Slightly Better Books

Author Focus:

Frederik Pohl

Fiction: Science Fiction

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Titles to Look Out For:
[in ascending order of date of publication (year) with each entry dated to earliest edition. Each listing includes later editions and printings]
1960. Drunkard's Walk
1963. The Expert Dreamers: Science Fiction Stories by Scientists
1976. Man Plus
1977. Heechee Book 1: Gateway
1979. Jem
1980. The Early Pohl
1980. The Cool War
1980. Heechee Book 2: Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (Sequel to Gateway)
1983. Midas World
1990. The World at the End of Time

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• Drunkard's Walk [top]
  First published in 1961 in Great Britain in hardback by Victor Gollancz
  Published in 1978 in Great Britain in paperback by Panther Science Fiction (Granada Publishing), 133pp, ISBN 0586047638

Storyline: You can only die, drunken molecule, you can die, you cannot stop... . Master Cornut was a marked man. Ten times in seven weeks he had tried to commit suicide - for not the slightest reason and without even seriously maiming himself. Yet as absurd as it seemed, Master Cornut felt sure that some strange and sinister telepathic power was compelling him to die...Then came the small-pox epidemic, devastating the lives of millions of people. But why - centuries after the preventive had been discovered - was there no known antidote available? Someone or Something had been tampering with civilization to catastrophic effect and Master Cornut's suicide syndrome was just the key to the most nightmarish conspiracy planet Earth has ever experienced

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• The Expert Dreamers: Science Fiction Stories by Scientists [top]
  First published in 1963 in Great Britain in hardback by Victor Gollancz
  Published in 1966 in Great Britain in paperback by Pan Books, 220pp, No ISBN

Contents:
Introduction by Frederik Pohl
A Feast of Demons by William Morrison (Joseph Samachson)
On the Feasability of Coal-Driven Power Stations by O.R. Frisch
The Heart on the Other Side by George Gamow
Lenny by Isaac Asimov
The Singers by W. Grey Walter
The Invasion by Robert Willey; (Willy Ley)
To Explain Mrs Thompson by Philip Latham (R. S. Richardson)
Adrift on the Policy Level by Chandler Davis
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle
Chain Reaction by Boyd Ellanby (Lyle and William C. Boyd)
The Miracle of the Broom Closet by W. Norbert (Norbert Wiener)
HeavyPlanet by Lee Gregor (Milton A. Rothman)
The Test Stand by Lee Correy (G. Harry Stine)
Amateur in Chancery by George O. Smith
The Mark Gable Foundation by Leo Szilard

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• Man Plus [top]
  First published in 1976 in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz
  Republished 1977 by Readers Union, hardcover, 218 pages

Storyline: Set in the near future, Man Plus describes a world in which international tensions have reached such a pitch that mankind's only hope for survival may be to colonise another planet before exterminating itself on Earth. The Man Plus programme is designed to establish a human colony on Mars, and since man cannot survive unprotected on Mars he must be adapted. Roger Torraway is the first successful product of the Man Plus Programme. True, he no longer looks very much like a man, wit his rhinoceros-hide skin, his multi-faceted eyes, and his huge bat wings, but he still feels very much human, and one of the project's biggest problems is to get him to Mars before he goes insane on Earth

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• Gateway [top]
  Heechee Book #1, Followed by Beyond The Blue Event Horizon
  First published in 1977 in hardback
  First published in 1978 in Great Britain in paperback by Del Rey Books (Ballantine Books), 313pp, ISBN 0345253787

Storyline: Rich Man, Dead Man. Those were the choices Gateway offered - the same for women, too of course. Gateway opened on all the wealth of the universe...and on reaches of unimaginable horror. The humans who rode the alien Heechee spacecraft stored on the planetoid couldn't know whether the trip would make them millionaires or corpses. When Bob Broadhead came out to Gateway, he thought his problem was simple - wait till the mission felt right, then ship out. but watching returned prospectors scraped from the insides of their ships, falling in love, feeling his nerve dwindle - all these things changed him. Then, years later, Robinette Broadhead, a three-mission veteran, famous and permanently rich, has to face just what happened to him and what he is...in a journey into himself as perilous and even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void he finally drove himself to take!

