Years ago, Nolly Stennis had been a promising baritone. On the threshold of a great career with Narabedla Ltd., illness had ruined his voice. Then a cellist friend received an offer from Narabedla, only to disappear shortly thereafter. When Nolly set out to investigate, he found intergalatic intr...
I loved Gateway, the first novel in the Heechee series by Frederik Pohl. Where Pohl came up with the term "Heechee" would be interesting to know, although I dislike this word. It sounds so lightweight to me to represent in language sentient beings and a culture that will have such a huge impact...
This is an excellent collection of short science fiction stories. I'd read some of Pohl's work and knew he was prolific, but I don't think I had the appreciation for him that I now have. This is some kick ass work, encompassing decades of writing. Philip K. Dick is probably my favorite sci fi wri...
Frederik Pohl is prolific. He handles so many diverse ideas with great skill. I was completely intrigued by nearly every one of the tales contained in this collection. Here, then, is an accounting."The Tunnel Under the World" - A man wakes up to find everything very different from the way he reme...
Contents:The Sweet, Sad Queen of the Grazing Isles (1984)The High Test (1983)Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair (1983)Second Coming (1983)Enjoy, Enjoy (1974)Growing Up in Edge City (1975)We Purchased People (1974)Rem the Rememberer (1977)The Mother Trip (1975)A Day in the Life of Able Charlie (19...
Frederik Pohl is a science fiction great who published work between 1937 and 2011 before he passed away in 2013. Pohl won multiple awards, including the Nebula Award for Man Plus. He followed that up with a Hugo and a Nebula in 1977 for Gateway. Man Plus features a brilliant premise in which a hu...
Review: Heechee #3; Heechee Rendezvous, Fredrick PohltThe first two Heechee novels were entertaining and suspenseful. This novel is peppered with the intensity of any given adventure/suspense novel but woven in like a spider web is the story of Essie and Robinette Broadhead whom the novels hav...
If you're a fan of the first book, or even of the first few books, please, do yourself a favour and leave this book on the shelf. You'll learn nothing new in here, and I seriously doubt there's anything new to be gleaned in the final book, which I won't be reading. There is no story to speak of, ...
What this book isn't: A novelization of the television show of the same name. Which I found outrageous. Truly, truly outrageous. However, I got over it pretty quickly as I kept reading.What this book is: An indictment of industrialism, capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism. If you don't want t...
I’ve had a very miss-and-miss relationship with recent novels and short stories that, claiming to be science fiction, venture into our future a few years to some kind of corporate dystopia. It’s not that I don’t take the threat seriously, but the refrain is so familiar and blunt. It doesn’t chall...
The World at the End of Time is an interesting sci-fi classic by Frederik Pohl that takes a whole lot of brilliant ideas and mixes them in one book. In the book, two narratives are explored, one from the viewpoint of a human named Viktor and another of an Entity know only as Won-To. They contrast...
Science Fiction. Humans have colonized the inhospitable world of Pava, but they still have to worry about budget cuts back on Earth and their own lack of resources. I've said it before, I will say it again. Pohl: excellent at science fiction; bad at people. His human characters spout cliched, bor...
Frederik Pohl has done it all in science fiction, one of the few who have won Hugo Awards both for his stories and for his editing. Becoming a science fiction magazine editor while still in his teens in the 1930s, he had already made a name for himself as an active science fiction fan. Here are h...
Frederik Pohl, one of the most honored science fiction writers of our time, gives us an extraordinary vision of a New York yet to come - from the wounded, struggling behemoth of tomorrow to the domed, atmospherically controlled megalopolis of the twenty-first century. In Pohl's prophetic novel, a...
SF. Oh give me a home, where the cyborgs do roam, and the grid is not silent all day! It's 2043 and Mars has been colonized by earthlings. They live underground in domed cities run by a computer system known as the grid, and the circuitry is getting a little tired of the humans thinking they know...
review of C. M. Kornbluth's Not This August by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 28, 2011 The front cover review excerpt from the Chicago Tribune reads: "The most shockingly realistic science fiction book since Orwell's '1984' - establishes Kornbluth as one of the best writers in the futurist...
The Company was a powerful, efficient, and monstrous insurance organization that controlled the entire world, scientifically regulating everything in life: war, epidemics, one-a-day food pills and test-tube sex...all through the use of its patented, terrifying human deep-freeze vault. Claims Adju...
