventually, he and some other like-minded youngsters created their own club, the Futurians, many of whom became well-known SF writers and editors. It's all a rather fascinating look at how fandom started, and Pohl was usually at the best place to experience it all.

Still very young, he got a job as editor of a minor SF pulp magazine, and we get to see how that world worked too. Then he served in the army in WWII (by the time he was sent to Europe the war was finishing, so he didn't see combat). Later he became an agent for many of the most famous SF writers, and managed to get broke. Then he became a big-shot editor, editing for example the prestigious SF magazines Galaxy and If... All the time he was also writing when he could, and occasionally having some other jobs to pay the bills, and socializing with numerous famous people in science fiction.

Unfortunately, the book was published right before what probably was his most successful time as a writer, when he published big classics like Man Plus and Gateway. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating opportunity for anyone with an interest in the history of science fiction to hear from someone who was heavily involved and made many contributions. Pohl is not as funny when he tells anecdotes as Asimov, but he has his own gruff, self-deprecating humor and tells things in an entertaining manner. show less

What an execrable finale to the Heechee quartet.

The worst part of Pohl's Heechee series is that there's more than one book. Gateway (1977) is one of the finest sci-fi novels of the 20th century, bristling with creativity the childish sense of wonder. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous, and Annals of the Heechee (1987), on the other hand, utterly fail to live up to the original novel; they fail to even understand what made Gateway so dang good in the first place, making show more me hate them all the more, and hate that I felt obligated to push through the continuing, bland, repetitive, illogical adventures of Robinette Broadhead, S. Ya, and the obnoxious AI pal, Albert.

They nearly ruin the original Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece, and this fourth, closing adventure is the worst of them.

Annals of the Heechee has an unusual structure: It's once again from the perspective of Robin, the anti-hero bum-slash-billionaire of the earlier books, who's long-dead and living as an AI construct inside future computers. He loves to talk about this fact, and spends pages upon pages repeating how being an AI is far better than being a 'meat' person. His digressive arguments and debates with his long-time AI pal, Albert Einstein, are excruciating boring, adding nothing at all to the plot -- and yet the naive philosophizing on the natures of the universe from these two make up the bulk of the book. Between these pages-long rants, we get a few adventures following a rag-tag group of outsider kids (including a Heechee child), and their story is the singular highlight. They feel real, and if the whole story followed them, there could have been another great novel here -- but it doesn't, and their story is a fraction of the pagecount, and it ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly with a deus ex machina before we revert focus back to the cyberspace of Robinette and Albert and the kids are never heard from again: Their story has no real resolution, they're simply dropped from the narrative once their story intersects with Robin.

Stick with Gateway and pretend the story ends there. It's a standalone adventure, with every positive perfectly holding its parabolic arc together. The three sequels drop the singularity of the original to form a new trilogy held together by obnoxious cliffhangers that push you to keep going; a trilogy that parts the curtains on every mystery Gateway won us over with. All the truths of the Heechee and the galaxy are played out in a really unsatisfying, overt way, leaving nothing to the imagination.

When I stumbled upon Gateway for the first time, I thought I had found myself a new best friend, a secret window into the real quality lurking in classic sci-fi -- the sort of sci-fi that should be dating itself by its 20th-century trappings and pseudoscience at this point -- but I was disappointed to see I was wrong, and the author barely seemed to understand his own work. Read Gateway. Now. But don't even think about picking up its sequels. show less

This is a work of fiction -- none of the characters is drawn from life, all are invented. Also, Pohl was writing in the immediate aftermath of the disaster at Chernobyl. The book came out the year after; given the exigencies of publishing, that's almost a rushed-into-print current affairs book. Much of the information about what really happened had not yet come to light. And Pohl was primarily a science fiction author with lots of SF tropes (and no degrees in science or engineering) to fall show more back on when writing about nuclear disaster, a common topic in science fiction of the Golden Age. So one should go into the book expecting a 1950s/60s nuclear apocalypse story with more immediate application than most. The application is even more striking in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as one of the protagonists was badly burned while serving in a Russian tank crew fighting against the Germans in WWII, the same type of tank used in 2022 in Ukraine with the same tendency to explode in flames and incinerate the crew; and a less prominent character, dying of radiation sickness in a Moscow hospital, raves in his last moments about Ukrainian independence and Russian oppression.

And the story is really good. The details of Soviet-era life are well depicted and the story is gripping. There's a little more explication of what things *are* and how people lived than you find in an oral history like Voices of Chernobyl, so it casts some light on my non-fiction reading too. I found the characters engaging and varied. Almost 40 years after the events, the book is still worth reading. show less