Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 32

Part 2 of "Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation," recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.


Bester: It's kind of peculiar, we are finally accepted — the Johnny-come-latelys are now talking about "sci-fi," which is an abbreviation which I loathe. But what makes me very curious is what [...]

 
As I mentioned in the short piece I wrote about Alfie Bester, he and I had a joint talk for a bunch of English fans thirty-odd years or so ago. To my total amazement, some of them recently came up with a tape of that discussion. They transcribed it, and I thought some [...]

From the blog team:
Fred's been a little busy lately starting another book, so we're taking it on ourselves to give you some of his publishing news. St. Joseph's Day seems an appropriate day to tell you about Fred's new novel, set in Italy. All the Lives He Led is due out April 12 from Tor. [...]

Husband-wife editing and publishing teams are not common in the real world of books. In fact, I only know of three, and, interestingly, all three made their biggest successes in the field of science fiction. Lester and Judy Lynn Del Rey were the first publishers to break sf and fantasy titles into [...]

 
"Man is a small thing, and the night is large and full of wonder."
—Lord Dunsany(quoted by Martin Gardner)

The Demolished Man was worth all of Horace Gold's editorial aggravations. The Demolished Man was fresh, adventurous and beautifully written, and it began a stretch of five years or so during which Alfred Bester was turning out what was arguably some of the best writing in the sf field, right up to [...]

When the Air Force decided they wouldn't need my services in order to accomplish the defeat of Japan — the reason for that being that Japan, discouraged by the simultaneous American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Stalin's last-minute invasion of their northern front, had finally given its struggle in World War II and surrendered — [...]

 
Want some seafood, Mama.
Oh, won't you give it to me?
'Cause I'm as happy as can be
When the seafood comes to me. . . . *
 
A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. [...]

Hal Clement was a nearly ideal client Almost everything he wrote was a sure sale.
The only real problem was that Hal (whose real name was Harry C. Stubbs) found it almost impossible to say no to a publishing-minded friend. He had written a really good novel called Mission of Gravity, but [...]

When I first began reading Hal Clement stories in Astounding, I was struck by this new writer's affection for cloud types and air masses. Had to be a weatherman, I assured myself. Nobody else could, or would bother to, get all that meteorological talk down so well.
When I learned that Clement [...]