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Saturday, March 9, 2024

"Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/7e/MLO4331.jpg

Originally appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted in several major retrospectives, by such editors as Arthur O. Lewis, Jr., Ben Bova, Gregory Fitz Gerald, Brian W. Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest,  Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh. Lester Del Rey selected it as one of Pohl's best.

 

Summary:

The "Midas" world is one where energy is so plentiful, that to be a good citizen means consuming more. The more one consumes, the higher one rises on the societal ladder. How does one consume ever more? If one cheats to get ahead, how does one hide their misdeeds? Surely, the evidence of their guilt

Commentary with Spoilers:

First, we should point out the famous fairy tale of Midas, who had the golden touch. Everything he touched turned to gold, making him very rich... until he touched his daughter, suggesting that greed may make us regret how it affects other parts of our lives.

Pohl takes this fairy tale and completely repurposes it. Note what the titles are for anthologies and collections it was reprinted in (he named two of them): American Utopias, Nightmare Age, The Case Against Tomorrow. Now some seem to suggest he does not mean the world he proposes, but the subtitle of Nightmare Age--"Tomorrows... we may be building today!" suggests that his aim seems utterly realistic. I also like that someone thought this deserved a place among utopias, not dystopias.

There's some truth here, but of course it's exaggerated for effect. The coolest thing about this short work is that what starts as a dystopia ends as a kind of utopia. It looks like doom for our hero who at first tries to make it through honesty and is forced by unsavory characters who trick his wife into forcing the couple into having to consume more. So he has to cheat, using robots to help him achieve this end. As he's hailed as a hero of consumption, the noose of his getting caught is cinching around his neck... until it turns out that they knew all along what he'd been doing and were impressed, starting to employ his techniques for consumption. 

Absurd but strangely delightful. It's difficult to explain the metamorphic shift in storytelling as we learn we weren't living in the morality of the dystopia but a true if bizarre utopia. Little wonder it was listed as  one of the great short works in the history of SF.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

"The Tunnel under the World" by Frederik Pohl


Originally appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted in several major retrospectives, by such editors as Arnold Thompson, Brian W. Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, Susan Morris, Orson Scott Card, Tom Shippey, Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Brian W. Aldiss. Lester Del Rey selected it as one of Pohl's best.

Read online here.

 

Summary:

On June 15th, Guy Burckhardt wakes from a dream about an explosion, to a world that's off. One example would be a loudspeaker outside advertising "Feckle Freezers! Feckle Freezers!" repeated over and over that comes off angry, if not insane. Guy goes about his day attempting to make it as normal as possible but the oddity of existence keeps rearing its head until Guy meets someone who will help him piece together what this world is all about.


Commentary (with Spoilers--don't read this if you haven't read the story):

Guy is told that they've been asking questions about the world and it's always June 15th. Everyone remembers the June 14th explosion and keeps waking up here. He's taken to the underground tunnel where all is revealed in several frame by frame revelations. Not only are they all dead, but are tiny figures (robots) on a tabletop, part of an experiment in advertising.

If one were to limit one's self to just one Fred Pohl story, this may be it. Super cool. Comparing it to "The Midas Plague," it is half the length, but the speculation does feel more concentrated and, therefore, more awe inducing. Still "The Midas Plague" is worth reading, but this one is tight.

My only complaint is that there should feel like there's a gradual change to the changes in advertising, adapting to the subjects, so that it becomes impossible to be sure about any aspect of reality--at least that's how I'd write the movie version.

Pohl clearly has an aversion to advertising despite or because of having worked in it (see also "The Midas Plague" and The Merchants of Venus). He would have been born before the proliferation of ads and grown up with radio and catchy jingles and phrases that  people paid for to get customers to remember their products when they entered the store. It must have been jarring to move from a world where it didn't exist to emerge into a world where it did. Whereas later generations may understand where he was coming from, but accepted the ads as the price one paid to get listen to their favorite radio programs or watch TV shows. Nonetheless, our distrust and/or dislike of ads is mixed with our understanding why they exist.

But it's strange what advertising is foisted upon these people whose after-life is spent in a kind of advertising hell. There's coercive methods of ads, to what end? Perhaps they are testing out a kind of oppressive tyranny, seeing to what extremes they can press on people without making them snap.

