Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 41

To say that I'm pleased to have won this Hugo doesn't really cover the subject, because I'm not just pleased, I'm tickled pink. So I want to thank everybody who voted in this year's event, whoever they voted for; to thank as well all the nice people, beloved friends as well as total strangers, [...:]

From the blog team:
Fred wins!
2010 Hugo Award Winners
Best Fan Artist
Brad W. Foster
Best Fanzine
StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith
Best Fan Writer
Frederik Pohl
Best Semiprozine
Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace and Cheryl Morgan
Best Professional Artist
Shaun Tan
Best Editor, Short Form
Ellen Datlow
Best Editor, Long Form
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Doctor Who: "The Waters of Mars,"
written by Russell T. [...:]

I wrote this more than 20 years ago, for David Hartwell's critical review zine The New York Review of Science Fiction. I looked it up in connection with a new novel I have begun, tentatively, but almost certainly not permanently, entitled Sweet Home, and thought it might be worth reprinting.
 
 
Most of us would argue that [...:]

 

 
This first paragraph is only for people who have seen the L. Ron Hubbard movie Battlefield Earth. If you haven't ever seen it, count your blessings and do your best to keep it that way for the rest of your life, because it is truly awful.
But if you ever have, we want to [...:]

Part 2 of my memories of Gene Roddenberry
When the studio announced that Star Trek had been canceled after its second year, I took the news philosophically. I had more or less stopped watching it, and Gene Roddenberry had already taken me to previews of a couple of other science-fiction shows he was developing. [...:]

The Man Who Launched the Enterprise
I was pretty satisfied with Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland in 1966. When it was over, I had had a chance to hang with many old friends, I had had a few talks with writers I wanted to juice up for the magazines I was editing, Galaxy and If, and [...:]

Italian scientists probably weren't surprised when they saw in the bookstores a new work entitled Evolutionism: the Decline of a Hypothesis. Italy does have a fairly substantial Creationist movement, and the statements the book made were pretty close to Creationist doctrine: Dinosaurs didn't go extinct until 40,000 years ago, what scientists take to be [...:]

The first "Worldcon" wasn't quite as globally representative as one might have wished; I don't know that any of the attendees came from any country but the U.S.A and, maybe, Canada. But it was the last chance we had for a real international gathering, because that year of 1939 was the beginning of [...:]

I did by chance run into Jack Williamson, briefly, at the first-ever Worldcon in 1939, which was in the same summer as New York's first World's Fair — and which Donald Wollheim had proposed we New York fans should use as the opportunity to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in the hope that it [...:]

My dear friend Jack Williamson, who died a few years ago, was ten or eleven years older than I, and I didn't actually meet him — in the flesh, that is, though I certainly knew and revered him through his wonderful stories — until he was an elderly 30 and I was 19, [...:]