He has been imagining the future and predicting it with uncanny accuracy for more than 73 years ... ever since he made his first sale, a poem he wrote at age 15 that was published by
Amazing Stories when he was 16. Thus began a long and illustrious career virtually unmatched in the annals of science-fiction writing. Pohl's in-depth knowledge of physics, astronomy, politics, medicine and a host of other disciplines merges seamlessly with his innate ability to bring his characters to life, enabling him to write science fiction that is both informative and rich with lifelike characters. By the time he was 19, Pohl was editing
Astonishing Stories and
Super Science Stories. He would go on to edit
Galaxy,
If and
Worlds of Tomorrow.
He is the author of numerous classic science-fiction novels, including
The Space Merchants (co-written with C.M. Kornbluth),
Man Plus,
The Day the Martians Came,
Black Star Rising,
Chernobyl,
Jem,
Mining the Oort,
Narabedla Ltd.,
O, Pioneer and many, many more.
This Grand Master of science fiction lives with his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, in Palatine, Ill. He is still writing and currently enjoying the recent publication of
Platinum Pohl by Tor, sub-titled "The Collected Best Stories."
In this interview, Frederik Pohl comments on the politics of today, yesterday and tomorrow and on the trends of the future. As always, he is the man who sees tomorrow.
How did The Boy Who Lived Forever go from a novella in Robert Silverberg's Legends to becoming a full-length novel?Pohl: I thought I was through with the
Gateway stuff, but Bobby [Silverberg] is a very persuasive guy, and he talked me into writing a novella for his new collection of novellas. So, Betty [Pohl's wife] and I were cruising in the Mediterranean and I wrote one for him on the ship, and then I realized it was too long, so I wrote this one, "The Boy Who Lived Forever." Still too long, but he didn't care. Then I realized I had about 30,000 words of a new novel, so I ultimately signed a contract to do the book.
The Gateway series consisted of six books and was long ... over 1,790 published pages. How do you feel now that it is over?Pohl: How do I feel now that it is over? I thought it was over before [laughs]. I'm still very fond of the concepts in it, and I could easily think of 10 new stories to write, but I don't want to, because there are other things I want to write.
If you ever met a Heechee alien, what would you say to him?Pohl: I'd say, "Thank you very much." If I ever met an alien, I would do my best to make friends with them and not start an interstellar war.
In "Some Joys Under the Stars," from the Platinum Pohl collection (1973), you have the secretary of state talking with the president, trying to convince him to bomb Venezuela for its oil. The conversation goes like this: "We've got to have oil, agreed. They have oil, everybody knows that. They don't want to sell it to us at a reasonable price, so you want me to beat on them until they change their minds. Right?" I wonder, were you predicting George W. Bush, with just a small change involving the name of the country? Pohl: I wasn't predicting George W. Bush. I've never been enough of a pessimist to predict George W. Bush. I've had a sort of ambiguous feeling about our presidents for a long time. Some of them have been tolerably good, but all of them have had grave faults. Clinton was a good president. He just had this damn habit of not knowing how to get his sexual appetites under control. Nixon was a terrible president, but he did some very good things, so it's very confusing. Eisenhower, I thought, was a pretty good president, but he's the one who destroyed the railroads by building the Interstate Highway System. So they all have more faults than virtues, I think.
Do you have any predictions for 2008?Pohl: Yes. I think that a Democrat will be nominated who doesn't go out of his way to lose it, like the last time.
I know you're very interested in the environment and that you wrote a book on the topic, "Our Angry Earth" (with Isaac Asimov). Any comments on this topic?Pohl: I'm very interested in the environment. It's being destroyed very rapidly and parts of it irrevocably. The melting of the polar ice caps is well along, and nothing can stop it now. If everybody did the things they should do, and did good starting this minute, it would still be too far along now. So that's the end of the polar bears. Polar bears cannot survive. I don't really have that much fondness for polar bears, but they're not the only species that will be destroyed. When the Antarctic ice cap begins to melt and Greenland melts more of its ice cap, you're going to have anywhere up to a 30-foot rise in the ocean. You can say goodbye to Miami, goodbye to the Earth, goodbye to most of the meadow and about a quarter of the places where people have lived in the natural history of the world. It's gonna be really tough on the Bangladeshis, South Sea Islanders, all those people. They will no longer have a place to live.
Due to people like our president ... not him alone, but people who thought, "Well, we'll put it off as long as we can before we do anything, because it will cost some money we don't want to spend"—due to the fact that nothing was done for so long, it's now too late.
What do you think is more likely to happen: a manned mission to Mars or a colony on the moon?Pohl: I think they're both likely to happen, but don't hold your breath. I think there will be a colony on the moon in this century, and possibly at that time, also, a colony on Mars. But I don't think it will be in the very early part of the century. It's expensive, and nobody wants to put up the money.
In an interview with you published in Giants of the Genre (by Michael McCarty, Wildside Press, 2003), you predicted that computers, hospitals, traffic jams and airports would be obsolete by the year 2210, ...Pohl: Yes, I did.