The term "Feckle Freezer" is curious. They are frozen in time and place and thought. "Feckle" may be altered from "fickle" (erratic) or "fettle" (fitness) or "feck" (value/worth). It seems to be also have a corrupted term in Scotland suggesting one's mettle, to withstand adversity with resilience. Combing all of these definitions has a powerful effect. The sellers want to suggest one thing, but the buyers hear something else. Or maybe it's just meant as a nonsense word that is meant to suggest it has meaning. The cumulative effect is powerful.

There are a number of stories that begin questioning reality especially in the modern era, especially in the works of Philip K. Dick. Perhaps advertising, according to Pohl, is at least one root cause of our losing our grip on what reality is.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

"Fermi and Frost" by Frederik Pohl

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/c/c5/IAS_1985_01_Potter.jpg
First appeared in Shawna McCarthy's Asimov's. It won the Hugo and was up for the Locus and SF Chronicle awards. Reprinted in several retrospectives, by Gardner Dozois, Arthur W. Saha, Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Sheila Williams, Martin H Greenberg, James Frenkel, Jack Dann, Mike Ashley.

 

Summary:

Nuclear war wipes out most of humanity and friends, including their supper. A small remnant escapes to Iceland.


Discussion (Spoilers):

When this appeared, nuclear holocaust stories had been appearing since the bombing of Hiroshima (see Pohl's earlier "Let the Ants Try" which provides an interesting contrast--optimistic about surviving nuclear bombing, but not so lucky about what might follow). Many worried about not just about the survival of themselves, but also human species. Some may have more optimistic than they ought to have been.

While not a difficult story, it can be read too hastily. One might miss choices of tone and word choice. In a sense, there is no story. There is, but it is subverted, short changed. If someone insists there is a story, ask them to summarize it.

There's a boy, but he's sentimentalized, orphaned, helpless, wet. We're told he's nine then reminded he's young. The opening line: "On Timothy Clary's ninth birthday he got no cake."

We have an omniscient narrator who drops into the minds of many. Then we switch to Harry Malibert, a scientist who runs a radio telescope in Arecibo. We think we've finally got our protagonist. But not exactly. We're given the nigh impossibility of survival. Probably it is set in Iceland for its geothermal activity so there is a remote chance of survival, a source heat and energy that is not reliant on the sun.

Then there's the issue of tone: "Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!" 

All of those exclamation marks. Due to juxtaposition, it suggests that some leap off the mountain. But "splat?" 

A few paragraphs later, it suggest that Timothy "might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just it time to become plasma." Just in time? Plasma? There's a dark humor here at work. It discusses all of the likely outcomes where he'd die, but then writes:

"he might have been given medicine, and oufnd somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live...

"But that is in fact what did happen!"

At this point, we doubt that any kind of survival will happen, and that last line, a little glib, remarking on the improbable chance that something good would happen. That last line is repeated at the end, where we have even less faith. But he adds, "At least, one would like to think so." This final sentence rubs a little of the dark humor off. It feels more honest in its feigned hope even though it has provided ample evidence that it won't.

This wasn't the only nuclear-worry story to catch the Hugo's eye that year. David Brin's The Postman also took home a trophy. This was probably part of the zeitgeist, worrying over the arms race build-up. See the cover story in the image above.

At any rate, what makes this story successful is knowledge of the subgenre (post nuclear war stories), knowing the common tropes found in such stories. "Let the Ants Try" subverts the subgenre as well with the thwarting of hope for human survival, but part of the success of that is also knowledge of other stories. But this one takes a hard, realistic look at our optimism. It is the Uber-story, paradoxically superseding all others yet entirely depending on knowledge and existence of that subgenre.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

"Let the Ants Try" by Frederik Pohl [as by James MacCreigh]

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/b/b1/BYNDDFTM3C1952.jpg

 First appeared in Paul L. Payne's Planet Stories, reprinted by Pohl himself, Robert Silverberg, and Algis Budrys. Read online.

Summary:

After a nuclear war, the radiation creates ants with lungs. Two men, including Dr. Salva Gordy, see this as an opportunity to go back in time.

Discussion with Spoilers:

This seems to be Pohl's mash-up between H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and his "The Empire of the Ants." Without lungs, there is a limitation to the size an insect might grow, hence the spontaneous of lungs in ants--however improbable.  It may still be that mash-up, but apparently it began as several Midtown Manhattan discussions between himself and George R. Spoerer (not known to be a writer--the only info that I can seem to find is that he was 16 years Pohl's senior and had an apartment at one time in Brooklyn's Jackson Heights). Another source points out stories that precede this one as the inspiration, but Wells' supercedes them all and being the more famous and more reprinted, perhaps a more likely source. Wells, after all, is mentioned in the story.

