Everything about Frederik Pohl totally explained
» This article is about the writer and editor. For the historian, see Frederick J. Pohl.
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (born
November 26,
1919) is a
American science fiction writer, editor and
fan, with a career spanning over sixty years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited
Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine
if, winning the
Hugo for
if three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple
Nebula Awards. He became a
Nebula Grand Master in 1993.
Biography and writing career
Pohl's family moved a number of times in his early years. His father held a number of jobs, and the Pohls lived in such wide-flung locations as
Texas,
California,
New Mexico, and the
Panama Canal Zone. Around age seven, they settled in
Brooklyn. He attended the prestigious
Brooklyn Tech high school, but due to the
Great Depression, Pohl dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to work. While still a teenager he began a lifelong friendship with fellow writer
Isaac Asimov, also a member of the New York-based
Futurians fan group.
In 1936, Pohl joined the
Young Communist League, an organization in favor of trade unions and against racial prejudice and Hitler and Mussolini. He became President of the local Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. Some say that party elders expelled him, in the belief that the escapist nature of science fiction risked corrupting the minds of youth; he says that after Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 the party line changed and he could no longer support it, so he left.
From 1939 to 1943, he was the editor of two
pulp magazines -
Astonishing Stories and
Super Science Stories. In his own autobiography, Pohl says that he stopped editing the two magazines at roughly the time of German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Pohl has been married several times. His first wife,
Leslie Perri, was another Futurian; they were married in August of 1940 but divorced during World War II. He then married
Dorothy LesTina in Paris in August, 1945 while both were serving in Europe. In 1948 he married
Judith Merril, an important figure in the world of science fiction, with whom he's one daughter, Ann. Merril and Pohl divorced in 1953. From 1953-1982 he was married to
Carol Metcal Ulf. He is currently married to science fiction editor and academic
Elizabeth Anne Hull,
PhD, whom he married in 1984.
Emily Pohl-Weary is Pohl's granddaughter.
During the war Pohl served in the US Army (April 1943-November 1945), rising to Sergeant as an air corp weathermen. After training in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Colorado, he primarily was stationed in Italy.
Pohl started his career as Literary Agent in 1937, but it was a sideline for him until after WWII, when he began doing it full time. He ended up "representing more than half the successful writers in science fiction"--for a short time, he was the only agent Isaac Asimov ever had--though, in the end it was a failure for him as his agenting business went bankrupt in the early 1950's.
He collaborated with friend and fellow Futurian
Cyril M. Kornbluth, co-authoring a number of short stories and several
novels, including a
dystopian
satire of a world ruled by the
advertising agencies,
The Space Merchants (a belated sequel,
The Merchants' War [1984] was written by Pohl alone, after Kornbluth's death). This shouldn't to be confused with Pohl's
The Merchants of Venus, an unconnected 1972 novella which includes biting satire on runaway
free market capitalism and first introduced the
Heechee.
A number of his short stories were notable for a satirical look at
consumerism and advertising in the
1950s and
1960s: "The Wizard 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 is held captive by advertising researchers.
From the late 1950s until 1969, he served as editor of
Galaxy and
if magazines, taking over at some point from the ailing
H. L. Gold. Under his leadership,
if won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine for 1966, 1967 and 1968.
Judy-Lynn del Rey was his assistant editor at
Galaxy and
if.
In the mid-
1970s, Pohl acquired and edited novels for
Bantam Books, published as "Frederik Pohl Selections"; the most notable were
Samuel R. Delany's
Dhalgren and
Joanna Russ's
The Female Man. Also in the 1970s, Pohl reemerged as a novel writer in his own right, with books such as
Man Plus and the
Heechee series. He won back-to-back Nebula awards with
Man Plus in 1976 and
Gateway, the first
Heechee novel, in 1977.
Gateway also won the
1978 Hugo Award for Best 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 notable late novel is
Jem (
1980), winner of the
National Book Award. Pohl continues to write and had a new story, "Generations", published in September 2005. As of November 2006, he was working on a novel begun by
Arthur C. Clarke with the provisional title "
The Last Theorem".
His works include not only science fiction but also articles for
Playboy and
Family Circle. For a time, he was the official authority for the
Encyclopædia Britannica on the subject of
Emperor Tiberius.
He was a frequent guest on
Long John Nebel's radio show, from the 1950s to the early 1970s.
