History Creator / FrederikPohl

Frederik George Pohl Jr. (November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science fiction writer and editor. His first professional publication was in 1937; his last novel, ''All the Lives He Led'', was published in April 2011. He also started a blog, which earned him the 2010 UsefulNotes/HugoAward for Best Fan Writer. This was his seventh Hugo, joining one for Best Novel, two for Best Short Story, and three for Best Professional Magazine. He is the only person to have won Hugos both for writing and editing. He has also won two UsefulNotes/{{Nebula Award}}s for Best Novel. He was declared a [[UsefulNotes/DamonKnightMemorialGrandMasterAward Grand Master of Science Fiction]] in 1992.

* CloningBlues: A duology of novels, ''Farthest Star'' and ''Wall Around A Star'' (written with Creator/JackWilliamson), feature a form of [[TeleportersAndTransporters teleportation]] that sends a copy of you elsewhere but leaves the original intact. The copy can be modified ''en route,'' since all you're transmitting is information. Interestingly, this is how most physicists figure real-life teleportation might work.

His best known solo works are probably the multiple-award-winning ''Gateway'' (the first novel of the ''Literature/HeecheeSaga''), ''Jem'' (winner of the National Book Award), and ''Man Plus''. He regularly collaborated with Creator/JackWilliamson--the two wrote nearly a dozen novels together, including the ''Starchild'' series and ''The Undersea Trilogy''. He also wrote several works with C. M. Kornbluth, including the very famous satire, ''The Space Merchants''.

* FutureFoodIsArtificial: In ''The Space Merchants'', there's a giant growing fleshy lump called "Chicken Little" (it was originally a piece of chicken heart tissue) that they carve slices off: the working man's "meat". Better yet, it's fed by hundreds of tubes carrying raw yeast in from a multi-story yeast farm above it, tended by hordes of perpetually abused sweatshop workers. This is actually based on a real-life experiment; [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Carrel Dr. Alexis Carrel]], an early-20th-century biologist, kept a culture of cells from an embryonic chicken heart alive for over 20 years. Unfortunately, after [[AuthorExistenceFailure Carrel passed away]], the culture was [[NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup destroyed]] for [[ParanoiaFuel unknown reasons]], and [[LostTechnology nobody has been able to replicate the experiment since.]]

* ''[[Literature/DangerousVisions The Day After the Day the Martians Came]]''

* AdvertOverloadedFuture: This trope is a major focus of the humorous novels ''The Space Merchants'', ''The Merchants' War'' and ''The Merchants of Venus''. The first, in particular, featured advertisers competing to come up with new--and usually horrific--ways to promote their clients' goods.

** "The Mile High Club" is set in a world where the US won World War II with biological instead of nuclear research, leading to a number of medical breakthroughs.

* ChristmasCreep: In ''Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus'', September is considered to be the peak of Christmas season. The devout Christian Hargrave family are very uncomfortable with this (the main character's attempts to help get them into the CommercializedChristmas spirit only make this worse).

* GroundhogDayLoop: In ''The Tunnel Under the World'', Guy Burckhardt lives in a town where June 15th is repeated every day, but the inhabitants don't realize.

** "The Mile High Club", a short story for an Isaac Asimov tribute book, featured all the members of the famous SF club the Futurians, still alive in the 1990s. In this timeline, Asimov (actually the aforementioned Carrel, but people assume it was Asimov because of his later fame) had convinced FDR to focus on biological research instead of atomic weapons. The post-WWII research boom resulted in a number of medical breakthroughs, and Asimov became more famous than Einstein (who is mentioned in the story as an obscure physicist from Princeton).

* ScrewYourself: In ''The Coming of the Quantum Cats'', similar characters from a mulititude of timelines mix & match during a cross-time war; when a slightly more advanced timeline decides to quarantine the others to avoid eddies in the space time continuum, a lot of editions get dumped on an uninhabited Earth, where multiple copies of a particularly unsavory mook decide to set up house together.

* TomatoInTheMirror: In "The Tunnel Under the World", The main character becomes convinced that some sinister conspiracy is keeping the citizens of his town stuck in a GroundhogDayLoop by erasing their memories every night. He eventually learns that [[spoiler:he and everyone else in the town were killed in a nuclear explosion, and their consciousnesses have been installed into tiny androids in a scale model town where they repeat their final day over and over while researchers use them to test the effectiveness of advertising jingles and political slogans.]]

* WeWillHaveEuthanasiaInTheFuture: In the short story "Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair," an overpopulated U.S. where both abortion ''and'' contraception are outlawed implements a form of population control using euthanasia by chance. "Lottery fairs" are held periodically at which fairgoers "pay" for rides, concessions, raffles (including several for jobs), etc. by inserting their arms into a cuff that offers a small but real chance of delivering a lethal injection.

* ChristmasCreep: In ''Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus'', September is considered to be the peak of Christmas season. The devout Christian Hargraves are very uncomfortable with this.

!! Works by Frederik Pohl with their own trope pages include:

!!Other works by Frederik Pohl provide examples of:

* RidiculousFutureInflation: In ''The Age of the Pussyfoot'', Charles Forrester is revived from cryopreservation in the year 2527 with a quarter of a million dollars from his insurance and interest. He thinks he is rich. It takes him a while to find out he isn't. It's handled quite well as the main source of inflation is rising health care costs.