The idea is to take these ants back in time and release them and occupy the human beings throughout history in wars with the ants, thereby preventing nuclear war. 

This seems a half-baked idea, especially how far back in time he goes. More likely, three scenarios would occur: 1) The ants eradicate the humans, 2) the ants are still battling humans, perhaps preventing educational/technological progress, 3) one species domesticates the other into companions or as a beast of burden, 4) the humans eradicate the ants.

Only in scenario 2 is it possible that the nuclear bombs are not created. Apparently, the ants can manipulate equipment and reverse engineer technology (although presumably using different appendages), so they seem just as likely to build a nuclear bomb at some point, making the whole project foolhardy. 

I had assumed, at first, that the clip below was the goal, thanks to the title. So I was surprised that the protagonist cared what the ants did to the humans since humans had destroyed the world (whatever the ants did would have to be better), but rereading I paid better attention to how he simply wanted his family back. Note the first "Salva" which in Spanish means he/she/it saves (although that could have referred to the ants as well.)

Therefore, apparently, the unnamed narrator titled this story--as well as having written it since who else was left to write it? But of course that means they went back to different timelines to witness events and assumed what other people were thinking.

Pohl himself was the first to reprint his  own story (Silverberg followed 20-odd years later). I'll let the cover of that anthology speak for what he thought about his own story. He said it was the first story of his he thought worth preserving

In the 1977 movie adaptation of Wells' "The Empire of the Ants," characters welcome their new ant taskmasters which The Simpsons famously allude to where they stirred up a number of memes, decades later:



Thursday, February 29, 2024

"Growing up in Edge City" by Frederik Pohl


https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/0/0b/PCHMNNGKFQ1975.jpg

Originally appeared in Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg's Epoch. It was up for a Nebula. James Frankel considered it one of Pohl's best, collected it in Platinum Pohl.

Summary:

In a highly regimented yet protective mechanical society, a young man routinely hides his location from his proctors and goes off exploring Edge City. There he meets Dropouts, people like his parents who somehow were unfit for society.

Discussion:

Whoa, Nelly. This one is fire. Definitely, experimental in style--these solid chunks of text that give us insight into this isolated mind that one expects to be influenced in one direction--toward a sensitive feeling toward people who had been kind to him--but instead he lies about having met them and when he is older and in power, is driven to attack the people who had invited him to live with them and be loved. This is paradoxically moving and excruciating. The style is so uniquely tied to everything about the story. Brilliant. Not one of the greatest of the greats, but well worth the time.


Sunday, February 25, 2024

"Day Million" by Frederik Pohl

 For more a deeper look and for other ways of seeing this story, see this post.  It has been viewed ~1500 times.

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/a1/IMPULSEOCT1966.jpgFirst appeared in Frank M. Robinson's Rogue. Reprinted in nearly a dozen major retrospectives, byAnn VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel,  Leigh Ronald Grossman, Arthur B. Evans, Gardner Dozois, Martin H. Greenberg, David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian Attebery, Robert Silverberg, Josh Pachter,  Martin H. Greenberg, James E. Gunn, Patricia S. Warrick, Joseph D. Olander, Brian W. Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Pamela Sargent, Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, Dick Allen, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr, Val Clear. Both Lester Del Rey and James Frenkel considered this one of Pohl's best.


Summary:

In the near or far future, a boy and a girl fall in love. But they are not like any boy or girl that we today might know.

 

Discussion:

The Aesthetics:

Someone asked me what the most disappointing but most lauded story I've read. This one came to mind. The biggest problem is the lack of fictive dream as John Gardner called it.  We never get to fall in love with our characters who are supposed to fall in love with each other. This was my complaint although one might focus on other issues. I don't care if I agree or disagree, but the aesthetics should be up to par. One could slip into and out of the fictive dream, which would probably be the best scenario in a situation like this, no matter how difficult the future might be to explain.

One major unanswered question: How and why is the narrator talking to us in this way? What is preventing our understanding? It addresses us (if we indeed are the adressees in the speaker's tale) as if we will object, but I doubt few SF readers actually ever do. If only the story were more pinned down in time and place, it might have suggested more of the fictive dream.