He was the eighth President of
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1974.
Pohl has been a resident of
Red Bank, New Jersey, and currently resides in
Palatine, Illinois.
Works
Series
- Undersea Quest (1954)
- Undersea Fleet (1956)
- Undersea City (1958)
The Merchants of Venus (1972) (novella in The Gold at the Starbow's End)
Gateway (1977) (winner of the Hugo Award and Nebula Award)
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
Heechee Rendezvous (1984)
Annals of the Heechee (1987)
The Gateway Trip (1990)
The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)
The Other End of Time (1996)
The Siege of Eternity (1997)
The Far Shore of Time (1999)
Mars
Man Plus (1975) (Winner of Nebula Award)
Mars Plus (1994) (with Thomas T. Thomas)
Farthest Star (1975)
Wall Around A Star (1983)
The Reefs of Space (1964)
Starchild (1965)
Rogue Star (1969)
The Space Merchants (1953) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
The Merchants' War (1984) (published together with The Space Merchants under the title VENUS, INC.)
Other novels (not part of a series)
Search the Sky (1954) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
Gladiator-At-Law (1955) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
Preferred Risk (1955) (with Lester Del Rey)
Slave Ship (1956)
Wolfbane (1957) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
Presidential Year (1958) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
Drunkard's Walk (1960)
A Plague of Pythons (1964) (also called Demon in the Skull)
The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965)
Jem (1980)
The Cool War (1981)
Syzygy (1981)
Starburst (1982)
The Years of the City (1984)
Black Star Rising (1985)
The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986)
Terror (1986)
Chernobyl (1987)
Land's End (1988) (with Jack Williamson)
The Day The Martians Came (1988)
Narabedla Ltd. (1988)
Homegoing (1989)
The World at the End of Time (1990)
Outnumbering the Dead (1990)
Stopping at Slowyear (1991)
The Singers of Time (1991) (with Jack Wiliamson)
Mining the Oort (1992)
The Voices of Heaven (1994)
O Pioneer! (1998)
Collections
Alternating Currents (1956)
The Case Against Tomorrow (1957)
Tomorrow Times Seven (1959)
The Man Who Ate the World (1960)
Turn Left At Thursday (1961)
The Wonder Effect (1962) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
The Abominable Earthman (1963)
Digits and Dastards (1966)
The Frederik Pohl Omnibus (1966)
Day Million (1970)
The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975)
In The Problem Pit (1976)
The Early Pohl (1976):
- 'Elegy for a Dead Planet: Luna,' 1937, (writing as Elton Andrews) [apoem, his first published piece]
- 'The Dweller in the Ice,' 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'The King's Eye,' 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'It's a Young World,' 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'Daughters of Eternity,' 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'Earth, Farewell!,' 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'Conspiracy on Callisto,' 1943, (writing as James MacCreigh)
- 'Highwayman of the Void,' 1943, (writing under Dirk Wylie's name)
- 'Double-Cross,' 1943, (writing as James MacCreigh)
Survival Kit (1979)
This Is My Best (1981)
Planets Three, 1982 (a collection of 3 novellas written as James MacCreigh):
- 'Figurehead'
- 'Red Moon of Danger'
- 'Donovan Had a Dream'
Midas World (1983)
Pohlstars (1984)
- 'The Sweet, Sad Queen of the Grazing Isles'
- 'The High Test', 1983
- 'Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair', 1983
- 'Second Coming', 1983
- 'Enjoy, Enjoy', 1974
- 'Growing Up in Edge City', 1975
- 'We Purchased People', 1974
- 'Rem the Rememberer', 1974
- 'The Mother Trip', 1975
- 'A Day in the Life of Able Charlie', 1976
- 'The Way It Was', 1977
- 'The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle (né The Wizards of Pung's Corners)', original story 1958, retranslation 1984.
BiPohl (1987)
(1987) (with C.M. Kornbluth)
Platinum Pohl (2005)
Autobiography
The Way the Future Was (1978)
Non-fiction
Tiberius (1960) (writing as Ernst Mason)
Practical Politics 1972 (1971)
Our Angry Earth (1991) (with Isaac Asimov)
Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport (2000)Further Information
Get more info on 'Frederik Pohl'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://frederik_pohl.totallyexplained.com">Frederik Pohl Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
