General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFrederik Pohl has died...
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/One of the great futurists from the classic age of Science Fiction.
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LuvNewcastle
(16,844 posts)I've read several of his books and enjoyed every one. I always thought he should have received more attention for his works; he was so creative. I hope he passed peacefully and his afterlife is as full of wonder as the worlds he imagined in his writings.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)hobbit709
(41,694 posts)MineralMan
(146,288 posts)Ohio Joe
(21,755 posts)Half-Century Man
(5,279 posts)This is now officially a bad day
And hi, Lithos!
niyad
(113,278 posts)his novel "space merchants", about a super-consumer society, was assigned in one of my college courses. I just reread it a few weeks ago.
thank you for the link to the blog, now have it bookmarked.
shenmue
(38,506 posts)Call Me Wesley
(38,187 posts)May he be free from suffering. Truly one of the great ones.
lastlib
(23,222 posts)Few could equal his futuristic vision, and I for one will miss him, as will humanity.
Requiescat in pacem, Mr. Pohl
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,000 posts)ChazInAz
(2,566 posts)I'll always remember: "Ears! It has ears!"
ismnotwasm
(41,976 posts)One of the greats;
Octafish
(55,745 posts)In my day there were professional entertainers, and fake psychics, who specialized in telling total strangers all sorts of intimate details about themselves. The process was called *cold reading*. Ive never done it before, but I think I can do it for you. I think I can tell you quite accurately what your lives are like as you open this time capsule.
For example, you live in a world at peace. Something like the World Court, as an arm of something like the United Nations, resolves international disputes, and has the power to enforce its decisions. For that reason, you live in a world almost without weaponry; and, because you therefore do not have to bear the crippling financial burden of paying for military establishments and hardware, all of you enjoy an average standard of living about equal to a contemporary millionaires. Your health is generally superb. Your life expectancy is not much less than a century. The most unpleasant and debilitating jobs (heavy industry, mining, large-scale farming) are given over to machines; most work performed by human beings is in some sense creative. The exploration of space is picking up speed, both by manned colonization and robot probes, and by vast orbiting telescopes and other instruments. Deforestation, desertification and the destruction of arable land has been halted and reversed. Pollution is controlled, and all the winds and the waters of the Earth are sweet again.
This is a very short description of your life, but it could be made even shorter. A single word can describe it: it is very close to what every previous age of mankind would call *Utopia*.
How do I know these things?
It isnt because Ive made a probabilistic assessment of present-day trends. Quite the contrary. All the evidence of what is going on in the world today leads to the conclusion that none of these things are going to happen, because our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world (and, I have always thought, the best) is bankrupting itself to recruit and train terrorists in Latin America, give arms to terrorists all over the world, develop and deploy fleets, armies and weapons systems which have no purpose except to pound any country which disagrees with us into submission. Since, unfortunately for us, the people who disagree with us have terrorists, fleets, armies and weapons systems of their own, the most plausible future scenario is all-out nuclear war.
It is therefore clear that to make the predictions above is to bet recklessly against the odds.
Its still a good bet, though.
In fact, I dont see how I can lose it. Anyone opening the capsule to read these lines will have to agree that my low-probability predictions pretty well describe the actual turn of events... because if the high-probability ones of mass destruction and species suicide should prevail no one is likely to be around to read them.
- Frederik Pohl
SOURCE: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/rip-sci-fi-author-frederik-pohl-his-1987-predictions-f-1241239510
hunter
(38,311 posts)I had the privilege of meeting him in the early 'eighties.
It's my own prediction he will be remembered in that utopia.
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malthaussen
(17,193 posts)Liked his stuff a lot.
-- Mal
olddots
(10,237 posts)r.i.p.
Android3.14
(5,402 posts)Sad to see you go Mr. Pohl.
KG
(28,751 posts)energumen
(76 posts)I read his novel The Age of the Pussyfoot in the mid 70's. When you reflect on some of his (and some other science fictions writers) visions of the future it is astounding the accuracy they sometimes have. I recently had one of those stray thoughts wonder through my head and was stuck by the similarity between the "Joymaker" and our current cell phones.