Frederik George Pohl Jr. (; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led.[
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From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual as the year's best professional magazine.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993[ and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers.]
Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, "The Way the Future Blogs".
Early life and family
Pohl was the son of Frederik (originally Friedrich) George Pohl (a salesman of German descent) and Anna Jane Mason.
He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, and dropped out at 17.
While a teenager, he co-founded the New York–based Futurians fan group, and began lifelong friendships with Donald Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, and others who would become important writers and editors.
In 1936, Pohl joined the Young Communist League because of its positions for labour unions and against racial prejudice, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini. He became president of the local Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. Pohl has said that after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the party line changed and he could no longer support it, at which point he left.[ The Way the Future Was, Frederik Pohl (Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 93, 113.]
During World War II, Pohl served in the United States Army from April 1943 until November 1945, rising to sergeant as an elite Air Corps weatherman. After training in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Colorado, he was mainly stationed in Italy with the 456th Bombardment Group.
Pohl was married five times. His first wife, Leslie Perri, was another Futurian; they were married in August 1940, and divorced in 1944. He then married Dorothy Les Tina in Paris in August 1945 while both were serving in the military in Europe; the marriage ended in 1947. During 1948, he married Judith Merril; they had a daughter, Ann. Pohl and Merril divorced in 1952. In 1953, he married Carol M. Ulf Stanton, with whom he had three children and collaborated on several books; they separated in 1977 and were divorced in 1983. From 1984 until his death, Pohl was married to science-fiction expert and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull.
He fathered four children – Ann (m. Walter Weary), Frederik III (born and died in 1954, aged one month[ Frederik Pohl IV, IMDB.com] and Kathy.[ Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009. Document Number: H1000078817] Grandchildren include Canadian writer Emily Pohl-Weary and chef Tobias Pohl-Weary.[ Eat at Red Canoe Bistro, The Way the Future Blogs, May 5, 2010: "The proprietor and head chef is the talented Tobias Pohl Weary, who has not only been winning awards for his cuisine but is also my grandson, of whom I am really proud."]
From 1984 on, he lived in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was previously a longtime resident of Middletown, New Jersey.
Career
Early writing
Pohl began writing in the late 1930s, using pseudonyms for most of his early works. His first publication was the poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna" under the name of Elton Andrews, in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stories, edited by T. O'Conor Sloane.
Editor and agent
Pohl started a career as a literary agent in 1937, but it was a sideline for him until after World War II, when he began doing it full-time. Pohl stopped being Asimov's agent—the only one the latter ever had
Stories by Pohl often appeared in these magazines, but never under his own name. Work written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth was credited to S. D. Gottesman or Scott Mariner; other collaborative work (with any combination of Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, or Robert A. W. Lownes) was credited to Paul Dennis Lavond. For Pohl's solo work, stories were credited to James MacCreigh (or for one story only, Warren F. Howard.)
He also worked as an advertising copywriting and then as a copywriter and book editor for Popular Science.
Pohl co-founded the Hydra Club, a loose collection of science-fiction professionals and fans who met during the late 1940s and 1950s.[
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From the early 1960s until 1969, Pohl served as editor of Galaxy Science Fiction and Worlds of If magazines, taking over after the ailing H. L. Gold could no longer continue working "around the end of 1960".[Pohl, Frederik. The Way the Future Was (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 221-2] Under his leadership, If won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine for 1966, 1967 and 1968.[Ashley, Mike, Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970, Liverpool University Press (2005), , p. 207.]
In the mid-1970s, Pohl acquired and edited novels for Bantam Books, published as "A Frederik Pohl Selection"; these included Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Joanna Russ's The Female Man. He also edited a number of science-fiction anthology.
Novelist
Though he retired his pen names "Gottesman", "Lavond", and "MacCreigh" by the early 1950s, Pohl still occasionally used pseudonyms, even after he began to publish work under his real name. These occasional pseudonyms, all of which date from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, included Charles Satterfield, Paul Flehr, Ernst Mason, Jordan Park (two collaborative novels with Kornbluth), and Edson McCann (one collaborative novel with Lester del Rey).
In the 1970s, Pohl re-emerged as a novel writer in his own right, with books such as Man Plus and the Heechee Saga series. He won back-to-back Nebula Awards with Man Plus in 1976 and Gateway, the first Heechee novel, in 1977. In 1978, Gateway swept the other two major novel honors, also winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel. Two of his stories have also earned him Hugo Awards: "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth) tied in 1973 and "Fermi and Frost" won in 1986. Another award-winning novel is Jem (1979), winner of the National Book Award.
His works include not only science fiction, but also articles for Playboy and Family Circle magazines and nonfiction books. For a time, he was the official authority for Encyclopædia Britannica on the subject of Tiberius. (He wrote a book on the subject of Tiberius, as "Ernst Mason".)
