My choices probably are pretty standard (although maybe I’ll be surprised by the final list): Gateway and The Space Merchants. Fred’s fiction is always an occasion, for those flashes of insight into the human condition as well as his great storytelling abilities and his skillful prose, I don’t think Fred (and Cyril) ever did better in Fred’s satire mode than his first, but Gateway is Fred at the peak of his mature powers and focusing on a more difficult target, the human heart rather than human folly. By the time Fred was able to write Gateway he had recognized that his skills at skewering human folly were a trap and he had moved on (at least most of the time). I’m looking forward to his new one.
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All the Lives He Led (978-0-7653-2176-3 / $25.99) by Frederik Pohl will be available from Tor Books on April 12, 2011.
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Related Links:
- What’s your Favorite Frederik Pohl novel?
- Jody Lynn Nye: Starburst
- Mike Resnick: The Way the Future Was
- Harry Harrison: The Space Merchants
- Vernor Vinge: Slave Ship
- Joe Haldeman: Wolfbane and The Space Merchants
- Neil Gaiman: The Age of the Pussyfoot
- Cory Doctorow: The Space Merchants
- David Brin: Wolfbane
- Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malatre: Man Plus
- Larry Niven: The Age of the Pussyfoot
- Ben Bova: The Space Merchants
- Phyllis Eisenstein: The Space Merchants