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Frederik Pohl.
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Frederick Pohl, an author whom Robert W. Wilcox, in the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, has hailed as "a star among stars," is one of the world's most prolific and widely read science fict...
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There are few science-fiction writers who have been as involved with every phase of the genre as Frederik Pohl. First as a fan and then as a writer, editor, and literary agent, Pohl has influenced and...
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Critical Essay by T. A. Shippey
Once upon a time the sneer at science fiction was that all its characters, human, Martian, or bug-eyed, appeared to come from Ohio. Later authors took note and lavished...
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Critical Essay by Alex De Jonge
Frederik Pohl's most recent novel, Jem … is a little blurred and messy. It is essentially a political allegory describing the struggle between the world&#...
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Critical Essay by Spider Robinson
[Fred Pohl's sequel to Gateway] has an abominably bad title—Beyond the Blue Event Horizon—and that is absolutely the only bad thing about it. I t...
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Critical Essay by J. G. Ballard
Fifteen years ago, in New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis described Frederik Pohl as the 'novelist of economic man' and speculated that sf as a whole would pr...
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Critical Essay by Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin
Frederik Pohl is one of the few men to make a genuine impact on the science fiction field both as a writer and an editor. Currently, he is doing mor...
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Critical Essay by Patrick Parrinder
Frederik Pohl's Gateway recalls the more spartan virtues of traditional SF. This is a post Freudian epic in which, from his position on the electronic analys...
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Critical Essay by Peter Ackroyd
By placing itself in some unimaginable future, and by taking as its theme the confrontation of human beings with the unknowable, Gateway veers close towards a kind of e...
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Critical Essay by Lester Del Rey
Frederik Pohl's memoir, The Way the Future Was,… was a book I found enjoyable from beginning to end. This is the account of Pohl's life in science...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Jonas
In his long career …, Frederik Pohl has written many different kinds of science fiction. But he is perhaps best known for his use of s.f. to poke fun at social in...
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Critical Essay by Algis Budrys
Frederik Pohl's Jem is not as good as Gateway, better than Man Plus. What does that mean? It means few books are as good as Gateway, and rarely has an SF author i...
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Critical Essay by Roz Kaveney
Frederik Pohl, along with the late C M Kornbluth, created a whole vein of satirical sf in the early Fifties; recently, in the award-winning Gateway, he successfully combi...
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In the following excerpt, Amis examines the themes of production and consumption in the stories "The Midas Plague," "The Wizards of Fung's Corners," and "The ...
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In the following interview, which was conducted in September-October 1970 and first published in Moebius Trip in 1971, Pohl discusses such topics as his writing and editing careers, his collaboration ...
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In the following excerpt of his introduction to The Best of Frederik Pohl, Del Rey gives an overview of Pohl's literary career, highlighting some of his best short stories.
Nothing is easy to ...
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In the following excerpt, Berger examines Pohl's heavy-handed treatment of the theme of advertising in "The Tunnel under the World" and "The Wizards of Pung's Corner...
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In the following excerpt, taken from an essay first published in S-F Studies in 1980, Samuelson explores the social criticism in Pohl's short fiction from the 1950s through the 1970s.
The probl...
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In the following essay, Manlove discusses major themes in Pohl's short fiction, focusing in particular on the stories collected in Alternating Currents.
Pohl began his trade with conventional s...
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In the following excerpt, Clareson analyzes the pessimism evident in Pohl's short fiction from the 1970s and early 1980s.
Even while he was working on the early novels of the Heechee Quartet, i...
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Below, Seed discusses what he considers Pohl's "preoccupation with the working of commercial processes" in three early short stories, including "The Tunnel under the World,...
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Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl
Critical Essay by T. A. Shippey
