In his various incarnations and capacities, Fred Pohl has developed some strong ideas about the makeup of the science fiction audience. And despite the fact that several of his works have been adapted for film and television
(”Tales from the Dark Side” recently adapted his short story, ”The Bitterest Pill,” and ”The Tunnel under the World” became a feature film in Italy), he sees significant differences between the audiences for science fiction films and books.
”There are two kinds of people in the world: people who read books, and people who don`t,” he says, lighting up a Carlton Menthol as Noah, one of the house`s three cats, jumps up on a kitchen chair. ”There are a great many people who consider themselves red-hot science fiction fans because they see all the movies, but who have never read a science fiction book and probably never will.
”Science fiction appeals to a more intelligent and thoughtful audience than most kinds of writing. One of the things about science fiction is that it gives you insights into the world. It has the capacity to make people do some thinking, and there has not yet been one moment in any science fiction film I`ve seen in the last 50 years that would cause anybody to do any thinking.”
Among those whose ways of thinking have been influenced by science fiction are a number of scientists and politicians, as well as various military and government agencies. Many of those people are very interested in what science fiction writers have to say, and Pohl is one of the most sought- after of their ranks.
He`s participated in a U.S. Army workshop on the future of small-arms weapons and has taken part in several NASA symposiums. (Pohl fondly remembers squeezing into a subcompact car at one NASA ”speculative science” meeting with rocket scientist Wernher von Braun sitting on his lap and Arthur C. Clarke sitting on the lap of an astronaut.)
Despite his participation in NASA and military gatherings, Pohl remains a strong critic of the militarization of outer space, particularly President Reagan`s proposed ”Star Wars” defense system. He is disconcerted by NASA`s plans to launch a number of military cargoes once the space shuttle program gets back on its feet, and has sent a paper to the Air Force suggesting ways to monitor the compliance of nuclear test treaties.
Still, he strongly backs the further exploration of space. ”I`m deeply committed to the principle that human beings should get into space to find out what`s out there and what uses can be made of what we find,” he says. ”We`ve learned an awful lot about our own planet by looking at other planets. We can see how things operate on different planets, and that gives us clues as to why things behave the way they do on our own. And that`s all intensely valuable.” Last June Pohl was one of three Americans invited to attend the 8th Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in the Kremlin, where he gave a short speech that was interrupted by applause four times. He`s traveled the globe giving lectures for the State Department and the United States Information Agency, has spoken at more than 100 colleges and is the Encyclopaedia Britannica`s expert on the Roman emperor Tiberius. He`s also a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is the Midwest area representative of the Authors Guild.
”One of the reasons that I write science fiction is that speculative science–the cutting edge of science–has always been a wonderland for me,”
Pohl says. ”Science is my `spectator sport`–I don`t do it, but I love to watch it. Because so many scientists have been turned on to science in the first place through reading science fiction, when I go to Fermilab or Cape Canaveral, there`s almost always someone there who`s a fan or a writer who will say, ”Hey, let me show you what we`re doing over here.”
For a guy who dropped out of high school in his senior year, you might say that Fred Pohl travels in some pretty fast circles.
In his native Brooklyn in 1930, 10-year-old Fred Pohl spied his first copy of Science Wonder Stories Quarterly, a science fiction magazine that mysteriously turned up in his home one day, and he was immediately hooked. That was the era of the ”pulps,” when magazines like Hugo Gernsback`s Amazing Stories, Astounding and Weird Tales captured the imaginations of readers with stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, E.E. ”Doc” Smith, Ray Cummings, Stanton A. Coblentz, Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith. More often, though, it was the lurid covers that first caught the attention of adolescent readers.
More than 50 years later, Pohl can still vividly recall the cover of his first magazine. ”It had a green alien monster about the size of King Kong raising hell with the city he was in,” he says, a fond memory playing about his lips. ”He was knocking off the tops of buildings and gas storage tanks.” It was the stuff that parents and teachers quickly dismissed as
”trash,” which only increased its popularity among impressionable boys like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl.
Pohl`s father was something of a jack-of-all-trades. He alternately sold stocks and bonds, chemical fertilizer and machine parts and even owned a 1,000-acre farm on Long Island for a while. Fred George Pohl`s life as a traveling salesman kept him out of Brooklyn and out of young Fred`s life for long periods of time; his parents eventually separated when Fred was 13.
Even before Science Wonder Stories transformed his view of the world, Pohl had discovered a love of books. He`s not sure where that love came from, noting that even though his mother received a teaching certificate, he can`t recall ever seeing either of his parents reading a book. A copy of Emerson`s
”Essays” was given to him by an elderly friend of the family. ”I remember it had gilt edges on the pages and a triple-silk book mark,” he says. ”I remember what it looked like, but I don`t remember anything that was inside because I never read the damn thing.”
As he entered his teens, Pohl soon encountered others whose sense of wonder had been captured by the magic that was between the covers of the science fiction magazines that could be found for a nickel in the second-hand magazine stores that proliferated during the Depression.
Science fiction clubs began to sprout as other precocious fans felt the need to discuss (and, more often, argue about) the ideas in the stories.
”They were really exciting,” he recalls of the early pulps, blue eyes sparkling. ”I mean, the notion of traveling to another planet . . . meeting intelligent creatures that didn`t look like human beings . . . it was wonderful, intoxicating!”
Pohl soon fell in with a group of fans that was to become legendary. The Futurians, as they called themselves, included a number of young fans who later became well-known writers, editors, publishers and scientists. At various times their ranks included Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, James Blish, C.M. Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie and Richard Wilson.
