Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 11

  Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. On a day late in August, in the year of 1976, I was sitting at my ease in a very comfortable first-class seat in a four-engined jet that was just about to land at my favorite airport in the world. I was sipping on a nearly empty [...]

(Did you notice we were gone?) Gone we all were, and for weeks on end. There were the bugs that were flying around, for starters. We didn’t get any of the more popular brands, but we got some mysterious upper-respiratory hits and several others at other locations, and that’s without mentioning the plagues that, without [...]

  “It’s the boom, not the bust, that’s the time for austerity.” —John Maynard Keynes

A recent Pulse — the Union of Concerned Scientists’ bulletin warning civilians about new threats to their life, liberty or good health — reports some alarming scientific findings about ground-level ozone pollution levels and what they are doing to our ability to breathe freely. The numbers are scary. By 2020, millions of people will develop [...]

  View Larger Map When my speaking-tour bookers at Foggy Bottom (as we insiders term the State Department) told me what my next port of call would be, in my world-girdling pilgrimage in the attempt to make foreigners like the U.S.A. better than their own daily papers did, it was Yugoslavia. That didn’t thrill me [...]

View Larger Map When the great world of non-English-speaking science fiction fans began to flex their young muscles and develop their own brand-new sorts of clubs and cons there was o way to slow them down. So it was no surprise to us Americans that, when there sprang into life an annual science fiction film [...]

  “True friends stab you in the front.” —Oscar Wilde

  “True friends stab you in the front.” —Oscar Wilde

It’s not surprising that astronomers are discovering new planets almost every day. Almost all of them are the same boring type as our old Earth — wisps of gas and dust orbiting around a star that, under the influence of their mutual gravitation, gradually accrete into planet-sized bodies. But last year, Yale researchers found out [...]

    “It is not acceptable for people to die where talks can be held.” —President Jacob Zuma, South Africa, addressing striking miners after 34 were shot dead by police