Profile of Frederick Pohl on Famous Like Me

This article is about the writer and editor. For the historian, see Frederick J. Pohl.

Frederik Pohl (November 26, 1919—) is an American science fiction writer and editor. In early adulthood, he lived in New York and was a member of the Futurians fan group.

When he was a teenager, Pohl attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, forming a lifelong friendship with fellow writer Isaac Asimov. But, this was during the Great Depression, and Pohl had to drop out of school when he was fourteen, in order to get a job.

Pohl joined the Communist Party as a teenager. But he was expelled from the Communist Party because more senior members of the Communist Party thought that his science fiction fandom risked corrupting youth.

Pohl has married several times. One of his wives was Judith Merril, also an important figure in the world of science fiction. Pohl and Merril had some children.

He was a friend and collaborator with C.M. Kornbluth, co-authoring a number of short stories and several novels, including a dystopian satire of a world ruled by the advertising agencies, The Space Merchants. In addition to The Space Merchants (a.k.a., perhaps more wittily, The Merchants of Venus), a number of his short stories were notable for a satirical look at consumerism and advertising in the 1950s and 1960s: The Wizard of Pung's Corner, where flashy, overcomplex military hardware prove useless against farmers with shotguns, and The Tunnel Under the World, where an entire community is held captive by advertising researchers (this one-line summary omits several plot twists).

In the 1970s, Pohl made a comeback as a writer with novels like Man Plus and the Heechee series. He won back-to-back Nebula awards with Man Plus in 1976 and Gateway, the first novel in the Heechee series, in 1977. Gateway also won the 1978 novel Hugo Award. Another notable late novel of his is Jem (1980).

From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine If, winning the Hugo for If three years running. In the mid-1970s, he acquired and edited novels for Bantam Books, published as "Frederik Pohl Selections"; the most notable were Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Joanna Russ's The Female Man.

Books

• The Early Pohl (1976) (fiction from 1937-1944) Contents:
  • 'Elegy for a Dead Planet: Luna,' 1937, (writing as Elton Andrews) [a poem, his first published piece]
  • 'The Dweller in the Ice,' (c) 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'The King's Eye,' (c) 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'It's a Young World,' (c) 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'Daughters of Eternity,' (c) 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'Earth, Farewell!,' (c) 1940, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'Conspiracy on Callisto,' (c) 1943, (writing as James MacCreigh)
  • 'Highwayman of the Void,' (c) 1943, (writing under Dirk Wylie's name)
  • 'Double-Cross,' (c) 1943, (writing as James MacCreigh)
• Collaborations with Cyril M. Kornbluth:
  • The Space Merchants (1953)
  • Search the Sky (1954)
  • Gladiator at Law (1955)
  • Wolfbane (1957)
• The Starchild series: (with Jack Williamson)
  • The Reefs of Space (1964)
  • Starchild (1965)
  • Rogue Star (1969)
• The Frederik Pohl Omnibus (1966) (short stories)
• Day Million (1971) (short stories)
• The Wonder Effect (1974) (short stories) with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
• Survival Kit (1979) (short stories)
• The Man Who Ate the World (1979) (short stories)
• The Starchild Trilogy (omnibus) (1980)
• The Cool War (1981)
• Starburst (1982)
• Man Plus (1975) (Winner of Nebula award)
• The Years of the City (1984)
• The Merchants War (1985), a sequel to The Space Merchants
• Slave Ship
• Drunkard's Walk
• The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965)
• Jem (novel) (1980)
• The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986)
• Chernobyl (novel) (1987)
• Narabedla Inc. (1988)
• Homegoing (1989)
• The world at the end of time (1990)
• O Pioneer! (1998)
• The Heechee series:
  • Gateway (1976) (winner of the Hugo award and Nebula award)
  • Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
  • Heechee rendezvous (1985)
  • Annals of the Heechee (1987)
  • The Gateway Trip (1990)
  • The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)
• The Eschaton series:
  • The Other End of Time (1996)
  • The Siege of Eternity (1997)
  • The Far Shore of Time (1999)

He has published an autobiography, The Way the Future Was (1978).

Frederik Pohl has won four Hugo Awards. His works include not only science fiction but articles for Playboy and Family Circle. He has also written several non-fiction books, the most recent of which is Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport (2000).

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