James Nicoll Reviews

Frederik Pohl’s 1990 The World at the End of Time is a stand-alone deep-time science fiction novel.

Humanities’ plan to reach and colonize the habitable exoplanet Enki, or as the colonists insist on calling it, Newmanhome, was very nearly perfect. The only oversight was an unavoidable one: humans had no idea that nigh-godlike Wan-To existed.

Having created copies of itself for company, Wan-To has buyer’s remorse.

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1976’s Man Plus is the first volume in Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus near-future science fiction series.

Astronaut Roger Torraway is just one member of the Man Plus program, which is tasked with establishing a colony on Mars. Since Mars is uninhabitable and transforming Mars is out of the question, Roger’s team has been ordered to transform a human into something that can survive on Mars.

A lot is riding on the project. A successful Mars colony might reverse the US’ declining fortunes. It might also save civilization.

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Frederick Pohl’s 1981 The Cool War is a near-future stand-alone science fiction fix-up.

Many Americans chafe at the endless energy shortages, rampant crime, spiralling bigotry, and endless crises they must endure. But thirty-nine-year-old Reverend H. Hornswell ​“Horny¹” Hake is content with his lot in life, as a Unitarian minister. Of course, Horny’s earlier life has given him a perspective that casts his current life in a very favourable light: orphaned by war as a child, he has until recently been forced by a now-cured life-threatening medical condition to use a wheelchair.

Horny’s tragic background fits the Team’s narrow criteria for an upcoming project. Unfortunately for Horny, the Team does not take no for an answer.

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Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl’s 1980 Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction is a retrospective anthology honoring Galaxy Magazine. But that’s not all it is.

As you know,

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Frederik Pohl’s 1978 The Way The Future Was is an autobiography. Because of Pohl’s diverse roles in the science fiction field, Future is also a good introduction to the history of American¹ science fiction from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

Back when I was a teen, I knew who Pohl was. He was the unimaginably old writer who, before I was born, had written a lot of SF that I enjoyed (in reprint), who had somehow overcome the inevitable cognitive erosion imposed by advanced age to write some of the best SF of the modern era… which is to say the 1970s.

In 1978 he was about five years younger than I am just now.

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Frederik Pohl’s 1972 The Gold at the Starbow’s End is a collection of short science fiction stories.

Several are cautionary tales, that being one of Pohl’s fortes. At least one is a cautionary tale for hard-SF authors.

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Carol Pohl and Frederik Pohl’s 1976 Science Fiction Discoveries is the fourth and final anthology the Pohls edited together¹; their editorial collaboration did not survive their 1977 separation and 1983 divorce. It is an anthology of original science fiction. Rather like Orbit, you say? In a way, except there was just the one Science Fiction Discovery anthology. 

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Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1953 The Space Merchants is a near-future SF satire. It was followed by The Merchant’s War, written by Pohl alone. 

Earth is a utopia. Population continues to soar and with it the economy explodes unchecked. True, supporting such a vast economic enterprise demands bold solutions to the challenge of dwindling resources, but only the worst sort of Consie—the Conservationists, lowest of the low — would object. Nation-states are guided by what best serves the corporations who effectively own the governments. At the top of this most perfect society sit the advertising experts who shape opinion. 

Mitch Courtenay, a Fowler Schocken Associates advertising agency star-class copywriter, is one of the elite. He has his own lavish two-bedroom apartment, can afford unreconstituted food, and enjoys the confidence of Fowler Schocken himself. He is, in other words, a man on his way up.

There are one or two tiny flaws in his idyllic life.

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1954’s Search the Sky is a standalone(ish) science fiction novel. It was the second novel-length collaboration between Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth,.

Ross has lived his whole life on Halsey’s Planet. Somehow he senses what his fellows cannot or will not: population levels are slowly, inexorably declining. The future will be grim. 

Halsey’s Planet is just one of many worlds settled by humans. Contact with its sister worlds is intermittent, carried out by sublight longliners, smaller versions of the ships that delivered the original colonists to Halsey’s Planet fourteen centuries earlier. 

A longliner arrives with an inbred crew of happy idiots bearing an enigmatic message and doleful news about the other human worlds. Another Halsey merchant, Haarland, asks Ross to come meet with him. This is odd, as Ross works for a rival firm. It turns out that Haarland has some bad news to share. 

Spoilers.… 

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Frederik Pohl’s 1985 Black Star Rising is a standalone science fiction novel. 

The world is divided into two spheres, one dominated by India, one by China, These two powers were the only slightly damaged by an apocalyptic nuclear war that ravaged the United States and the Soviet Union. North America falls under China’s benevolent umbrella. Its aboriginal population is monitored by Chinese supervisors. 

Castor is an Anglo farmer with pretensions above his class. Denied entry into university, he is an autodidact, hoovering up knowledge of no relevance to his duties to the Heavenly Grain Rice Collective. Elevation from this humble but necessary role comes courtesy of two unrelated events: a brutal murder and what seems to be a First Contact event. 

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