Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 39

As those of you who have been paying attention know, a man named Mark Rich wrote a libelous book, in principal about my old-time collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth, but in fact filled with denunciatory — rumors, suppositions, bad guesses and occasional outright falsehoods — material about me. Why this Mark Rich person hated me, [...]

The continued life and loves of Isaac Asimov
There was one woman whom Isaac met in that period when his marriage to Gertrudewas crumbling but had not yet got to the stage of a divorce who became both large and permanent in Isaac's life. She was a New York psychiatrist named Janet Jeppson, who now [...]

Just a reminder that our giveaway program for that great new anthology, Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, ends on Monday. So, if you haven't entered so far, get your entry in fast!
To enter the drawing, e-mail blog @ thewaythefutureblogs.com with your name and snail-mail address.
The winning names will be pulled out of a hat [...]

 

 
The Naming of Names
If what you're writing is science fiction and the character you need a name for has three heads and seventeen eyes and lives on the ninth planet of Aldebaran, what writing secrets I am about to pass on to you won't help you much. (Except that I will urge you to [...]

Our continued reminiscences of Isaac Asimov, and we must be getting somewhere near the end by now, mustn't we?

 
""Poetry lies its way to the truth."
—John Ciardi


 
 
* This is the feature I used to call "Bright Sayings of Geniuses." I had to change the title because some of the lines I want to run were said by people who almost certainly were not likely to score 140 or more on an IQ test, [...]

I've been reading a book I wholly and totally despise about a person I loved a lot. The person is Cyril Kornbluth, with whom I shared so much of my early writing life, and of his. The book is succinctly called C.M. Kornbluth, and it is by a man named Mark Rich, who [...]

We're happy to be able to tell you that we love all of you, not just the ones who live in the U. S. of A., but also all of you who happen to live in some place whose current capital is not Washington D.C. as well. To show that we mean it, we're [...]

VOTE!
When you just can't make up your mind between two candidates who are equally good, or equally rotten, follow these simple steps:

Keep an eye on your TV.
Count how many commercials each candidate has.
Identify which candidate has more,
Vote for the other guy.

The point is that those commercials cost big money. The way the politician pays [...]

Robert A. Heinlein:
In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1,
Learning Curve, 1907–1948
By William H. Patterson
(Tor, Hardcover, $29.99).
When I read a biography of someone I've known well, there are two things I look for on first inspection. The first is errors of fact, and I'm glad to say that Patterson's detailed and well researched study seems [...]