R.I.P. Frederik Pohl

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Pohl, the last of the golden age science fiction writers, who as author wrote award-winning science fiction and as editors launched talent like Isaac ASimov and Larry Niven, is dead of respiratory failure at 93. Story.
 
Matthew said:
I'm finishing a couple of Niven/Pournelle books right now.
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Good, then try the ones written by Niven alone and note how much better it is without the collaboration. As for Pohl, the Gateway series (Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, etc...) are good reads.

My reaction, is GOSH was he still alive. He wrote the above mentioned books 35 years ago and he wasn't exactly a young man then. I've not been to a SF con probably since that era.
 
flyingron said:
My reaction, is GOSH was he still alive. He wrote the above mentioned books 35 years ago and he wasn't exactly a young man then. I've not been to a SF con probably since that era.
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I think his last book came out about 2 years ago. Dude definitely survived into his geezerhood.
 
flyingron said:
My reaction, is GOSH was he still alive.
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Same here!

BTW, I'm going to disagree with you about the Niven / Pournelle collabs. Neither is as good alone as they were together. "The Mote in God's Eye" will forever be definitive (and Heinlein wrote a few pieces of that, too).

Larry is perhaps the best alien designer ever to come along, but he's not as strong on hardware or conflict. Jerry is good with strategy, tactics and with stuff that has edges, points, detonators or propulsion, but anthropocentric. The two of them together play off of each other, Larry thinks up the aliens and Jerry figures out what their technology would be, then how they would use it.
 
Spent a week with Pohl at the National College of Education where he was teaching, and I was taking, a class on Science Fiction int he classroom. He had more or less retired, he thought he was in poor health. But he got a temporary job at the race track (he collected the horse urine sample) where he had to take a medical examine for the insurance.

The doctor pronounced him in good health, so he started writing again.

Isaac Asimov's autobiography In Memory Yet Green makes it clear that Pohl helped him a lot in his career. Pohl acted as his agent (they were both very young -- 18 to 21 or something like that -- and Pohl managed to sell some of Asimov's stories, which kept Asimov writing.

He also helped other writers a lot in his early days acting as their agent, so I think his influence on science fiction was as great as the Big Three -- Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. And, of course, his Gateway series is first rate.

Gonna miss him -- and the Big Three, and Bradbury, A. E. van Vogt, and all the others of First Fandom. Is anyone left? RIP all.
 
SoloEqs said:
Same here!

BTW, I'm going to disagree with you about the Niven / Pournelle collabs. Neither is as good alone as they were together. "The Mote in God's Eye" will forever be definitive (and Heinlein wrote a few pieces of that, too).

Larry is perhaps the best alien designer ever to come along, but he's not as strong on hardware or conflict. Jerry is good with strategy, tactics and with stuff that has edges, points, detonators or propulsion, but anthropocentric. The two of them together play off of each other, Larry thinks up the aliens and Jerry figures out what their technology would be, then how they would use it.
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Just finished "Mote" and am about to finish the sequel, "The Gripping Hand". This will be the 2nd or 3rd time around for me.

"Lucifer's Hammer" is another good read by that pair.
 
Fred Pohl was an amazing author and I'll always remember the Gateway series. When I was a boy my mother commissioned an artist to rerender the cover of the first book. It still gives me chills.
 
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