Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 12

When I was a child I read everything that came into the house. The majority of these chance-met books that made up my available literary finds were the boys’ (and sometimes the girls’) series works, specifically delivered as gifts for me. None of these made much of an impression on me, though. I read them [...]

Researchers led by Andrew Jarosz at the University of Illinois at Chicago devised an experiment to check the conviction, held by some, that an author’s work desk is not complete without a typewriter, some paper and (at least) one open bottle of beer. They gave 40 men either a vodka and cranberry drink or a [...]

When an election is near, politicians do their best to avoid doing or saying anything unusually evil or asinine because they know that people are watching. At times like the present, though, they know that most voters are sick of the subject and aren’t paying much attention any more. So let’s fool them and pay [...]

Well, definitely a lot less in recoverable natural gas than the gas billionaires were telling us just a few months ago. Their claim then was that there was that there were 827 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. This brought about a lot more drilling, which gave more accurate numbers for the supply. The Energy [...]

Last week my wife, Betty Anne Hull, and I each got a little unsigned note. Since the author didn’t include any address, we have to try to answer them this way. Betty Anne’s letter criticized her parking. She acknowledges she was at fault and will try to avoid such problems in the future. The one [...]

    Fred made a rare live appearance last month at Windycon in Lombard, Ill., talking about his 75-year career. Leigh Hanlon of ChicagoScope recorded it, so you can hear it, too. Elizabeth Anne Hull also features, and blogmaster Leah A. Zeldes is the interviewer.     Click to play “75 years of Fred,” ChicagoScope [...]

“I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention being paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident [...]

  Order any ebook on the Baen list by tapping this link! Choose the famous Lester del Rey collection, The Best of Frederik Pohl, or any other of nearly two dozen additional Pohl books, as well as books by many others of your favorite authors. Do It Today!  

  “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” —Thomas Jefferson

When Harrycon in Ireland came to pass, it was a blast. A couple of dozen top sf writers showed up-— even Alfie Bester, who was getting into the more serious phases of his blindness — as well as numbers of editors, fans and general hangers-on from all sorts of European, North American and South American [...]