Frederick Pohl’s been a fixture in scifi for decades. From the 1930s onward, Pohl has worked diligently as an author and as an editor of science fiction. He’s written dozens of novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Gateway and the Nebula-winning Man Plus. He’s also written hundreds of stories, thirty of which were culled for this stellar collection.
I’d never read Pohl before dipping into Platinum Pohl, but now I find myself eager to expand my Pohl-ian horizons. This is Grand Master science fiction at its finest. Each one of the stories in here is a gem, a well-crafted little machine. Many writers insist that writing a good short story of 5,000 words can be a great deal more difficult than writing a good novel of 50,000. You have to make every word count; you have to grab the reader’s attention right away and hold on tight to the end, tying it all off with a great twist as payoff. Pohl’s shorts never disappoint on these criteria.
“The Merchants of Venus” tells the story of a down-on-his-luck pilot struggling to make a living on Venus, desperate for the cash he needs to replace his ruined liver and buy a ticket back to Earth. Then a wealthy couple arrives looking for a tour guide who knows about alien artifacts… “Shaffery Among the Immortals” is about a talentless astronomer who will do anything to make a name for himself—and ends up doing so, but there’s a thin line between fame and infamy. “The Knights of Arthur” is about a trio of beached sailors—one of whom has been reduced to a brain in a box—just trying to make it in a post-apocalyptic world.
The majority of the stories feature desperate characters who are given a now-or-never shot at their dreams, a great recipe for a short story (or a Twilight Zone episode) in my opinion. And, usually, the characters pull through. Pohl’s an optimist, and anything but postmodern, even in his more recent stories: his writing is big, bold, and imaginative. Not subtle, not disturbing, not ambiguous. Those who look for those elements in their scifi should look elsewhere.
My favorite story in the collection is the wonderfully clever “Waiting for the Olympians,” in which Pohl thoroughly and thoughtfully imagines a world where the Roman Empire never collapsed. The twist is that the main character is a hack science fiction author who, in urgent need of an advance, comes up with an idea for an alternate history novel about a world where the Empire collapsed to be replaced by the one we know today. Yeah, it’s high concept, but it’s also funny and thought-provoking and it proves that Pohl is more than happy to poke fun at himself.
Good stuff, people. Read this collection, particularly if you have any interest in writing scifi yourself. Frederick Pohl demonstrates more craft in just one of these stories than many authors display in their entire phonebook-sized scifi epics. It’s an education in hardcover.
Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories by Frederick Pohl
Publisher : Tor Books; First Edition (November 29, 2005)
Hardcover : 464 pages
ISBN-10 : 0312875274
ISBN-13 : 978-0312875275
Genre: classic scifi short stories
