Frederick Pohl

Frederik Pohl (New York, November 26, 1919 - Palatine, Illinois, September 2, 2013) was an American science fiction writer and editor. His career within the genre spanned more than 75 years and he encompassed all kinds of activities: writer, editor of books, magazines and collections, literary agent, critic, but above all he was recognized as a prominent fan and promoter of the Science fiction.

Outside this field, he also stood out as a lecturer and professor in the area of prospective. He was also an authority on Emperor Tiberius in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Biography

The son of a merchant, he spent his childhood living in places as diverse as Texas, California, New Mexico and the Panama Canal zone. When he was seven years old, his family finally settled in the Brooklyn borough of New York, where he attended Brooklyn Technical High School, but dropped out at age 17.

In 1936 his syndicalist, anti-racist and anti-fascist political ideas led him to join the Communist Youth, in which he came to preside over a local section, but in 1939 he left, disappointed by the Nazi-Soviet pact. During World War II Mundial served in the air force between 1943 and 1945, and was posted to Italy.

Pohl was married five times. His first marriage was to fellow Futurian Leslie Perri between 1940 and 1944. In 1948 he married, for the third time, fellow science fiction writer Judith Merril with whom he had a daughter, Ann. Pohl and Merril divorced in 1952. His fourth marriage to Carol M. Ulf Stanton (1953-1983) produced 3 children. From 1984 until his death, Pohl was married to science fiction expert Elizabeth Anne Hull. Canadian writer Emily Pohl-Weary is the granddaughter of Pohl and Merril.

In 1984 he moved his residence to Palatine, Illinois, near Chicago.

Career

From an early age he was a compulsive reader of popular literature, especially science fiction, and he wrote from the age of eleven in fanzines that he himself organized and distributed throughout New York. An active participant in the nascent fandom (group of followers), he became part of the Brooklyn Science Fiction League (BSFL), a local section of the & # 34;Science Fiction League & # 34; founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1934. In it he meets Donald A. Wollheim, John Michel and Robert A. W. Lowndes, and together the four go through successive science fiction clubs until in 1937 they found their own group, known as the Futurians (&# 34;Futurians"). The group acquired great prominence among the mass of fans, but the strong political ideology of many of its members led them to clash with other New York followers. This situation crystallized when Pohl and other Futurians were banned from the 1st Worldcon. Over time the group dissolved, but friendships and contacts remained, and a good number of its members ended up becoming important writers and editors in the genre. From that period also comes Pohl's friendship with Cyril M. Kornbluth, Isaac Asimov or Larry T. Shaw to give a few examples.

By the age of 19, Pohl was already editing two science fiction pulp magazines: Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He also wrote stories in these magazines, but always under pseudonyms.. Works written with Cyril M. Kornbluth appear under the names S. D. Gottesman or Scott Mariner; his other collaborations are signed as Paul Dennis Lavond and his solo work as James MacCreigh (and on one occasion as Warren F. Howard).In his autobiography, Pohl comments that he stopped editing both magazines around from 1941.

After World War II, Pohl began releasing material under his own name, much of it in collaboration with his friend Kornbluth. However, he continued to occasionally use pseudonyms such as Charles Satterfield, Paul Flehr, Ernst Mason, Jordan Park (two novels written with Kornbluth) and Edson McCann (one with Lester del Rey). The publication of his classic together with Kornbluth is from this period. Space merchants.

Her career as a literary agent dates back to 1937, but it wasn't until after World War II that it became a full-time job. He ended up "representing more than half of successful science fiction writers." For a short period of time he was Isaac Asimov's literary agent (in fact, the only one this author had). Despite all this, the financial results did not accompany his literary agency, and he had to close it in the early 1950s.

In the late 1950s, Pohl assisted an ailing H. L. Gold in managing the prestigious science fiction magazines Galaxy Science Fiction and If, Although it would not be until December 1961 when he officially took charge of them. Pohl revitalized both magazines and got the participation of the most prestigious writers of the moment during his period. The result of this work are the three Hugo awards for the best professional magazine that If received in 1966, 1967 and 1968. He was also in charge of directing the new magazine Worlds of Tomorrow from its first issue in 1963 until its merger with If in 1967. In 1969 he left the direction of both magazines.

In the 1970s Pohl re-emerges as a novel writer, this time on his own. Homo Plus won him the Nebula award in 1976, and Pórtico, the first volume in the Heeche saga, won both the 1977 Nebula and the the Hugos of 1978. On the other hand, Jem (1980) would win the prestigious National Book Award.

In the mid-1970s Pohl acquired and edited novels for Bantam Books, published under the banner "Frederik Pohl Picks"; Among them were Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Joanna Russ's The Female Man. He also edited a series of science fiction anthologies. In 1987 he published a novel titled Chernobyl where he recounts in a novel way the events that occurred in the accident at the nuclear power plant in said Ukrainian city.

In 1994 he received the Grandmaster Damon Knight Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1998 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Beginning in 1995, he served on the jury for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, initially alongside James Gunn and Judith Merril, and from then until his retirement in 2013 with several others. Pohl had been associated with James Gunn since the decade 1940s, at what would later become the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. In it he presented several talks and conferences and participated in the science fiction writing literary workshop.

Pohl received the second annual J. W. Eaton Award for Lifetime Work in Science Fiction from the University of California, Riverside Library at the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction: " Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne and Beyond" 2009. In 2010, he received a Hugo Award for Best Amateur Writer.

Pohl's latest novel, All the Lives He Led was published on April 12, 2011. He was preparing a second edition of his memoir The way the future was when he was surprised by death in 2013.

Outstanding works

His first masterpiece was the novel Space Merchants (1953), a satirical anti-utopia of a world ruled by advertising agencies written with his friend and regular collaborator C.M. kornbluth. Other outstanding novels are Homo Plus (1976), which narrates the efforts to colonize Mars by adapting the human body to the environment of that world, and the Saga of the Heechee, begun in 1977 with his novel Pórtico, which describes the remains of a vanished civilization whose communication routes and technologies are used clumsily without being understood by humans. He also stood out as a good writer of short stories, in which the satirical bias against consumerism and advertising is perceived. In another series of novels he collaborated with special assiduity with Jack Williamson. The later works, such as the Saga of the Heechee, stand out for their imagination and freshness.

Works

Series

Awards

• 1976 Nébula Award for Best News Homo Plus
• 1977 Nébula Award, Hugo 1978 and John W. Campbell Memorial 1978 to the best novel by Portico
• National Book Award for Jem
• John W. Campbell Memorial Prize 1985 by The years of the city

Additional bibliography

• Page, Michael R. (2015). Frederik Pohl. Modern Masters of Science Fiction (in English). University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-03965-2.