Gateways (75 page)

He always had good things to say about
The Space Merchants
, though. A satirical anticapitalist masterpiece and so on. I totally disagreed about
The Door into Summer
(and continue to do so, though I do think that the Maker’s Manifesto and its cry of “Screws not glue” and “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” are good implicit critiques of Hired Girl, Inc.’s engineering decisions). But Dad, you are totally, 100 percent right about
The Space Merchants
. That thing is a damned masterwork: comic, scathing. The gender stuff is more than a little dated (as Jo Walton pointed out in a recent review on
tor.com
), but that’s endemic to the period. The fact remains,
The Space Merchants
was country before country was cool—presaging Naomi Klein and Adbusters both.

The financialization of the twenty-first century’s economy means an ever increasing polarization of wealth. The superrich are in danger of speciating from us Homo suckerus. They run the financial system. Ikea registered itself as a charity and pays 3.5 percent tax on 551 million euros in annual profits, while its founder (likely the richest man on Earth) hides out in Switzerland, dodging tax on the millions he presumably extracts
from his “charity.” The megarich can afford Götterdämmerung, rising seas, and climate devastation. They’ll just hop from mountaintop to mountaintop in harrier jets, carefully breeding their offspring while we tread water. It’s far more darkly comic than even Pohl and Kornbluth imagined.

I first met Fred at a birthday party in Judy Merril’s honor in Toronto. We were both smokers at the time, and it was a golden time to be a smoker, since there were so few of us that you’d get to meet and converse with people who’d otherwise be way out of your league (case in point: I met my wife because we were the only two smokers at a Nokia think tank in Helsinki; I quit immediately afterward, thus ensuring that I wouldn’t ever meet anyone as wonderful as her again). I was about nineteen at the time. I was in awe. Fred was Fred: nice, funny, gracious. The veritable template of what a gentlemanly SF writer could be. It’s an honor to write this story for him.

Hope you like it, Fred.

—C
ORY
D
OCTOROW

I’m the invisible man in this book, the in-house editor. My job (at Tor Books) is to work with the wonderful Betty Anne Hull to make sure the publication process goes smoothly. When there’s an editor whose name is on the front of the book, the in-house editor
should
be invisible.

Betty has done all the heavy lifting, from the very start of the publishing process, way back in March 2009. One day she called me up and said something like: “Fred is going to be ninety in November. I’d like to put together a book to honor him. Stories, reminiscences, by writers and others he’s known, friends, family, all sorts of things, in time for his birthday.”

My first thought was that this was impossible. November! Normally it takes ten months to go from having a finished manuscript to when finished books hit the stands. Nothing had been written, no contracts signed—not even a deal had been agreed upon. Even as I despaired about the timing, I told Betty I loved the idea of this book. I’ve worked with Frederik Pohl for more than fifteen years, and have been a great admirer of his work for much longer than that. I can’t think of anyone else in science fiction who is more deserving of this kind of a book. As Betty mentioned in her introduction, he’s done just about everything you can do in science fiction, and I’m merely one of the many, many people who know and revere him and his contributions to the field over the past—gasp!—seventy years.

But, as I said to Betty when she called me, there was no reasonable way we could have a book such as she described ready for November. Could we, I asked, possibly publish this sometime in 2010? She very kindly let on as how that would be nice. In the best of all possible worlds, sooner would have been better, but a terrific book in 2010 would be better than a hastily cobbled-together book in November 2009.

With this mandate from her, I told her I’d do what I could to get the okay to buy the book—and as quickly as possible. So I called our publisher
Tom Doherty who, like the rest of us at Tor, is a huge fan of Fred both on a professional and personal level. When I suggested this project to Tom, he said, without hesitation, “For Fred, yes, of course!”

I immediately conveyed this message to Betty, and we were off to the races. Now she had to contact a bunch of writers and others in the field who have either worked with or been influenced by Fred. That includes a lot of people, and it took her a while to get hold of everyone she thought might be interested in being involved with the book. Some people were hard to track down; others were easy to contact. But altogether, there was an enormously positive response to her e-mails, letters, and phone calls.

