Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 5

In 2011, Fred revised The Space Merchants, his classic collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth. The most notable changes in the 21st Century Edition were the replacement of defunct brand names with more contemporary ones, and a few tweaks to make the science more accurate. Not everybody was pleased with the update, but since earlier editions had […]

The History of Engiish in 10 Minutes by the Open University By Elizabeth Anne Hull I love the English language, one of the truly great ones in the world. It’s not spoken by as many people as Mandarin Chinese or Spanish, but more students worldwide are learning English as a foreign language than any other […]

See, the liberating thought that came to me one night was, “Hey, Fred! All those people you and Cyril had so much pleasure making fun of, they’re still around — only worse than ever — and they still need to have somebody point out how contemptible their aspirations are and how wretched they would make […]

By Elizabeth Anne Hull Consider the substantial reality of an abstraction like love. We see the sacrifices people make for one another every day in the name of love as evidence of love’s existence. But what we mean by love varies a lot by context. We all know that loving pizza and loving power are […]

One by one, I showed the tearsheets of Gravy Planet, to every publisher in America who had ever published a science-fiction book or given any sign that some day he might. One by one, they turned it down cold. These publishers, remember, were firms to whom I had been regularly selling scores of science-fiction books, […]

  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”                   —Dwight D. Eisenhower    

By Elizabeth Anne Hull Two headlines in recent news seem at odds: 1) Eating nuts tied to lower risk of death, and 2) Doctors see increase in those allergic to sesame seeds. The first story touted not only “true” nuts like pistachios, almonds and walnuts, but also said the results of a 30-year study analyzed […]

Cyril Kornbluth and I had collaborated on a few not very good (but sold and published anyway) stories before the war changed everything. He wasn’t doing a lot of writing now, because he had determined to go straight with his life, by which he meant get a college education. Accordingly, he had moved to Chicago […]

By Elizabeth Anne Hull Today I’m thinking about names. Fred’s was one he generally enjoyed, uncommon enough to be distinctive but not so rare as to be a unique identifier. He was no Beyonce or Liberace or Oprah. Though a lifelong anglophile, Fred liked the spelling of his name — the way the Danish kings […]

Over the next few years I gave most of my thinking time to other matters. I finally could not make myself stay on at a 9-to-5 job in advertising, so in spite of pleas to stay and the offers of still more money, I left my good friends in advertising and took over the management […]