Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 29

The thing to remember about those pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s is that, with a few exceptions, the stories behind the lurid covers didn't have to be any good. Not in any literary sense, at least — the average story in a pulp magazine was about as mindless as daytime television, if [...]

 
What a Major Pulp House Was Like in 1939
Harry Steeger didn't take me into his confidence about his reasons for adding fifteen or twenty new half-cent-a-word titles to his existing string of twenty or thirty penny-a-word pulps, but I can see what he might have been thinking. At a penny a word, the average [...]

In the late 1930s, I was a teenage science-fiction fan and would-be writer. I had come to know a number of editors of the existing science-fiction pulps by reinventing myself as a literary agent and visiting them at their offices, offering them the latest stories written by some of my fan friends. The [...]

Back in Chengdu, after Yang Xiao had finished writing up that story about World SF for her magazine, her next major production was to give birth to a son. She did that very well, too.
Now Zhou Qi — or Michael, as his language-handicapped friends are allowed to call him — is twenty [...]

From time to time, Robert Silverberg has told the world that he had written himself out and was retiring from the field. Fortunately for the rest of us, these periods of abstinence from the computer were so depressing to his irrepressibly auctorial psyche that he fled back to the keyboard before long each time. [...]

 
"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."
—Winston Churchill


 

So long, old friend.
Twenty-some years ago a few writers and editors from assorted parts of the world — Harry Harrison from Ireland, Brian Aldiss from England, Sam Lundwall from Sweden and your servant from the U.S.A. — got together to form the organization World SF. Its primary purpose was to constitute a formally existing [...]

 
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Michael Walsh, a reader whose aunt lived in Long Branch, New Jersey, has heard that Cyril Kornbluth did at one time, too, and would like to know exactly where.
I'm afraid I don't know the street address any more — this was back in the '50s — but it was within a [...]

How many of you have read that excellent novel, Gateway? And, pray tell, how many of you remember the novel's most important character? No, I'm not talking about Robinette Broadhead, though it's true that he gets more space then the other guy. I'm talking about the wise, kindly and super-smart computer who goes [...]

How many of you have read that excellent novel, Gateway? And, pray tell, how many of you remember the novel's most important character? No, I'm not talking about Robinette Broadhead, though it's true that he gets more space then the other guy. I'm talking about the wise, kindly and super-smart computer who goes [...]