The Knights of Arthur
by Frederik Pohl
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Published in the January 1958 issue, THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR is one of the earlier computer satires in which the machine (like Arthur C. Clarke's Hal in 2001 ten years later) is gifted with a human and very cranky personality. By 1958, the Horace Gold's own personality, under the constant pressure of his agoraphobia, isolation and increasing imperiousness had sharply deteriorated and he had alienated most of his best contributors, some of whom (Isaac Asimov) refused to work with him any more. show more Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine, between 1950 and 1959 apparently never left his Stuyvesant Town apartment for any reason. Gold was having ever less to do with the mechanical and repetitive aspects of editing and, probably at the best of his publisher Robert Guinn had turned over those tasks (and some of the task of selection) to Frederik Pohl who was in effect ghost-editing the magazine years before he assumed the position of editor on the masthead in 1960. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pohl became in those years one of the magazine's most prolific contributors, even as the already dominant Robert Sheckley under Pohl's guidance became so prolific that he developed three pseudonyms because so frequently more than one of his stories appeared in the magazine. THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR is a characteristic GALAXY satire of a machine pushing the borders of restraint and becoming a bully or at least something of an oppressor. (Robert Silverberg's THE IRON CHANCELLOR, also part of The Galaxy Project is another such example.) Pohl's pleasantly ravaged, post-apocalyptic city is more than background landscape; it is itself a character (just as New York City was essentially the protagonist of Pohl's great novel YEARS OF THE CITY published three decades earlier). Pohl's work was usually more inferno than comic but this novelette is managed with unaccustomed lightness.. show less
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Story: 7 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 8
Prose: 6
Characters: 6
Setting: 8
Prose: 6
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637+ Works 42,731 Members
Frederik Pohl was born in New York City on November 26, 1919. More interested in writing than in school, he dropped out of high school in his senior year and took a job with a publishing company. After serving as a public relations officer in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945, he returned to publishing as copywriter for Popular Science, a show more literary agent for several sci-fi writers, and the editor for the magazines Galaxy and If from 1959 until 1969, with If winning three successive Hugo awards. His first published work, a poem entitled Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna, was printed in Amazing Stories magazine in 1937 under the pen name Elton Andrews. His first science fiction novels were published in the mid 1960's, some written in collaboration with other writers, others created alone. During his lifetime, he won over 16 major awards for his writing (much of which was published pseudonymously) including six Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. His works include Gateway, which won the Campbell Memorial, Hugo, Locus SF, and Nebula Awards, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, and Jem, which won the National Book Award in 1979. He also embraced blogging in his later years, using his online journal as an ongoing sequel to his autobiography, The Way the Future Was. He died on September 2, 2013 at the age 93. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Original publication date
- 1957
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- Members
- 28
- Popularity
- 976,870
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.38)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 13
- ASINs
- 5