Tell me how and why that's going to happen?Pohl: Computers will be obsolete, because everything will have built-in components of something like computers. You won't need a special thing. When you want to do arithmetic, you might use one built into a tunic. If you want something to wake you up, you'd set a clock somewhere. Your house will have all sorts of devices built in. I don't think there will be any more airports, because I think the kind of airplane that needs 7,000 feet of airstrip to take off or land is obsolete. There are short-landing planes now which can do so in a city block ... they don't need all that space. A place like Chicago, which now has one airport at O'Hare and one at Midway, it'll have an airport in Schaumburg, an airport in Libertyville, an airport in all these places. It has them now, but they are not used. And transport planes will use them. A lot of them will be combination helicopter/fixed-wing planes that take off like helicopters, spread their wings, and go. Some of them will be blimps.
I am confident that there will be a considerable increase in the number of lighter-than-air vehicles that will be used for the transport of goods and for cruising. A cruise line based on blimps can go all sorts of places that steamships can't. There are all sorts of wonderful places in the interior of Asia, in the interior of Africa, South America, North America, that ships can't reach. Tourists would like to go there; a zeppelin could take them. There's a company in Germany now building zeppelins, and somebody is buying them ... not very many, but some of them. They're going somewhere. I've never been in a lighter-than-air aircraft; I'd like to try it.
Traffic jams?Pohl: I think that the car as a means of transportation for everything has passed its usefulness. It's expensive, in terms of money and in terms of energy and pollution, and it's especially expensive in terms of the land it uses up. We're paving everything around us for roads, highways, parking lots and all that stuff. And that's not sensible. We need that land for other purposes. So I think there will be more public transport and fewer individual cars.
I think it's very possible that in big cities there will be a sort of taxi system where, when you want to go somewhere, you order a car, it comes to where you are, you get in it and drive to wherever you want to go, and then you let it go to serve somebody else. Not a taxi that somebody else is driving, but something you drive. That's technically feasible right now, and I think it would save a lot of trouble.
There's no reason so many cars have to be in downtown Chicago. It's ridiculous. There's no place to park. We have friends on the Lakefront, and when we go there it's been hell to find a place to park. Most of the parking spots that are available are reserved for the residents, and there are no other parking spots.
Hospitals?Pohl: Hospitals ... most things will be taken care of in a doctor's office. The pharmaceuticals that are around now are suitable for most things, but not for things that involve rearrangement of the general organs. That'll be done pretty much by kinds of cloning ... cloning parts that go into the body.
When you were the editor of Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow, you published a lot of unknown or relatively unknown writers who later who would become genre giants, like Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and Roger Zelazny. Who were some of the other luminaries from that era?Pohl: Oh, let's see. Some of them have become pretty famous, but I don't read what they write. I like R.A. Lafferty, who I'm proud of, because he's a good writer. But some of them, although they've been successful, I'm not particularly proud of, because I don't like what they're doing.
Also in your Giants of the Genre interview, you said, "I plan to keep writing until I drop dead. Old science-fiction writers don't fade away; they just die. Heinlein was still writing a few months before he died. Jack Williamson turned 85 and he has no plans for stopping. If he can do it at 85, I can do it at 74," ... which you were then. Is this still true today?Pohl: It's still true today, except Jack has retired. He retired about 6 months ago, at age 97.
What project or projects are you working on now?Pohl: I have a novel that's almost finished. Arthur Clarke asked me to finish a novel for him. That's my newest project; the one I was working on I put aside. I was having trouble with it anyhow. I'm almost done finishing this book that Arthur started and bogged down on, and I hope to have it done by the end of 2006 at the latest. It is presently called
Last Theorem. Whether that title stays or not, I'm not sure.
When you were an editor, you rejected a rough draft of Star Wars. Do you have any regrets that you turned it down?Pohl: I didn't exactly turn it down. I couldn't sit on it. It was committed to Judy Lynn del Rey—but I sneaked a copy of it, and I could have made an offer on it, but I didn't really think it was very good. It was described as "
Wagon Train in space ... ," "space opera." It sounded pretty poor, which, in fact, it is. What makes it so wonderful is that the special effects are so wonderful. When you see that first film and you see the mothership coming at you onscreen, you're hooked.
Have you seen all of the Star Wars movies?Pohl: I've seen all three of the original set and one of the others. I'm not too crazy about the others.
What do you think is your greatest achievement, of everything you've achieved in your life?Pohl: I think
Gateway is my greatest achievement, because not only is it a great book, but it was a groundbreaker in many ways. It was told in unusual ways. I used sidebars to convey information in a way that nobody else ever had, and I think it worked pretty well, so I like that. But, I don't know. I'd say
Gateway.
How many printings did the Gateway book eventually go through?Pohl: Five million. [Laughter.] Eighteen or 20, I think, maybe more. It was earning royalties the day it was published.