Science fiction is unique among genre fiction for its long history of fan groups, publications (”fanzines”) and conventions. It is a tradition that remains strong today, with several hundred science fiction conventions held in the U.S. each year. The conventions give like-minded fans a chance to meet their favorite writers and artists, listen to writers and editors discuss the state of the art in panel discussions, and buy hard-to-find collectibles and artwork.
Pohl took part in the world`s first science fiction convention in 1936, when a handful of New York-area fans met their counterparts in Philadelphia. Today it`s not unusual for a convention to draw hundreds of fans. Last year`s World Science Fiction Convention was held at Atlanta`s futuristic-looking Marriott Marquis Hotel and attracted more than 5,000 fans.
Looking back on his involvement with the Futurians, Pohl remembers their meetings as consisting mainly of a bit of routine parliamentary procedure, followed by a lot of often bitter arguing about science fiction, politics and the world in general.
”The average IQ of the Futurians was probably 130 or a little better,”
he recalls. ”We were smart, and we were anxious to make everybody else aware of it.”
Isaac Asimov, the son of a Russian immigrant candy-store owner in Brooklyn, remembers first meeting Pohl in 1938 at a Futurians meeting. ”Those were peculiar days,” he says. ”It was still the tail-end of the Depression, Hitler was riding high, and things looked dark in many ways. We were young and we loved science fiction, though neither one of us yet had sold a story. Although writing science fiction meant fame and fortune to us both eventually, it also took away some of the amateur status that we had when we were just fans.”
Asimov credits Pohl with buying some of his very early stories for Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories in the early `40s. As his literary agent for several years, Pohl was responsible for selling Asimov`s first science fiction novel, ”Pebble in the Sky,” to Doubleday in 1950.
These days Asimov`s science fiction novels regularly make the best-seller lists. He recent ”Robots and Empire” also received a $425,000 paperback advance from Del Ray books.
”When we all started, it was a field that brought virtually no money and fame to anyone,” Asimov recalls. ”It was a tiny field that attracted attention only among a small group of science fiction fans. We were all in it together, all starving together, and the enemy was the rest of the world.”
Pohl and Asimov have remained good friends throughout the years. Asimov points out that September, 1988, will mark the 50th anniversary of their first meeting. He also thinks that their fundamental beliefs have not changed radically from their Futurian days.
”Fred and I see the world through the same eyes, and neither he nor I have undergone any change to conservatism with age,” he says. ”Usually fiery young liberals grow up to be fat-cat conservatives, but neither Fred nor I have done that. We`re still fiery young liberals.”
”Betty Anne and I were once being interviewed on a Swedish radio program, and they asked her what the common element was in all of my writing,” says Pohl. ”She said, `Basically, Fred wants to teach the world to be kinder to each other.` And I think that`s true. I believe that people should get off each other`s backs and stop trying to coerce each other. That`s a pretty good description of `liberalism` as I understand it.”
It was Pohl`s experiences as an advertising copywriter in the late 1940s that fueled ”The Space Merchants” in 1953, the first (and most successful)
of his many collaborations with C.M. Kornbluth. A biting satire on advertising, the book portrayed a future where advertising and marketing techniques are ruthlessly used to control the world.
Among other things, the book anticipated the arrival of multinational corporations as powerbrokers, and 34 years later the book remains a science fiction classic. It has also caused ripples in advertising circles. A Wall Street Journal story on the recent mergers of several of the larger advertising agencies cited ”The Space Merchants” as a portent of the changes.
Pohl retains a sense of admiration for Kornbluth, who died in 1958 at the age of 34. Together the two of them carved out a niche as writers of
”sociological” science fiction, extrapolating on then-current events and trends with an appealing mix of dry wit and cynical bite.
”He was a writing machine,” Pohl fondly recalls. ”When he sat down at a typewriter, immaculate prose came out. The books that we did together survived better than anything of his or mine that was written at that time.” In addition to science fiction novels like ”Gladiator-at-Law” and
”Wolfbane,” Pohl and Kornbluth collaborated on a pair of nonscience-fiction novels, ”Presidential Year” and ”A Town Is Drowning,” which was set during the New England floods of 1954.
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident happened last April, Bantam and Ballantine Books founder and publisher Ian Ballantine remembered ”A Town Is Drowning” and asked Pohl to do a similar treatment of the lives of the people who lived near Chernobyl. ”Chernobyl” will be published as a hardcover in September.
Both as a United States Information Agency-sponsored speaker and a private citizen, Pohl has traveled to the Soviet Union six times since 1971, most recently in December to do the final research for the book.
”They did ask me after I got there if I was planning to write an anti-Soviet novel, and I said that it wasn`t anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet,” he says. ”It`s the story of what happened to the people involved and to the people around them. I`m trying to show not only what happened at Chernobyl but what life is like in the Soviet Union.”
Pohl credits Mikhail Gorbachev`s policy of glasnost with making it possible for him to write ”Chernobyl.” He got a birds-eye view of that policy of candor at the Soviet Writers Conference, where he heard writers speak out against censorship, the homogenization of Soviet ethnic cultures and, in particular, about who deserves the blame for the Chernobyl disaster.
What impressed Pohl the most was that many of these comments were made with Gorbachev present at the conference. ”I`d been to the Soviet Union about half a dozen times over the last 15 years and had heard such things being said, but they were whispered,” he says. ”Gorbachev`s theory with glasnost is that if people speak more openly and are allowed to print their criticisms, then (the problems) can be corrected better, and that the very creaky machinery that is the Soviet Union will work a little better.”
