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What’s your Favorite Frederik Pohl novel, David Brin?

Placeholder of  -44 Wolfbane was one of the earliest SF novels I read, and at the time it certainly seemed the creepiest!  In contrasts, some of his other works with Cyril Kornbluth, such as Gladiator at Law, though fun adventures, also helped spur  my lifelong habit of doubting all ends of the silly, nonsensical, so-called “left-right political axis.”  Provoking people to rethink their own assumptions—now that’s writing.

One nearly forgotten Pohl book ought to tower high on any shrine of modern techno-visionary prophecy.  The Age of the Pussyfoot was one of the only science fiction stories of the fifties through seventies that envisioned computers becoming common household tools, owned and used, avidly, by nearly everybody.  In fact, to my knowledge it is just about the only work of prophetic fiction to foresee citizens carrying about portable, computerized assistants that would fulfill all the functions we now see gathering together in our futuristic cell phones. And you can bet I salivate for the even-better versions he foresaw.   Pohl’s “joymaker” device is as marvelous an on-target prediction as Jules Verne predicting submarines or trips to the Moon.

In The Cool War, Frederik Pohl showed a chillingly plausible failure mode for human civilization, one in which our nations and factions do not dare to wage open conflict, and so they settle upon tit-for-tat patterns of reciprocal sabotage, ruining each other’s infrastructures and economies, propelling our shared planet on a gradual death-spiral of lowered expectations degraded hopes.  It is a cautionary tale that I cite often, today, as recommended reading for those at the top of our social order.

David Brin can be found online at davidbrin.com

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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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What’s your Favorite Frederik Pohl novel, Joe Haldeman?

Image Placeholder of - 85Poster Placeholder of - 38As impressive as Fred’s later work is, the two that made the biggest impression on me were novels I read when I was still in high school—Wolfbane and The Space Merchants.  I suppose most of the sf I’d read before that was pretty much hooray-for-the-future optimism.  Fred’s darker vision (along with Kornbluth’s) woke up something new and frighteningly adult in me.

Joe Haldeman can be found online at home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/

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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:

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