Mars was harsh and unforgiving, but for the colonists who called it home, its future was as bright as the comets that hung in the night sky, for locked in those icy bodies were the water and gases that would make Mars live again, mined from the vast Oort Cloud beyond Pluto. Young Dekker DeWoe yea...
SEAQUAKE It was the most dreaded of all undersea phenomena. If strong enough, it would set up chain-reaction pressures that could shatter any dome and cost inestimable lives. But the Krakatoan Dome has been specifically designed to cope with the tremors of its seaquake-prone area. The trouble wa...
A very fine YA/"juvenile" from 1954, reminiscent of the works of, say, Robert A. Heinlein or Lester Del Rey. The first-person narrative is fast-moving and adventuresome, with many cute cliffhangers that are not cheesy or overdone. I was struck by how beautifully evocative the novel is--the colors...
A good YA for 1956, though for some hard-to-define reason I would rate it just a hair lower than the first of the series, Undersea Quest. The handling of the sometimes-savage imperialism, I suppose we can call it, of Jason Craken is decent for the period, although Jim is a little slower than I wo...
"La variedad de efectos es poco comun en los autores de anticipacion... con sus brillantes relatos de aventuras y su falta de curiosidad acerca del caracter humano. Una variedad que va mas alla de un mero reordenamiento se encuentra raramente, y la variedad de tono es mas escasa todavia. Aparece ...
En 1953, con una calurosa acogida por parte de la crítica y gran éxito de público, se publicó Los Mercaderes del Espacio, novela que encierra una sátira mordaz de la publicidad y el consumismo. La Guerra de los Mercaderes, brillante continuación de Frederik Pohl, reanuda la historia en el punto e...
En Portico, Frederik Pohl retoma y vigoriza la linea especulativa que le puso a la cabeza de la ciencia ficcion mundial. Esta es la primera novela de una tetrologia cuyo hilo conductor es una misteriosa especie de extraterrestres, los Heechee. En ella, un grupo de humanos descubre una base espaci...
"It's no exaggeration to say that for the greater part of my life I've wanted to come across a pupil of Professor Hopper. I've sat under him and over him on various faculties; we even went to Cambridge together — it disgusted both of us. And now at last I have the chance, and now you are going to...
RECORDER LESSONS or play at parties. 87-429. CHRISTMAS IS coming! Remember your loved ones at home with a Genuine Recomposed Heechee-Plastic model of Gateway or Gateway Two; lift it and see a lovely whirling snowfall of authentic Peggy's World glitterdust. Scenic holofiches, hand-etched Junior La...
That was because he lived there. He had lived in the Core all his life and had no desire ever to leave it. Achiever knew that there were a lot of highly interesting things Outside. However, he also knew how dangerous those interesting things might be, and so he had no more desire to see them for ...
Almost anything can be thought of as part of a system. Chaos theory is based on that idea; we don’t always see the system at work because we’re looking at it from within the system itself or because we don’t have the tools to see the entirety of the system. Dr. Grew, the protagonist of “Speed Tra...
I was not too pleased about it. My dissatisfaction was partly with the war itself, in which the bad guys seemed to win all the battles, partly with myself for not being part of it. Around the office we told each other that we were, after all, contributing very significantly to the war effort. We ...
Naturally.It wasn’t four days, either, or five. It wasn’t even six days, because when the seventh day came along she still hadn’t come back. Hadn’t even called. And there was a great big hole in my world where Gerda should have been, and wasn’t.I’d got used to having Gerda in my life. It wasn’t a...
An exploring party of another species arrived. They were not welcome. In fact, they were the very people the Centaurians had been fighting their interminable war with, the sluglike inhabitants of Alpha Centauri's fourth planet. Although the fighting in their home system had temporarily subsided, ...
I don’t know. Nothing changed things. I made no resolve, settled no unanswerable questions. But one morning I got up early, changed trains at a different station, got out where I had not been in a long, long time and presented myself at Mitzi’s apartment building. The door...
The stars were bright outside our window; and the Project Mako alarm bell was ringing General Quarters. Semyon snored, sputtered, choked and sat up. I jumped out of my own bed, slammed down the shades, slapped on the light. It was the first GQ I had heard since I left Spruance, but the old habits...
‘In 1988, when you were running the Des Moines office.’ He beamed and held out his hand. ‘Why, darn it, so we did! I remember now, Odin.’ ‘I don’t like to be called Odin.’ ‘No? All right. Mr Gunnarsen—’ ‘Not “Mr Gunnarsen” either. Just “Gunner”.’ ‘That’s right, Gunner; I’d almost forgot...