Science Fiction's Hidden Hero

Screw Ray Bradbury and all his Midwestern sci-fi fame and glory. It’s great that he gets all moony over rolling fields of grass, and sure he’s a jolly read, but his characters never really tickle danger. Where’s the fucking, the profanity, the evil? It’s a bad gimmick, but what the hell, why not even toss in a random alien-zapping dickwad once in a while? He’s not writing sci-fi, he’s writing fantasy. For elementary school children. When Chicago declared a couple years ago that April 15 was officially Ray Bradbury Day, why was there no looting and rioting? Bradbury’s a longtime Californian, first of all, and second, he’s no Frederik Pohl.

Pohl, who’s now 89 years old, was one of the younger writers in the Golden Age of science fiction, and he’s now the last one alive. He has a number of physical issues (his right hand’s basically paralyzed into a claw, for example, but let’s not get into it, mortality’s kind of depressing) and can barely get around his own roomy house in a Chicago suburb—which, upon last check, contained a massive pantry full of canned peaches, as well as a gajillion books and animal figurines—and yet the man still gallivants around the world. He’s been to every continent but Antarctica several times over. “This casts some doubt on my intelligence,” he says. “I can live anywhere in the world, and I’ve always lived in the northern part of the United States. And it gets cold, which I hate. I could’ve been living in Bermuda all the time.”

Vice: When did you decide you wanted to write?

Frederik Pohl:

It seems like you must’ve known it somehow. You wrote your first complete sci-fi story in eighth-grade English class when the teacher wasn’t looking. And then you dropped out permanently not too long after that.

Nowadays a gathering of social-outcast teenage boys interested in imaginary worlds is a Dungeons & Dragons pizza party, and the likelihood of them getting tail is less than rolling the number 13 on a dodecahedron die 86 times in a row. But you guys—Isaac Asimov, Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Don Wollheim, and some others—you guys were studs.

Oh, come on.

You guys used pseudonyms all the time. What’s a funny one?

That’s actually less funny than the name Cyril Kornbluth. You have more than a dozen pen names, and for about the first ten years nothing appeared under your own name.

When did you start to have a clue?

But you also decided to become a professional agent representing the Futurians.

Like what?

You were 21 when you started editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. How’d that happen?

Meanwhile, Pohl had discovered the Young Communist League. As a gung-ho card-carrying member for four years, he persuaded a few Futurians to join as well. But in 1939, when the YCL changed their hard-ass, empty slogans from “Quarantine the Aggressor” and “Death to the Nazis” to “Keep America Out of the Imperialist War,” shit got a little too real. As he wrote in his 1978 autobiography,

, “It was like being awakened from a pleasant dream by a kick in the gut.” He started missing meetings after that and soon stopped going altogether.

In 1943, when Pohl was 24, his first marriage had basically disintegrated (he’s been married five times, three of which he now considers “prolonged weekend dates”), and he decided enlisting in the army was easier than pursuing the crush he had at the time—though she joined the army too and he did eventually marry her. In a weird coincidence, he started his service as a weather observer alongside his friend sci-fi wild man Jack Williamson and ended up in Italy writing PR for the army, living on the side of Vesuvius, the volcano that decimated Pompeii. (Right now, he’s finishing up a draft of a novel about a future in which Pompeii’s archaeological site is being exploited as a theme park.)

Back in civilian life, Pohl decided to make a quick buck by copywriting ads, but he couldn’t stay away from the real geekery. After the 1947 World Convention in Philadelphia, he and Lester del Rey started a new science-fiction group, the Hydra Club, and Pohl acted as their agent.

He invented a system that coaxed stories out of writers by offering them an advance out of his own pocket. (No one would do such a thing now, when you basically have to pay to play.) The incentive to write gave Pohl a larger pile to pitch to editors, and as a result he was responsible for getting Isaac Asimov’s first book,

, published, as well as

. In fact, he says, half the stories in the major science-fiction mags in the 1950s came from his agency.

You were more than just a swashbuckling lit agent, you were also a maniac writer.

