You could do far worse for yourself than going out and buying a copy of "The Space Merchants" which Fred Pohl wrote in 1953 with Cyril Kornbluth, and which reads like Forbes Magazine will read five years from now.
Escapist literature my ass (my own borrowings from Mr. Pohl begin halfway through this post.)
And, not for nothing, but he was also a blogger.
Goodbye Fred.
7 comments:
I'm gonna grab Gateway off the shelf this evening, settle down with a whiskey and a smoke and let Fred blow me away one more time.
Awww hell nawww!!! another genius gone.
He will be greatly missed.
Is it Gladiator-at-Law yet?
Jeez, no one's ever ready for anything.
I don't know why I never figured out that he had a blog. I wish that I had read it in real time.
I've been re-reading his stuff recently. His memoir "The Way the Future Was" is fascinating. "The Space Merchants" is great, but he had so much more great stuff. Definitely the "Gateway" novels.
I just read "The Coming of the Quantum Cats", the paperback for which has been kicking around the house for years and I couldn't put it down.
He also was asked by Heinlein to put together the anthology published under Heinlein's name ("Tomorrow the Stars").
RIP
Indeed, a sad day for all. The great writers of our youth seem all but gone; Aldiss and Vance are still with us I think. Vance is done writing but still wrote well - his last book is a fine bit of that rococo Vancian language, with cruel and unsentimental deaths around every corner (no one saves the world by dying in a Vance novel). And the young punks of SF, Silverberg and Ellison and Delany, are old or absent.
I suppose this is as much about my experience, discovering SF in the old Ace doubles and other paperbacks, and the old SF mags. Guys like Pohl were a connection to the earliest days of SF, a different world than now when people think of movies and TV as the real SF. Sheldon and friends once referenced Asimov's laws of robotics, but for the most part, this supreme show about nerds and geeks references movies and TV and comics over F&SF or Hugo-winners.
When I read Drift glass, I smile because of the references to the Cold Equations and I expect that DG has read Space Prison, a great obscure 60's novel by the same guy.
I know that DG and some of his readers read Man Plus as a serial first, that they've read not just te well known books like the Space Merchants but that they probably have a favorite obscure Pohl novel or story.
One of the best.
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