This suggests that the story is aimed in a different direction. Much as I like stories that break the fictive dream, we are rarely immersed in it here. Pohl could have done so as he had the skill, but chose not to. Perhaps he didn't want to. Why not? Did he not want or was he incapable of delivering the strangeness? Was he writing at the edge of what he could comprehend? Or was he purposefully thwarting expectations?

Robert Silverberg praises this "style" in Worlds of Wonder, yet almost in the same breath suggests it shouldn't be done again.

In this era, a number of writers were trying to rewrite what fiction means. This is probably why Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss included it in the Nebula Award anthology, despite it apparently not making the cut. It may have been considered part of the New Wave, which Aldiss (especially) and Harrison sometimes championed.

The Thumbed Nose at Normies:

The British New Wave was more aesthetically driven while the American New Wave (exemplified by Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions) was more taboo driven. This story conveniently fits both parameters. Clearly there was cross-pollination between the two. It feels like a Dangerous Visions story, and perhaps it helped launch the idea in Ellison's brain.

This was first published in the men's magazine--intended as a rival to Playboy--as edited by Frank Robinson who was gay, which is a curious combination yet explains its publication.

As suggested above, the style itself is a thumbed nose at our conception of story should be but it also  rejects our idea of normative sexuality. But it does so, so strangely. Yes, it is still trangendered individuals, but in a way that it is still normal. If it could be labeled as such. It wants to make the strange as normal as possible. It is but is not.

However, the future changes genders based not on the individual but on what outsiders view the genetics should be. In a sense, it doesn't understand that it is presenting the same problem to the next generation. It isn't even nature developing one's gender, but human beings telling people what their gender is. Pohl's narrator suggests this is just like giving a scholarship to Julliard for people talented at making music, but this is done without consent before an individual could decide for themselves.

The Science:

This suggests one of the potential scientific problems with the text. On one hand, maybe in the future, we think we might be able to guess by an arrangement of genes who will desire might desire to be transgender, but it neglects our understanding that not only is phenotype determined by genetics developing, which influences the development of other genes but also by nurture. Also, it would be far simpler to add or remove the Y chromosome, so that one would not have to continually repress one's gene expression. Yet the Y and the X are maintained as is. But it still seems improbable that one could guess what phenotype one would want to express. Instead of freeing of gender, it might be a shackling of gender. This might create more problems than it prevents.

 When I first read it, I didn't challenge its suppositions, assuming "Day Million" meant [a] Day [a] Million [years from now]. I think (the text says about 10,000 years from now, so maybe I accepted that). Some far future, anyway. In Pohl's essay "On Velocity Exercises" from the Those Who Can anthology (see discussion of that essay here), that this was supposed to be a million days from the beginning of the Christian era. That would mean, more or less, Novembber 23, 2737. That would have been ~770 years from when Pohl originally wrote this. 

However, if one were to project from the publication date, then it would suggest Christmas Eve or Christmas in 4703. Either way, we are still a far cry from 10,000 years from now. Perhaps Pohl rounded and did a quick mental calculation using 100 days in a year instead of 365.25 (accounting for leap year). This suggests that maybe Pohl wrote this a little too hastily, perhaps without double-checking himself.

One character has a centrifuge for a heart. That doesn't make sense based on what we know about centrifuges which separate the parts of a solution/suspension such as that contained in a cell in order to study the parts of each. Why would a creature want to separate out the parts of their blood? It would probably be poor at holding oxygen post-separation. Or maybe the centrifuge is more metaphorical, suggesting that the blood is flung out to the parts of the body by some high-speed rotary device. However, one problem would be a huge blood pressure, which means a different constitution from what we have today, or they'd all be dead seconds after creation of the heart. The other problem would be the difficulty of oxygen distribution, which  would be a lack of time for this to occur.

It also discussed osmosis as one method of oxygen distribution, which make sense unless we are talking about beings at least as small as frogs with large surface areas.  

On the Whole:

As the above link suggests, there is much to appreciate. It is flawed. But it is probably best appreciated as a kind of speculative essay.

 


Saturday, February 24, 2024

Frederik Pohl's Velocity Exercises and thoughts on style: "Grandy Devil," "Punch" and "Pythias"

"Grandy Devil" first appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted by Robin Scott Wilson.
This was reprinted as one of Pohl's best (~the top 15% of his stories up until this point, 1974? or perhaps from the 1940s through the 1960s).

Summary: A young man learns who the strange people who visit the house which has been in family's hands for generations.