Some of his short stories take a satirical look at consumerism and advertising in the 1950s and 1960s: "The Wizards of Pung's Corners", where flashy, over-complex military hardware proved useless against farmers with shotguns, and "The Tunnel under the World", where an entire community of seeming-humans is held captive by advertising researchers. ("The Wizards of Pung's Corners" was freely translated into Chinese and then freely translated back into English as "The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle" in the first edition of Pohlstars 1984).
In his 1969 novel, "The Age of the Pussyfoot", Pohl speculated about a society where everyone could access knowledge and the means to communicate with others through a small handheld device similar to a smartphone. Although he set the novel 500 years in the future, he noted in an afterword that it might be as few as fifty years away. A short story "Day Million" suggested that society in the year 2737 might be as alien to us as contemporary society would be to someone from ancient times.
Pohl's Law is "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere will not hate it".
He was a frequent guest on Long John Nebel's radio show from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and an international lecturer.[Pohl, Frederik. The Way the Future Was (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 238-39, 269-70, 280.]
Starting in 1995, when the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award became a juried award, Pohl served first with James Gunn and Judith Merril, and since then with several others until retiring in 2013.
Pohl received the second annual J. W. Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the University of California, Riverside Libraries at the 2009 Eaton Award, "Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne and Beyond".[
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Pohl's work has been an influence on a wide variety of other science fiction writers, some of whom appear in the 2010 anthology, , edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull.
Pohl's last novel, All the Lives He Led, was released on April 12, 2011.
At the time of his death, he was working to finish a second volume of his autobiography The Way the Future Was (1979), along with an expanded version of the latter.
In July 2020, an academic description reported on the nature and rise of the "robot prosumer", derived from modern-day technology and related participatory culture, that, in turn, was substantially predicted earlier by science fiction writers, most notably by Pohl.
Collaborative work
In addition to his solo writings, Pohl was also well known for his collaborations, beginning with his first published story. Before and following the war, Pohl did a series of collaborations with his friend Cyril Kornbluth, including a large number of short stories and several novels, among them The Space Merchants, a satire of a world ruled by the advertising agencies.[A belated sequel, The Merchants' War (1984) was written by Pohl alone, after Kornbluth's death. Pohl's The Merchants of Venus was an unconnected 1972 novella that includes biting satire on runaway free-market capitalism and first introduced the Heechee.]
In the mid-1950s, he began a long-running collaboration with Jack Williamson, eventually resulting in 10 collaborative novels over five decades.
Other collaborations included a novel with Lester Del Rey, Preferred Risk (1955). This novel was solicited for a contest by Galaxy–Simon & Schuster when the judges did not think any of the contest submissions was good enough to win their contest. It was published under the joint pseudonym Edson McCann.[Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was, Ballantine Books (1978),] He also collaborated with Thomas T. Thomas on a sequel to his award-winning novel Man Plus. He wrote two short stories with Isaac Asimov in the 1940s, both published in 1950.[Asimov, Isaac (1974). The Early Asimov Volume 2, Panther Books, pp. 134 and 197-198. ]
He finished a novel begun by Arthur C. Clarke, The Last Theorem, which was published on August 5, 2008.
Death
Pohl went to the hospital in respiratory distress on the morning of September 2, 2013, and died that afternoon
Works
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Frederik Pohl bibliography
Notes
Further reading
Critical studies, reviews, and biography
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Frederik Pohl by Michael R. Page (2015). University of Illinois Press
Derivative works
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Gateways: Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl (2010), edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull.
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Elizabeth Anne Hull, Introduction
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David Brin, "Shoresteading"
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Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, "Von Neumann's Bug"
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Isaac Asimov, Appreciation
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Joe Haldeman, "Sleeping Dogs"
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Larry Niven, "Gates (Variations)"
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Gardner Dozois, Appreciation
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James Gunn, "Tales from the Spaceship Geoffrey"
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Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre, "Shadows of the Lost"
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Connie Willis, Appreciation
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Vernor Vinge, "A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memories of Star Captain Y.T. Lee"
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Greg Bear, "Warm Sea"
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Robert J. Sawyer, Appreciation
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Frank M. Robinson, "The Errand Boy"
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Gene Wolfe, "King Rat"
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Robert Silverberg, Appreciation
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Harry Harrison, "The Stainless Steel Rat and the Pernicious Porcuswine"
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Jody Lynn Nye, "Virtually, A Cat"
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David Marusek, Appreciation
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Brian W. Aldiss, "The First-Born"
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Ben Bova, "Scheherezade and the Storytellers"
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Joan Slonczewski, Appreciation
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Sheri S. Tepper, "The Flight of the Denartesestel Radichan"
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Neil Gaiman, "The Backspace Merchants"
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Emily Pohl-Weary, Appreciation
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Mike Resnick, "On Safari"
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Cory Doctorow, "Chicken Little"
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James Frenkel, Afterword
External links
