Sci-Fi Great Frederik Pohl Passes Away At 93 57
damnbunni writes "Frederik Pohl, one of the last Golden Age science fiction authors, passed away on September 2nd of respiratory distress, as reported on his blog. Pohl is perhaps best known for his Heechee Saga novels, beginning with Gateway in 1977, but his work in pulp magazines in the '30s and '40s helped give rise to science fiction fandom."
The Cool War (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal favourite. Amazingly prescient.
The masters fade away.. (Score:4, Interesting)
To be replaced by Vampire fiction :_(
As a school library was cleaning out books I've been acquiring a lot of the works of Simak, Heinlein (early sci-fi), Bradbury, et al. There's something enjoyable about reading these things. Sometimes listening to old MP3s of Dimension-X or X-Minus-1 (which you can find on archive.org) is a lot of fun. It was a simpler age with the new sciences of atomic physics and morality to be explored.
Gold at Starbow's End (Score:5, Interesting)
In typical Pohl fashion it includes lots of sex. But the basic plot is that civilization is collapsing, and someone devises a plan to send six of the world's top scientists, three men and three women, on a multi-year space journey to a planet near Alpha Centauri with nothing to do during the voyage but scientific research. With nothing else to do but research on the ship and chemicals in their food to suppress sexual desire, they hope the crew will make new breakthroughs in many fields. They do.
Unfortunately, the logical, mathematical, and scientific breakthroughs by the crew swiftly move them beyond what the humans back on earth can understand. They create their own language and mathematical notation. They redesign and reconstruct their space ship while it's in motion. They manufacture their own chemicals to nullify the mechanism that was negating their sexual desires and have all sorts of sex, and even raise children on the ship. In the end they manifest psychic powers and figure out how to live disembodied.
The story takes everything you might have liked about the movies Phenomenom, Limitless (and the book it's based upon, "The Dark Fields"), and Lawnmower Man and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Nth Degree" and takes the ideas far further. (Except for killing John Travolta, which cannot be improved upon.)