* VenusIsWet: In ''The Space Merchants'', Venus is a steamy jungle world.

* MindHive: The protagonists of ''Black Star Rising'' include a scientist known as Manyface, who once nearly died from brain damage that was treated by replacing the lost sections with pieces from the brain of a dead boy. When asked if he could remember his name, he gave it, then gave the dead boy's name a second later. The two realized that their joined knowledge was a great aid to the scientist's research, and by the start of the story they've collected so many brains they've had to undergo experimental skull-enlargement surgery to fit them all in.

* SolarCPR: In ''Wolfsbane'' by Pohl and Kornbluth, Earth's moon is turned into an artificial sun to keep the Earth livable since it was stolen from the solar system by aliens. The moon needs to be relighted periodically.

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was an American science fiction writer and editor. His first professional publication was in 1937; his last novel, ''All the Lives He Led'', was published in April 2011. He also started a blog, which earned him the 2010 UsefulNotes/HugoAward for Best Fan Writer. This was his seventh Hugo, joining one for Best Novel, two for Best Short Story, and three for Best Professional Magazine. He is the only person to have won Hugos both for writing and editing. He has also won two UsefulNotes/{{Nebula Award}}s for Best Novel. He was declared a [[UsefulNotes/DamonKnightMemorialGrandMasterAward Grand Master of Science Fiction]] in 1992.

* "[[Literature/DangerousVisions The Day After the Day the Martians Came]]"

** "The Mile High Club", a short story for an Isaac Asimov tribute book, featured all the members of the famous SF club the Futurians, still alive in the 1990s. In this timeline, Asimov (actually the aforementioned Carrel, but people assume it was Asimov because of his later fame) had convinced FDR to focus on biological research instead of atomic weapons. The post-WWII research boom resulted in a number of medical breakthroughs, and Asimov became more famous than Einstein (who is metioned in the story as an obscure physicist from Princeton).

** "The Mile High Club", a short story for an Isaac Asimov tribute book, featured all the members of the famous SF club the Futurians, still alive in the 1990s. In this timeline, Asimov had convinced FDR to focus on biological research instead of atomic weapons. The post-WWII research boom resulted in a number of medical breakthroughs, and Asimov became more famous than Einstein (who is metioned in the story as an obscure physicist from Princeton).

* ''Literature/TheStarchildTrilogy''

* ExplosiveLeash: In the ''Starchild Trilogy'' by Pohl and Creator/JackWilliamson, political dissidents are fitted with explosive collars with undefined timers that need to be periodically "wound up" by the guard's key to renew the timer. Within the series, legend has it that the only way around the tamper mechanism is to detach the head, remove the collar, and sew the head back on.

* MasterComputer: ''The Starchild Trilogy'' has The Plan of Man, a great computer which is responsible for managing the limited resource of Earth in the face of massive overpopulation. Even its enemies, who believe in old-fashioned concepts of freedom, are reluctant to attack it directly, since many of its functions are critical, and prefer to flee into space. Amusingly, by modern standards, it communicates by [[OurGraphicsWillSuckInTheFuture printing its commands on paper]].

* ApocalypseHow: [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX2 Stellar/Physical Annihilation]]: In ''The World at the End of Time'' war between plasma-based beings that live inside stars results in the destruction of uncountable solar systems. The war is fought by directing energies into a star that tear apart the beings. It has the side effect of causing the stars that the beings inhabit to go nova. That side affect is used to exterminate biological entities before they might threaten the beings. One notable example is the destruction of a Wolf-Rayet type star when one being tricks another into believing that is the type of star he prefers. [[spoiler:It is revealed to be ''Sun-like'' stars what he prefers, and their war takes out Earth and all human civilisation except the colony the story is set in.]]

* ColdSleepColdFuture: Happens to the protagonist of ''The World at the End of Time''. After the failed attempt to find what's happening on the planet Nebo, he and his wife are put on suspended animation to be thawed out 400 years later in a very different -and [[CrapsackWorld far more hostile]]- world than that they knew.

* StarfishAliens: ''The World At The End Of Time'' features plasma-based aliens who live inside stars and don't care much for "slowlife" like biological beings.
* StarKilling: The aliens that live inside stars described in ''The World at the End of Time'' have the nasty habit of attacking each other, causing the stars where they live to go nova [[spoiler: without any regards to the people that could live in the planets orbiting them, as occurred with the humans on Earth]]. However, it does not totally qualify since the affected stars "heal" after some millennia.

* TimeAbyss: The final part of ''The World at the End of Time'' [[spoiler: takes place in the ''very'' far future (''10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years'' from now; not kidding, read the book), when all the stars of the Universe -except the ones ejected off the Milky Way by Five- have died and the unique energy source available to Wan-To is that provided by proton decay.]]

* ToTheFutureAndBeyond: Happens [[spoiler: twice]] to Viktor Sorricaine, the main (human) protagonist of ''The World at the End of Time'' thanks to [[spoiler: suspended animation and relativistic contraction of time]].