Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl at the 2008 UCR J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Conference
Born November 26, 1919 (1919-11-26) (age 89)
Pen name Cyril Judd, Edson McCann, Jordan Park, Elton V. Andrews, Paul Fleur, Lee Gregor, Warren F. Howard, Scott Mariner, Ernst Mason, James McCreigh, Dirk Wilson, Donald Stacy, James MacCreigh
Occupation Novelist, short story author, essayist, publisher, editor, literary agent
Nationality American
Genres Science fiction
Official website

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (born November 26, 1919) is an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine if, winning the Hugo for if three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

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[edit] Early life and family

Pohl is the son of Frederik George Pohl (a salesman) and Anna Jane Pohl. Pohl Sr. held a number of jobs, and the Pohls lived in such wide-flung locations as Texas, California, New Mexico and the Panama Canal Zone. The family settled in Brooklyn when Pohl was around seven. He attended the prestigious Brooklyn Tech high school, but due to the Great Depression, Pohl dropped out of school at the age of 14 to work.

While still a teenager, he co-founded the New York-based Futurians fan group, and began lifelong friendships with Donald Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, and others who would go on to become important writers and editors.

In 1936, Pohl joined the Young Communist League, an organization in favor of trade unions and against racial prejudice and Hitler and Mussolini. He became president of the local Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. Pohl has said that after the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939, the party line changed and he could no longer support it, at which point he left.

Pohl has been married five times. His first wife, Leslie Perri, was another Futurian; they were married in August 1940 but divorced in 1944. He then married Dorothy LesTina in Paris in August 1945 while both were serving in Europe; the marriage ended in 1947. In 1948, he married Judith Merril; they divorced in 1952. From 1953–1983 he was married to Carol M. Ulf Stanton, with whom he collaborated on several books. Since 1984, he has been married to science fiction expert and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD.

He fathered five children: Ann (m. Walter Weary), Karen (m. Robert Dixon), Frederik III (deceased), Frederik IV and Kathy. [1] Grandchildren include writer Emily Pohl-Weary.

Since 1984, he has lived in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was previously a resident of Red Bank, New Jersey.

[edit] Career

Pohl's writing career began in the late 1930s. For the first fifteen years of his writing career, he used pseudonyms: Pohl's first published piece was a poem in the October, 1937 issue of Amazing Stories credited to "Elton Andrews."

From 1939 to 1943, Pohl was the editor of two pulp magazines - Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories.[2] Stories by Pohl often appeared in these magazines, but never under his own name. Work written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth was credited to S.D. Gottesman or Scott Mariner; other collaborative work (with any combination of Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie or Robert A.W. Lownes) was credited to Paul Dennis Lavond. For Pohl's solo work, stories were credited to James MacCreigh (or, for one story only, Warren F. Howard.)

In his own autobiography, Pohl says that he stopped editing the two magazines at roughly the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Regardless, works by "Gottesman", "Lavond" and "MacCreigh" continued to appear in various SF pulp magazines throughout the 1940s.

During World War II, Pohl served in the U.S. Army from April 1943 until November 1945, rising to sergeant as an air corps weatherman. After training in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Colorado, he primarily was stationed in Italy.

Pohl started his career as a literary agent in 1937, but it was a sideline for him until after WWII, when he began doing it full time. He ended up "representing more than half the successful writers in science fiction"--for a short time, he was the only agent Isaac Asimov ever had--though, in the end it was a failure for him as his agenting business went bankrupt in the early 1950s.

Pohl began publishing material under his own name in the early 1950s. He collaborated with friend and fellow Futurian Cyril 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 (a belated sequel, The Merchants' War [1984] was written by Pohl alone, after Kornbluth's death). This should not to be confused with Pohl's The Merchants of Venus, an unconnected 1972 novella which includes biting satire on runaway free market capitalism and first introduced the Heechee.

Though the pen-names of "Gottesman", "Lavond" and "MacCreigh" were retired by the early 1950s, Pohl still occasionally used pseudonyms even after he began to publish work under his real name. These occasional pseudonyms, all of which date from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, included Charles Satterfield, Paul Flehr, Ernst Mason, Jordan Park (two collaborative novels with Kornbluth) and Edson McCann (one collaborative novel with Lester del Rey).

From the late 1950s until 1969, Pohl served as editor of Galaxy and if magazines, taking over at some point from the ailing H. L. Gold. Under his leadership, if won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine for 1966, 1967 and 1968.[3] Judy-Lynn del Rey was his assistant editor at Galaxy and if.

In the mid-1970s, Pohl 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. Also in the 1970s, Pohl reemerged as a novel writer in his own right, with books such as Man Plus and the Heechee series. He won back-to-back Nebula awards with Man Plus in 1976 and Gateway, the first Heechee novel, in 1977. Gateway also won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Two of his stories have also earned him Hugo awards: "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth) tied in 1973 and "Fermi and Frost" won in 1986. Another notable late novel is Jem (1980), winner of the National Book Award. Pohl continues to write and had a new story, "Generations", published in September 2005. A novel begun by Arthur C. Clarke called "The Last Theorem" was finished by Pohl and published on August 5, 2008.

His works include not only science fiction but also articles for Playboy and Family Circle. For a time, he was the official authority for the Encyclopædia Britannica on the subject of Emperor Tiberius. (He wrote a book on the subject of Tiberius, as "Ernst Mason".)

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 Corners", where flashy, over-complex military hardware proved useless against farmers with shotguns, and "The Tunnel Under the World", where an entire community is held captive by advertising researchers.

He was a frequent guest on Long John Nebel's radio show, from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

He was the eighth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1974.

He is a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.

Pohl has been announced as the recipient of the second Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the University of California, Riverside.[4]

[edit] Works

[edit] Series

[edit] Undersea Trilogy (with Jack Williamson)

  1. Undersea Quest (1954)
  2. Undersea Fleet (1956)
  3. Undersea City (1958)

[edit] Heechee

  1. Gateway (1977) (winner of the Hugo Award and Nebula Award)
  2. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
  3. Heechee Rendezvous (1984)
  4. Annals of the Heechee (1987)
  5. The Gateway Trip (1990)
  6. The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)

[edit] Eschaton trilogy

  1. The Other End of Time (1996)
  2. The Siege of Eternity (1997)
  3. The Far Shore of Time (1999)

[edit] Mars

[edit] Saga of Cuckoo (with Jack Williamson)

  1. Farthest Star (1975)
  2. Wall Around A Star (1983)

[edit] Starchild Trilogy (with Jack Williamson)

  1. The Reefs of Space (1964)
  2. Starchild (1965)
  3. Rogue Star (1969)

[edit] Space Merchants

  1. The Space Merchants (1953) (with Cyril M. Kornbluth)
  2. The Merchants' War (1984) (published together with The Space Merchants under the title VENUS, INC.)

[edit] Other novels (not part of a series)

[edit] Collections

[edit] Autobiography

  • The Way the Future Was (1978)

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Tiberius (1960) (writing as Ernst Mason)
  • Practical Politics 1972 (1971)
  • Science Fiction Studies in Film (1981) (with Frederik Pohl IV)
  • Our Angry Earth (1991) (with Isaac Asimov)
  • Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport (2000)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009. Document Number: H1000078817
  2. ^ "Frederik Pohl: Chasing Science". Locus Online. October 2000. http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/10/Pohl.html. 
  3. ^ "The Hugo Awards by Category". worldcon. http://www.worldcon.org/hc.html#pm. 
  4. ^ The 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference Press Release, University of California, Riverside, September, 19, 2008.

[edit] External links


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