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• Jem: The Making of a Utopia [top]
  First published in 1979 in the United States by St. Martin's Press, in hardback, ISBN 031244155x
  First published in 1979 in the United Kingdom by Victor Gollancz (Yellow Jacket), in hardback, 300pp, ISBN 0575025662
  Published in 1980 in the United Kingdom by Panther Science Fiction (Granada Publishing), in paperback, 300pp, ISBN 0586050787

Storyline: The 21st Century facts of life are simple. The Greasies produce oil. The Fats produce food. The Peeps produce people. And that's how it must stay. Three massive blocs, each dependent on the other two, all surviving in uneasy nuclear peace. Until Jem. Jem is a whole new possibility, the first habitable and inhabited planet yet discovered, and the race is on to get there

When Jem was written, the world was still very much in the throes of a cold war - West vs. East. This of course saw the two dominant super-powers: America and the Soviet Union pitted against each other in covert operations and subterfuge. The Soviets attacked Afghanistan in 1979, and the China was growing in stature economically and politically.

Against this background, Frederik Pohl wrote a future novel where the world has consolidated into the three blocks mentioned above. Each block is rich in one resource, but poor in others. Earth politics are dominated by cold, calculating co-operation made by shadowy individuals with games of cloak and dagger.

The novel opens with a scientist's desire to travel to another world. This should not in itself be unusual because space travel is a relatively common occurrence. But the scientist choses a world where colonisation is a possibility, a new idea. As the story unfolds, the competition between the blocs to colonise this distant planet becomes a race and the politics, manipulation and cost necessary for the mission to go ahead are very visible to the reader.

On the target planet the reader discovers that there are three sentient species of life forms. As each bloc arrives, they each form a relationship to a native species, and the delicate balance of the planet in terms of the political balance and the ecology becomes upset as the colonists put their ambitions and desires first.

In terms of space exploration and colonisation and the effects on the target planets by those events makes this book an interesting read. Is it really the making of a Utopia?

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• The Early Pohl [top]
  First published in the UK in 1980 by Dobson Books Ltd in hardback, 183pp, ISBN 0234721987

This book contains eight great stories that weave themselves into magnificent tales of wonder and intrigue.
Together with the stories and one poem (all of which appeared during the period 1940-1944) is Frederik Pohl's delightful commentary on each of them-as well as revealing anecdotes about his fandom associates, his friends and his enemies. The collection includes:
Elegy to a Dead Planet:Luna

The Dweller in the Ice

The King's Eye, in which a local tribe of Venutians develop an allergy to Earthmen

It's a Young World, the epic drama of one young hunter's exposure to a culture more advanced than his own

Daughters of Eternity
Earth, Farewell!, the poignant story of one man's attempt to save an entire planet

Conspiracy on Callisto
Double Cross, in which a nervous band of conspirators plot to bomb a spaceship

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• The Cool War [top]
  1st published in the UK in 1980 by Victor Gollancz
  Reprinted in 1982 by the Science Fiction Book Club, Volume 3, Issue 9, hardcover with very good dustjacket, 284 pages

"There are two ways to win a race, Hake. One is to beat your opponent by sheer force. The other is to trip him up."

Thus the Reverend H. Hornswell Hake learns the rules of the war he has just been drafted into-a war that he, like most people, had been unaware was taking place. It is a few years in the future, and conventional warfare has gone out of fashion after a few final spasms. Nation is ostensibly at peace with nation, but the world is still falling apart at the seams because of the combatants in the cool war-men and women whose objective is to create as much havoc as possible in rival countries without leaving any evidence that their nation was responsible. Their methods include spreading disease, pushing dangerous drugs, blighting crops and any other mayhem that can be caused without detection.

Hake, a Unitarian minister revelling in the aftermath of an operation which has freed hime from a lifetime in a wheel-chair, is called into active service because of his Middle-East background. His first mission is to accompany a party of schoolchildren innocently presenting marmosets to their brother and sisters in Europe...