Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 17

Despite having lived within easy driving distance of Gene Wolfe’s home for the last quarter century — and having read compulsively in those seriously addictive novels he keeps writing — I hesitate to say I know Gene Wolfe. He’s one of those people whom you think you know really well, and then, without warning, some [...]

Although I often get tempted to get into the discussions that keep coming up in the “Comments” appended to each item we post, I usually hold my tongue. This isn’t because I don’t enjoy a good argument, it’s just because I don’t think it’s fair for me to get into arguments where I would always [...]

  “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” —Denis Diderot

(And One of the Smartest) In the spring of 1978, I was doing a book-promotion tour in the general area of Boston, Massachusetts. That sort of thing was usually scheduled to take advantage of the fact that I would be in that area anyway, for some other commitment such as a lecture date. The rest [...]

Cathy Pizarro, Betty’s oldest daughter, who helps Betty and me deal with computer malfunctions and much else, came back to live with us years ago after her husband, Tony Pizarro, was hit and killed by an unlicensed driver in a stolen car in New York. Among other things, she took herself back to college, earning [...]

  “It is unnatural in a large field to have only one shaft of wheat, and in the universe only one living world.” —Metrodorus of Chios  

Scientists have finally figured out where we all came from, and the answer isn’t pretty. Three billion years ago, an organism named LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) inhabited the Earth, and we all — that’s primates and platypuses, sponges and salamanders, diplodocuses and ducklings — every last one of us, of whatever species, are her [...]

  It could happen to a nicer guy— Listeners report that there are empty spots in Rush Limbaugh’s daily outpouring of venom where there used to be commercials, but now there’s just dead air because advertisers have been drawn away— —but it wouldn’t.

Everything, you see, was going beautifully. So then, guess what AJ did next. I’ll tell you what he did next. Basically, he quit writing.   I haven’t played quite fair with you because, actually, those last four or five sentences covered that many years, and he did do some writing, part of the time. In [...]

  “Size, we are told, is not a crime. But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it is attained or the uses to which it is put.” —Louis Brandeis