Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 30

Now let's talk a little bit about the justice system. Start with the traditional opening call: "All rise! His Honor's coming in!" That's Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella we're talking about, and unless his attorneys succeed in an unlikely appeal, what he's coming into will be jail.
As a juvenile court [...]

Now let's talk a little bit about the justice system. Start with the traditional opening call: "All rise! His Honor's coming in!" That's Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella we're talking about, and unless his attorneys succeed in an unlikely appeal, what he's coming into will be jail.
As a juvenile court [...]

A new book worth a look

Back in 1935, The Boeing Company was proudly getting ready to show off its brand-new four engine bomber, not yet named either B-17 or Flying Fortress. It had a few problems. Little ones like the fact that its control surfaces, rudders and elevators, were of a size and [...]

Remember those good old science-fiction stories, those scientifically impeccably accurate ones that pointed out that. as the human brain has been getting bigger and bigger ever since Lucy. it must be going to keep on getting bigger still? So those great Frank R. Paul-ish illustrations showed the man of the future with a torso [...]

Robert Silverberg has been a good friend for a pile of years, but "good friend" doesn't quite describe some of the more disconcerting parts of our friendship.
Along about the early 1960s, while I was just getting comfortable as the new editor of Galaxy and its companions, Bob Silverberg was sending me almost a story a [...]

Although Robert Silverberg was born (in Brooklyn, home of literary giants) in 1935, his first novel, a juvenile entitled Revolt on Alpha C, was not published until 1955. Asked to explain this prolonged period with no new book appearing, Silverberg is quick to respond. "What do you think, I'm some kind of freak [...]

 

"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal."
—Emma Goldman

 

 


 
If you've read a lot of my work you know that I do sometimes try to keep up with the latest Big Thinks in cosmology — starting, as a matter of policy, writing about the steady-state universe with Jack Williamson way back when. That novel was The Reefs of Space, and Jack used the [...]

The idea started with Chinese rice farmers long ago They had learned that rice grew best when they flooded the fields, then drained them to harvest the crop at the end of the season. That was good farming, but why waste all that water that was doing nothing for all those months? [...]

Just before World War II, I lived in an apartment in the giant (at the time) development called Knickerbocker Village, on Monroe Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, close to the foot of Manhattan island. KV was only a few blocks from New York's expanding Chinatown and I, usually along with some [...]