Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 10

Where we left off: MidAmeriCon, August 1976 — As I gave her a foot rub, Dr. Hull said, “I forgot to ask you. Are you married, Frederik?” “Well,” I said, “I guess I am, at least for the next, let me see, four months. After that, we’ll see.” She didn’t respond to that in words, [...]

  “Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.” —Voltaire

Years and years ago—I would say maybe about the 1970s—I happened to think of a mystery novel I would like to write. So whenever I got tired of working on the current piece I was writing for Horace L. Gold to print in Galaxy and needed a break I would write a chapter or so [...]

Visiting the SFWA suite at MidAmeriCon seemed worth a try, so we tried it. Unfortunately giving it a try meant quite a lot of walking, which meant a lot of competition for body space as the eager mobs of fans, famished for PARTYPARTYPARTY! wandered the halls, now a crawling mass of fan flesh. It was [...]

  “Now it doesn’t matter if you came over on the Mayflower, as long as you can get into Studio 54. Anyone rich, powerful, beautiful or famous can get into Society. If you’re a few of those things you can really get to the top.” —Andy Warhol

This is a two-person sort of book review of Terry Bisson’s 2012 novel, Any Day Now. One of the reviewers is Old Fred the Blogger, who says that he was disappointed in it because the opening was a beautifully worked story of a young boy and his world, and then it turned into a fantasy [...]

Psychologist Emile van der Zee, at the University of Lincoln in the U.K., is studying how dogs perceive differences between objects. When a human being hears the word “ball” he forms a visual image of something marked by its roundness — the most marked trait he observes by looking at it and handling it. His [...]

By the time the dozen or so of us hungry MidAmeriCon-goers got desperate about food we learned that the Kansas City Rot had spread through the whole city. The hotel’s own coffee shop would take no reservations before midnight, and their fancier restaurant had already closed its doors. Still, one person among us claimed to [...]

  “How to become a fossil. First, you die. Second, die on a soft stone, not granite!” —Maria Isabel Garcia Curator, The Mind Museum, Philippines

Marty Greenberg and a couple of the others who were clustered in the Kansas City hotel lobby were coaxing me to stay, and one of those (apparent) teen-age graduate students nailed me down with a comment that was clearly intended to lead to a series of questions, “I understand you know Mr. Heinlein quite well, [...]