Frederik Pohl has been keeping a blog since the beginning of this year. Most recently he posted about his pacemaker implant, but over the last few months he’s also put up a series of posts about early fandom that are just terrific.
I’m a sucker for old SF pulps and stories about the penny-a-word writers that filled their pages. You’ll never convince me that John Updike, David Foster Wallace, or Joyce Carol Oates (or most of the literati of US literature) are half as good as Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Damon Knight, or Stanley Weinbaum (or, from a bit later, Robert Sheckley or Barry Malzberg).
Pohl will celebrate his 90th birthday next Thanksgiving. He published his first story in 1939, and has won a whole raft of awards for his work since. As an editor he was responsible for publishing Samuel Delany’s Dahlgren, and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man.
One of his best known early works is The Space Merchants, co-written with Cyril Kornbluth. Space Merchants satirizes the people Mad Men romanticizes today. If we lived in a just and fair world Pohl would have the most prestigious accolades American literature has to offer raining down on him for his 70 years of creating and sustaining our cultural imagination.