"Punch" first appeared in Playboy. Reprinted by Avram Davidson, Groff Conklin, the editors of Playboy, Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg. This was reprinted as one of Pohl's best (~the top 15% of his stories up until this point, 1974? or perhaps from the 1940s through the 1960s). Read online.

Summary: A kind group of aliens offer humanity many gifts, including warships to venture into space.

 

"Pythias" first appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted by Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, Jenny-Lynn Waugh. Read online.

Summary: A young visits an old friend in the hospital, who had just protected the Senate from a hand grenade meant to blow up the proceedings.

#

Velocity Exercises

What are they?

In his essay on style in the anthology, Those Who Can, these are three stories Pohl pointed to as having fit the definition. Pohl used a number of terms and definitions that make it difficult to pinpoint.

"Three-word stories": Pohl wrote, "not that every one of them is exactly three words; it may be a little more or less." Rather, I think he refers to the turn the story makes which may depend on three-word revelations that cast the story in a new light. In "Punch" it's "Neither do we," and in "Punch" it's "But I can."

"Twist-ending" or "one-punch" stories: two other names Pohl lent to this idea, which Pohl telegraphs by calling one "Punch." These, he says, were popular in magazines like Liberty and Collier's. He's a bit dismissive, but the anthologies these appeared in had multiple printings, which is rare for anthologies. The magazines were popular in Pohl's youth, but they folded, but I suspect that had more to do with the changing economy than the stories themselves given the popularity of anthologies that appeared decades after the magazines folded. Moreover,  Collier's published Hemingway, Faulkner, and Heinlein whose work could not easily be summed up by this.

Velocity exercises: What is the velocity in the exercise? A story that can be written quickly? A story that can be read quickly? He doesn't say. He does call it a haiku--a kind of compressed story told in 2000 words or less, which may be a narrative form more akin to, say, the sonnet and its iambic pentameter and final turn, especially.

Pohl adds that the important thing to these stories, despite the emphasis on the "turn" or "twist," is not to diminish the story that proceeds the change. He does invest in the main story, but it's unclear where these represent a departure from other stories of this kind.

Now Pohl's essay is supposed to be about style. I suspect that the two short short stories ("Day Million" and "Grandy Devil") were selected for Pohl by Robin Scott Wilson so as to give Pohl a path to illumine what style in a story might be. Rather, Pohl took the essay in the direction of form, which is somewhat informative but not fully. The gist of what Pohl had to say about this was

"In the act of solving these problem [character, plot, scene, setting, theme] style is created. If it is appropriate, it is good; if it is inappropriate it; and that is the Whole of the Law."

The last is an allusion to Aleister Crowley, suggesting that the writer seek out his own true path. A bit mushy and not entirely useful for a writer seeking advice. This suggests that he may not know himself except on a subconscious level. He does suggest that parodists copy other writers' styles and when it does so inappropriately to the story in question, "the results are comic."

James Gunn in addressing his own style in his most famous story [the Nebula-nominated "The Listeners"] says essentially that style should be seen but not heard--a very different conclusion. Yet, Gunn goes into more depth, suggesting that style in part comes out of revision, seeking better words to express one's meaning. Most surprisingly, Gunn invites disagreement: "don't let me get by with that! disagree!" which echoes the old, long lost ways of academia that invited people to disagree, to let people own their own opinions and to have discussions, rather to be told what to think.

What's interesting about several of these stories ["The Listeners" and "Grandy Devil"] and the above quote alluding to Crowley, too, is that they borrow from other writers, invoking a kind of style that comments on and illumines the work of each. 

In "Grandy Devil" Pohl has a series of "begats" that calls on the Bible where historical lineages are of critical importance as it is here as well.

Gunn's "The Listeners" quotes famous works to put them in a context of communicating with aliens, which both illumines and alters the theme in that they comment on Gunn's own spare, clear style.

 

Commentary on individual stories:

"Grandy Devil": In some ways this is the most fun, but the least provocative. Unless you consider the mystery of one's lineage important. There's also the idea that we don't always understand the history of conflicts that we walk into as young people.


"Punch": This is the most famed and recognized of the three, but perhaps the least interesting. Beware of those bearing gifts. "I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts."--Virgil's Aeneid. But still fun and provocative, nonetheless.


"Pythias": The most brilliant of the three, this tells the story of a man who kills a friend in order to obtain the secret of telekinesis and hold it for himself. It presents itself as doing the greater good thing, but we see that it's just selfishness and greed--a parable applicable to every political faction ever.