Frederik Pohl has died | Hacker News Reader

Frederik Pohl has died

frederikpohl.com

175 pointsColinWright52 comments

One of Pohl's laws is "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere will not hate it".

I always thought that could be the HN motto.

It could be reddit's motto as well. I've not found a post >100 upvotes that wasn't downvoted at least once.

That's more likely to be reddit's vote fuzzing mechanism; any post with lots of upvotes will automatically get tempered with "fake" downvotes by the system.

Why? To counter some weird ass automated upvotes?

I have the notion that bad voters are canceled out by sticking in votes on the other count. That makes it harder for them to sniff out the fact that they don't really count.

Reddit uses a hellbanning system like HN. Spammers and the like don't realize they are banned until they try to read their own posts from another account. The auto-downvote system along with score caching makes it a lot harder to tell if your upvote/downvote went through or not. It's just one of the many, many anti-bot systems built into Reddit.

Discovered Gateway when I was about 13. What a story to expand a young mind! Beyond The Blue Event Horizon and Jem, which I re-read earlier this year, also made big impressions.

His role in supporting other authors can't be overlooked, either -- check out his two-part blog account of how Delaney's Dhalgren got published (1).

One of the other remarkable things I discovered about Pohl through his blog is just how long he was involved with science fiction. This 2009 post talks about what it was like being a hard-core sci-fi fan in the 1930s (2). I read another one (can't find it now) where he talks about joining the first "con" in the same decade, and meeting some early writers. Almost all of them were gone by the time he wrote the blog post ... he was the last one who remembered that era of raw imagination, and had lived to see many future technologies and concepts become reality. His writing reflected a pessimism about humanity, but also a sense of hope.

Thank you, Mr. Pohl, for your gifts to the world.

1. http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/11/chip-delany/

2. http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/09/let-there-be-fan...

Besides being one of the truly great writers of the 20th century, Mr. Pohl was a kind man, and just a really great guy. I got to spend a day with him way back when-- I think it was in 1980 or '81. He had been invited to be a guest at a small university in Missouri and I showed up because I loved his stuff. It became apparent that most of the people at his lecture were non-SF types who were only in attendance because their teachers forced them. (Remember, this was 1980-- SF was not widely popular.) After the lecture, the professor who had invited Mr. Pohl was desperate to provide some "SF fellowship" for his guest and asked me to be accompany them to a faculty-&-community-leader lunch. It was hilarious-- no one at the table knew who he was. And then-- I was invited to have dinner with the prof and Mr. Pohl that evening, just the 3 of us. It was one of a handful of outstanding moments in my life-- we talked about SF, religion (he said that he had a close friend that was a Jesuit priest with whom he discussed religion from time to time), politics, space exploration-- it was amazing. Rest in Peace, sir.

What a lovely comment. Thank you.

He also had a regularly updated blog at:

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

There are many 'back in the day' stories archived there. It's bothering me quite a bit that his latest "To be continued" won't.

Great link. I was surprised to find an entry for today... Makes me wonder if the death was sudden.

I also enjoyed those stories on his blog.

He also wrote a lot about the early days of science fiction in his 1978 memoir, The Way the Future Was. I was particularly fascinated by his association with the Futurians, a NY-based science fiction club which included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Cyril Kornbluth.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/way-the-future-was-a-memoir/oc...

> It's bothering me quite a bit that his latest "To be continued" won't.

It may be. The blog says that they have a thick file of stuff that he meant to post and will likely continue for a while.

This feels like the passing of an era to me.

He himself (presumably) writes a post in the morning . . . :

This entry was posted on September 2, 2013 at 9:00 am under Miscellaneous: http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2013/09/an-interesting-s...

. . . then someone else finishes the day off with:

This entry was posted on September 2, 2013 at 11:00 pm under Personal: http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2013/09/farewell/

Pohl was not a young man anymore, but it still makes me think what a difference a day makes, and if I live every day as wisely as I can . . .

OMG. Gateway is one of my all-time favourite books. So brilliant. The Space Merchants is great as well.

He finally hitched that Heechee ride.

If you never played the Gateway game, I recommend it too: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/540

I first head of Mr. Pohl work by playing that game (and its sequel)

And indeed, it is really impressive and interesting! Lots of food for thought on them.

And considering a game cannot have much story as a book, it is only a glimpse of Mr. Pohl full body of work, but it still is really, really impressive and awesome.

