Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 35

Jack Robins (or sometimes Jack Rubinson) was a well-liked Futurian from the very beginning. He took little part in the Futurian writing attempts and was never known to write a science-fiction story.
Indeed, most of us considered him as "the smiling guy in the background."
But then, one day, he brought [...]

 
"Happiness is a good thing; it's just not the only thing."
—Elizabeth Kolbert

Do you remember the name Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani? Probably not. I didn't remember it myself until, just now, I had to look it up so I could write this. But she was pretty famous all around the world a few months ago, after a court in Iran convicted her of adultery, and [...]

A Christmas Story, sort of
To begin with, that's "Prince Mtskheta," all right. Mtskheta is a place in what was the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic at that time, and is now the independent, as long as they can keep it that way, nation of Georgia. The spelling is right. I can't guarantee the [...]

I came across this poem somewhere when I was about 17 or 18 and still a YCLer, with every hope that most of the brutal and inexcusable things about the Soviet Union that I was reading every day in the New York Post or Times were just typical untrue capitalist press slanders — of which, [...]

The fall term of the year 1934: For all of us Techies, it was a watershed event in at least two ways.
First there was the sybaritic opulence of our new home. Everything was so clean! Not only that, the rooms smelled better. In every washroom, the toilets worked whenever you [...]

In New York City, the school year, up through the end of high school, came in two parts, fall term and spring term. I had entered Brooklyn Tech in September 1932 — fall term — which would end in February 1933. By then, rumor whispered, we might move over to the new building. [...]

By Frederik Pohl ('09)
In the spring of 1932, when I was 12 years old, my homeroom teacher explained to us that as we were going to start high school as soon as we came back from summer vacation, we needed to choose the high school we wanted to attend. I took the list home [...]

In the 1970s, both Judy and I had become active in Canadian television, Judy as the person who handled Dr. Who for Ontario Television, me as a sort of all-purpose guest correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Company's coverage of the American space doings, ending with the CBC's coverage of the rendezvous in orbit of the [...]

 
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one."
—Charles Mackay