Author Profile · Science Fiction
Frederik Pohl
1919–2013 · American
Who was Frederik Pohl?
Science fiction's complete man: fan (a Futurian alongside Asimov and Kornbluth), literary agent, editor (Galaxy and If, winning three Hugos in the role), and writer whose career kept improving for sixty years. With Cyril Kornbluth he wrote The Space Merchants, the sharpest satire of the advertising age ever launched from inside it; alone, decades later, he produced Gateway, in which the galaxy's best free transit system doubles as a lottery of horrible deaths. Pohl's futures run on greed, bureaucracy and guilt — engines he understood from professional experience — and his late masterpieces prove the rare case of a Golden Ager who outwrote his own youth.
Why they matter
A pillar of the field in every role it offers. The Space Merchants founded sociological satire SF; Gateway swept the awards and remains a model of psychological hard SF; and as editor he published much of the 1960s' best work.
Essential books — and where to start
The Space Merchants
1953 · Science Fiction · Satirical SF, Dystopia
Co-written with C. M. Kornbluth. In a future run openly by advertising agencies — Congress represents corporations, conservationists are terrorists, and addiction loops are product design — star copywriter Mitch Courtenay lands the Venus account: sell colonisation of a poisonous hellworld to a public that must never learn the truth. Then someone erases his identity, and Mitch gets to experience the consumer's-eye view from the very bottom. Written by two ad-men manqués, its satire of focus groups, contract law and engineered cravings has aged from outrageous to documentary.
Man Plus
1976 · Science Fiction · Hard SF, Social SF
To survive on Mars unprotected, astronaut Roger Torraway must become something that can: eyes replaced with faceted crystal, skin with polymer, lungs with machinery, until the question of where the man ends and the project begins stops having an answer. Pohl narrates the surgical unmaking of a human being with clinical tenderness, alongside the collapse of Torraway's marriage and an Earth sliding towards war — and a final-page reveal about the narrator that re-frames the entire novel. Cyborg fiction's most humane and most unnerving classic.
Gateway
1977 · Heechee Saga, book 1 · Science Fiction · Hard SF, Space Opera
Inside a hollowed asteroid, the vanished Heechee left a thousand starships with preset, unreadable destinations. Climb in, launch, and you might return rich; you might return starved, irradiated or inside-out; mostly you don't return. Robinette Broadhead won the lottery out of the food mines, flew three missions, and came back the richest man alive and broken in a way he can't say — which is why half the novel is his sessions with a robot psychoanalyst he calls Sigfrid von Shrink. The slow excavation of what happened near the black hole is among SF's great guilt narratives.
Series
1954–2013 · British (Scottish)
The writer who revived British space opera virtually single-handed and gave SF its most fully argued utopia.
1920–1992 · American (Russian-born)
One of the Big Three of Golden Age SF.
b. 1957 · British
The keeper of British SF's cosmological flame: the bridge from Wells, Stapledon and Clarke to the modern field, and the standard for fiction in which the universe's full history is the stage.