Heechee Saga is a wonderful piece of science fiction, making humans think of many controversial themes. Especially likes of us, Hackers, Scientists, IT workers. Some of these themes are;

  - What happens after you die?
  - If possible would you record your consciousness into a computer?
  - If some kind of human recordings and/or simulations are possible 
    what happens to the source person's inheritance/belongings?
  - How would consciousness cope with energy outages?
  - What of human - computer love affairs?
  - Can we correctly analyse Extra Terrestrial artefacts?
  - How would science and society behave in rationing  possible synthetic food 
    in case of global famine or drought?
  - If we ever build synthetic body parts that's 
    absolutely compatible with human bodies and can replace
    old/defect ones who can reach these?

I'm very sorry about Mr.Pohl's death. If a human recording was possible he was someone worthy of binary encoding.

(edit styling)

I loved his work. It was about expanding our horizons. But sometimes the narrative would suffer. Why could super-intelligent energy lifeforms not conceive that matter-based creatures were intelligent, but human science fiction writers could imagine that energy-creatures could be? Do 10^17 super-intelligences inside a black hole have no science fiction writers at all among them?

They were non fiction intelligences. Also they were so afraid of the upcoming doom so they locked themselves in a blackhole and lost track of time outside. (U.S. see the resemblence?). But of course some matters are mind tingling :-) This can't soil his brilliance.

No,not soil certainly. But I remember my great disappointment when the entire Heechee series' ultimate mystery turned out to be - that superintelligent beings couldn't conceive of something a science fiction author could.

by the way universe is amazing. In many many ways :)

Indeed. It is one of all time my favourite hard sci-fi novels.

Agreed...it's the ultimate lottery ticket...what a brilliant writer!

While I enjoyed the Heechee stories, my favorite of his is an oldie he wrote with Kornbluth, "The Space Merchants".

My parents gave me his last name as my first. I still have yet to read his work.

I am not particularly a fan of Sci-Fi but I know he was a well regarded author. My condolences to those who knew him and to those who enjoyed his work.

More importantly he was a well-regarded thinker.

I can't help but think of this Kurt Vonnegut quote (He put these words into the mouth of a character, Eliot Rosewater, who gate-crashed and addressed a conference of SF writers):

"I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

(from 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater' 1965)

"God Bless You, Mr Rosewater" is one of the most underrated books of all time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_You,_Mr._Rosewater

Of course, "Sirens of Titan" is the other great one.

Pohl was one of the pillars around which SF grew after 1950. The Space Merchants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants ) is a remarkable cautionary tale, often mentioned.

I also liked his Man Plus novel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus ), which pointed out the uneasy relationship between sensory input and brain, at a time the subject was not yet popular.

(The purpose of the human modifications in that novel is Mars colonization. I feel it is somehow a serious answer to Clifford D. Simak's City [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28novel%29 ], a poetic tale where humans leave Earth to the dogs and go to Jupiter to frolic in giant kangaroo bodies ...)

Original Source: https://twitter.com/emilypohlweary/status/374628088791175168

I enjoyed his work, I think my favorite was "Midas World" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World . Midas World explores a future reality where there is cheap energy, and cheap robotics, and the poor have to consume the output of the automatic factories while the wealthy get to enjoy the simple life. It is an interesting exploration of a possible future where everything can be made for virtually no cost (except for the environmental damage).

It is a collection of short but related stories.

Maybe in his legacy we can run Problem Pits. Anyone up for that? (In The Problem Pit)

There's also the creepy novel about a voice in someone's head because they know something and die. Anyone remember this one?

That would be Drunkard's Walk.

I'm pretty sure I got introduced to Fred in one of Groff Conklin's HUGE and GREAT anthologies published back in the 50s. Thanks to a great, open-minded small-town librarian I was already mainlining SF as a young teen.

Fred was very much a pioneer, and if you look through his few-dozen blog posts (93-year-old blogger!) of the last year or so he shares stories about the early SF conventions (#71 just ended).

Have you ever met someone and known immediately they were brilliant, a complete gentleman, and giving his full attention to you? I had the honor to meeting Frederik Pohl once and that's really the only way to describe it.

Well said-- "giving his full attention to you." I knew I left out an important point in my comment about meeting Mr. Pohl, and that covers it. I was a 20 yr old who knew close to nothing & had delusions of being a great SF writer one day, but Mr. Pohl treated me as if I were completely sane. He was definitely one of a kind.As you said, a complete gentleman, in the very best meaning of the word.

I find it interesting that some great people only get the proper credits they deserve when they die. Does anyone bother to write a list of great people that are still alive?

That's what awards are for, like all those Pohl earned.

Of all his work I only know "The Last Theorem", which he co-wrote with Arthur C. Clarke. Unlike what seems like most people, I quite enjoyed it.

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