Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 14

Back in April many U.S. Congressmen got a letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops urging the legislators not to institute Paul Ryan’s budget reducing the “safety nets” for those who need them and asking them always to “put the poor first.” Those are the letters that were sent, but we wonder. Did, [...]

Dear friends, If you vote for Republicans, you vote for global warming — and more and worse Sandys. I’m sorry to say this, but it is my honest opinion and that of most of the world’s scientists.

Why We Should Go Back to the MoonFor the Sake of the Science There What recent scientific discovery suggests that we ought to resume space flights to the Moon for purposes of scientific research? Why, that would be the discovery of traces of the isotope iron-60 in deep-sea rocks and meteorites. The reason that discovering [...]

The development of a professional writer is marked by a number of stages, each identified by a particular event. My own development was accelerated by the fact that by the time I was 14 or so I had come to know people — Johnny Michel and Don Wollheim — who had actually sold works to [...]

The Great Depression is thought of to have begun with the stock-market crash in October, 1929. Not for us, though. My father didn’t lose his money then. He had pretty much already lost it all — whatever he and my mother had saved and whatever he was getting from whatever kind of job he had [...]

Who Bashed People With His Wit, Then His Cane The first manuscript by Keith Laumer that I remember seeing was about an interstellar diplomat named Retief, which caused me to stop reading manuscripts that day to write the author a letter, telling him I was buying the story and adding, “Please write me more stories, [...]

In the United States, we have 5 percent of the human population in the world, but 25 percent of the humans who are in prison. For the year 2012, loopholes in income-tax returns will amount to approximately $1 trillion — $1,000,000,000,000 — in losses to the government, or more than it spends on either defense [...]

I remember The Depression pretty well, not only because I saw some of it with my own eyes (I was 11 in 1931) but because I did a lot of research on it for a book I never published. What you youngsters don’t know is that it came in two halves, like a football game. [...]

I said I was going to put advertising in the blog, and I am doing it. Only I think I’ll limit it to advertising my own books — and so here is the first ad! Now Available as an Ebook! The Best of Frederik Pohl The Famous Anthology Edited by Lester del Rey The Stories [...]

The Man Who Gave Me His Wife During World War II, Jay Stanton signed on as radioman with several convoys on the Murmansk run. This was one of the most dangerous jobs there were but Stanton survived. After the war he settled for some years in the largely sf community in Manhattan. I didn’t really [...]