{"id":1074,"date":"2013-09-03T08:26:11","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T12:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2023-08-03T11:52:57","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T15:52:57","slug":"frederik-pohl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/2013\/09\/03\/frederik-pohl\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond that Blue Event Horizon: Frederik Pohl 1919-2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gateway<\/a>It was with some sadness that I learned this morning of Frederik Pohl’s passing, on his own blog of all places<\/a>. He was a giant in science fiction, writing prolifically in many forms.<\/p>\n

For me, his seminal accomplishment will always be Gateway<\/a><\/em>, with its mysterious spacecraft pre-programmed on journeys to fortune or, more often, doom, and the men and women who risked all to take their chances with them. When I first read it in 1984, my science fiction diet to then had been space operas and little else; now, suddenly, there is deep characterization, a bit of suspense, and a robotic psychiatrist.<\/p>\n

I still try to read Gateway<\/em> once every few years, preferably in the mass-market paperback version I had as a kid. Some books just don’t work in hardback or trade paperback for some reason.<\/p>\n

And Pohl wasn’t just a significant writer. His contributions to science fiction, from its relative infancy mid-century to the present, extended into publishing as well. Jo Walton over on Tor.com points out<\/a> his importance as an editor:<\/p>\n

But Pohl was also a truly great editor—he edited Galaxy<\/em> and If<\/em> for more than a decade in the sixties. He also edited for Bantam, and bought and published Samuel R. Delany\u2019s Dhalgren<\/em> and Joanna Russ\u2019s The Female Man<\/em> (both 1975). He was one of the most imaginative editors the genre has ever seen, always prepared to buy things in new styles and move ahead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s tempting to view his passing as him taking a trip on his own Heechee spacecraft into the unknown, but I get the sense he was too much of a curmudgeon to have appreciated that view, so I’ll just bid a fond farewell and dig up my tattered copy of Gateway<\/em> instead. That, I think, he would appreciate.<\/p>\n

(Image via The Way the Future Blogs<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was with some sadness that I learned this morning of Frederik Pohl’s passing, on his own blog of all places. He was a giant in science fiction, writing prolifically in many forms. For me, his seminal accomplishment will always be Gateway, with its mysterious spacecraft pre-programmed on journeys to fortune or, more often, doom, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,17],"tags":[196],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-science-fiction","tag-pohl"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pedXm-hk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6043,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions\/6043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}