Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 27

After the war — that's World War II, I'm talking about, what did you think? — I went to work as copywriter for a tiny Mad Ave. advertising agency called Thwing & Altman. It wasn't a boring job, and one of the things I liked about it was that one of my favorite [...]

 
Six months or so back a local outfit asked me to make some predictions about the future. That's not my regular line of work, of course. Sf writers do not predict the future, they just speculate about what sorts of futures might come our way, but I was feeling lucky so I took [...]

When Don Wollheim and Johnny Michel came to convert the Brooklyn SFL to the cause of annihilating Hugo Gernsback, Donald was all of seventeen years old. I was twelve, and to a twelve-year old seventeen looks nearly indistinguishable from grownup. He acted and talked that way, too.
He and Johnny, in fact, were [...]

The loss of a dear old friend
I don't remember exactly when I first met Martin Harry Greenberg, who died on July 2nd after a series of debilitating health problems. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago, maybe in the '60s, but I do remember the circumstances. I had received a letter [...]

The whole of Yellowstone National Park is basically the gigantic caldera of a super-volcano, the kind that can mess up the whole world's climate when it blows. The Yellowstone one is pretty regular about how often it does blow, too, and at the moment it's about 6,000 years overdue for its next ka-boom. [...]

 


The Daily Show


 
What Fools These Repub — These Mortals Be
In April, U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R., AZ) warned the nation in one of his fact-free orations that if we gave federal funds to Planned Parenthood they would spend 90 percent of it on providing abortions. (The correct number is 3 to 4 percent.) [...]

I was personally saddened to learn that Joanna Russ had died after a number of severe strokes, saddened especially because I had seen so little of her for the last couple of decades.
It is evident, not only from her work but from everything she ever said on the subject, that Joanna had no [...]

 
Science published this extract from an article called "Counterexamples to Relativity" from Conservapedia, which calls itself "an encyclopedia written from a conservative viewpoint":
"The theory of relativity … is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativitism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world. . . . Virtually no [...]

Here are the answers to last week's Bible quiz:



a and c. As for stoning on a father's doorstep, that is the fate of non-virgin brides. (Deuteronomy 22:13.)


b. Read the Song of Songs and blush. It also serves as a metaphor for divine relations with Israel or with humans.


a, b and c. [...]

 
 
Oh, and by the way, have you noticed that Booklist Online's latest list of the ten best science-fiction and fantasy books of the year and, oh, my goodness, Number One on the list is All the Lives He Led by You Know Who. (Number Two is old friend Larry Niven's The Best of Larry [...]