Encyclopedia Britannica

You’ve also written books on politics [Practical Politics, 1971], ecology [Our Angry Earth, a collaboration with Isaac Asimov], North American Vikings [The Viking Settlements of North America, 1972], Prince Henry Sinclair [Prince Henry Sinclair: His Expedition to the New World in 1398, 1995], and the pleasures of visiting places where science is explained or made [Chasing Science, 2002]. This is on top of dozens of novels and short stories in which you’ve made some pretty freaky spot-on predictions. Like in Heechee Rendezvous when terrorists gain control of the collective unconscious and use it as a psychological weapon, controlling the masses by spreading fear into their minds. Then a ship docks and releases anthrax spores. Later, a spaceship crashes into a building, blowing it up. Sounds a lot like 2001.

But you were involved with the World Future Society, which tried to figure out how to predict the future.

why

Well, besides being a crystal ball, you’re also a romantic. Why are you like the only one who puts love stories in his sci-fi novels?

So what’s science fiction and what’s fantasy?

Let’s talk numbers for a minute: Pohl has won at least 16 high-profile awards for his writing, including six Hugos and three Nebulas. He’s edited or coauthored stories with all the sci-fi magis—Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein, Cyril Kornbluth, Donald Wolheim, Harry Dockweiler (aka Dirk Wylie)—and represented lots of them (and more) as a literary agent, most of this while he was still a teenager.

And he still writes. Just this past August,

, which he coauthored with Arthur C. Clarke, was published. It was the last book Clarke wrote before he died. That’s a pretty big deal.

But even when not behind the desk, Pohl’s always been an ass kicker. His house burned down in the early 1960s, so he became a volunteer fireman. His family begged him to quit doing that and support them, so he took the first real job offered to him, and that was collecting urine samples from racehorses. Around the same time, in 1962, Pohl first brought cryogenics to the light of day, and he was also an expert in crystal gazing.

What happened to you politically in the 70s?

Your wife, Betty Anne Hull, ran on the Democratic ticket for House Representative in 1996 and lost to the incumbent Republican. Actually, Betty, can you tell us about that?

Betty Anne Hull:

While Pohl was out romanticizing politics and signing up for whatever seemed like the most dumbass, dangerous thing to do, Bradbury decided as a teenager he was a pacifist and prayed he wouldn’t be drafted. Luckily for him, his army physical determined that without his glasses he was blinder than Helen Keller and thus unfit for service. In fact, the most outright politically bold thing Bradbury ever did was on paper. Eisenhower had just won 1951’s election; disappointed, Bradbury took out a full-page ad in

denouncing Republicans and Senator McCarthy’s communist hoedown. “I have seen too much fear in a country that has no right to be afraid,” he wrote. “I do not want any more lies, any more prejudice, any more smears. I do not want intimations, hear-say

, or rumor. I do not want unsigned letters or nameless telephone calls from either side, or from anyone.” Wow, dude. You really told them.

Pohl started off a few steps ahead of the game: Months before Bradbury’s first story was published in

, Pohl had already quit editing that magazine. And later, both had long-term working relationships with an editor but Bradbury was selling him stories as an author and Pohl was selling him stories as an agent.

Did you and Ray Bradbury cross paths often?

You wrote in a review of Bradbury’s biography how a distinguished Soviet academic came to see you, a specialist in sci-fi. And when you offered to take him anywhere he wanted to visit in the Chicago area, he said he wanted to see the “boyhood home of the most famous science-fiction writer in the world, Mr. Ray Bradbury.” Ouch.

You’re awfully cool about all this. Don’t you get offended?

Do you remember which book it was?

Pohl helped shape the world of sci-fi for Bradbury to live in—and then admonish. Eager for breadcrumbs anywhere else in the freelance world, Bradbury’s always denied a science-fiction pigeonhole, worried it’d hinder his career. When Doubleday published

, he was dismayed to see a science-fiction disclaimer emblazoned on the cover. When the house next published

, Bradbury politely demanded that his editor omit the tag. And Pohl doesn’t have even one tiny sour grape.

No one remembers firsts. Seconds get all the attention. I had to call ten bookstores in New York to find The Last Theorem—and there was one copy left.

Betty Anne Hull:

That’s crazy, and sad.

It makes me angry that people still don’t seem to know who Fred is.