Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 16

Ever wonder why the Republicans have spent the last four years doing everything they can to handicap President Obama, even at the risk of throwing us into a full-scale Depression, as when the ultra-right Republicans did their best to sabotage compromises that were needed to save the country from bankruptcy? It isn’t just cause they [...]

  “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” —Lewis Mumford

Robert Sheckley was a great — and greatly funny — writer of science-fiction short stories. Along with “William Tenn” (aka Phil Klass) and damon knight, he filled the magazines in that thrice-blessed decade of the ’60s with an apparently infinite supply of great little comic stories. When I say there was nothing like them before [...]

In the beginning of his career, young Ben Bova had a good job writing about the hardware his employer, Avco-Everett Research Laboratory, dealt with, but a yearning to write something less confining, particularly science fiction. When he began trying his hand at that he got a welcome from John Campbell, arguably the top editor in [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, the late Jay Kay Klein gave me permission to use his photos and sent me a box of them before he died. Unfortunately, not all of them are captioned. I’ve been sorting through them, and trying to put names to the faces. Here are two of them, and if anyone can [...]

If you have been going to sf cons for more than a handful of years you have probably been blinded now and then by the photoflashes of the World’s Number One Fan Photographer, Jay Kay Klein. It’s our sad duty to say that won’t happen any more, because on May 13,,Jay Kay passed away. He [...]

Mr. Left Hand, Meet Mr. Right Hand: You Two Should Talk Even when it come to food, Congress still likes to talk out of two sides of its mouth at once. Congress has appropriated large sum of tax money to urge Americans to eat more healthful food, their ideal dinner plate supposed to contain 50 [...]

A few days ago, I received a telephone call to tell me that Ray Bradbury had just died. I can’t write a proper obituary about the man who had been a friend for very nearly three-quarters of a century, ever since that day in 1939 when both of us — kid fans, yearning to be [...]

Remember the death panels? The ones that the right-wing kooks warned we would all risk facing if Obamacare passed, consisting of committees of politicians whose job was to decide which severely ill patients got treatment and which were just allowed to go ahead and die? Well, there actually was nothing of that sort in Obama’s [...]

I’ve been reading the New York Times, on and off, since I was maybe twelve years old, when the major attraction was ads showing models in their underwear, and I have long been aware of some puzzling facts about the paper. The first of those facts was historical: Way back in the 19th century, the [...]