As you’ve seen from the stories and appreciations, not everyone she contacted had the time to write a story for this book. All the people represented in these pages are, after all, writers, and most of them are busy working on novels, most of them with deadlines, and some of them were late and trying desperately to finish other projects. But despite that, Betty—offering them a chance to express their love and appreciation of Fred and his enormous body of work as editor, agent, writer, and all-around SF legend—has gathered a collection of fictions and personal anecdotes I hope you have enjoyed as much as I have.

April came, and people started responding. A few sent their regrets that they couldn’t write a story, but shortly I started getting e-mails from Betty with stories from various writers, and appreciations from a few people who, for one reason or another, simply could not write stories for the book. Along with the stories came afterwords about Fred. You’ve read them already, so you know what fun these many afterwords are, along with the stories and appreciations. For me, it’s been a constant joy to open my e-mail, see two or three e-mails from Betty, each containing yet another delicious piece of fiction or nonfiction for the book.

Betty—well, she’s just so sweet. When Cory Doctorow submitted his twenty thousand word novella, she apologized to me. “Sorry it’s so long.” I had to suppress my impulse to laugh, to scream with delight. What a tough thing to deal with: A wonderful, amazing novella from Cory. Somehow, I told her, we’ll manage to find room for it.

It wasn’t just Cory, of course. David Brin’s novella is even longer, and also extremely cool. And Frank Robinson’s novelette, not quite as long, is also quite wonderful. And it wasn’t just these, of course. The next six months witnessed a steady influx of stories from many other favorite science fiction writers: Brian W. Aldiss, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Phyllis Eisenstein, Neil Gaiman, James Gunn, Joe Haldeman, Harry
Harrison, Larry Niven, Jody Lynn Nye, Mike Resnick, Sheri S. Tepper, Vernor Vinge, and Gene Wolfe.

It is very rare (you can look it up!) for an in-house editor to giggle with delight, but
Gateways
caused me to do this on more than one occasion. After the first few times, I had to restrain myself, lest people think I was stranger than they already knew.

Get the picture? This was more like fun than work. Really.

But more to the point, I hope you’ll understand that getting superlative original stories from as many wonderful writers as have contributed to
Gateways
was nothing short of a miracle, if for no reason other than the odds against it, given the demands they all have on their time and talent. At Tor we publish a fair number of anthologies, and we always want to get the best writers to contribute. But most of the time we receive stories from only a small number of the authors we’d most like to contribute. So
Gateways
, with its “Who’s Who” of science fiction has been a uniquely wonderful, satisfying experience for us. And we hope it is equally wonderful for one particular reader: Frederik Pohl. More than once, it has occurred to me that the success of this book as an artistic venture depends on Fred liking the results. And that scares me just a little.

Frederik Pohl’s accomplishments have been mentioned by various writers in their afterwords or appreciations. As an editor myself, I’m all too keenly aware of the fact that we’re making this book to honor not only a writer, but also, most emphatically, an editor. A hard-nosed, grizzled veteran who is nobody’s fool when it comes to judging good science fiction. So I’m hoping that you’re still reading, Fred, and you haven’t thrown the book against the wall in disgust, thinking—
Hell, I could do better than this!
(Hey, Fred, if you really don’t like it, just please don’t throw it. It might put a dent in a wall.)

I’ve left out what everyone else in the book has talked about: what Frederik Pohl means to me. I haven’t known Fred nearly as long as some of the others who have provided reminiscences of him. (I was amazed to read Frank Robinson’s afterword, in which he referred to him as “Freddy.”) As happens between authors and editors, Fred has become a dear and valued friend, but I have other friends. What Fred has given to me that is unique to him, is his work, to which I relate as an editor, but even more, as a grateful reader.

There is a common thread in the afterwords and appreciations, whether they talk about his editing, his agenting, or his writing. In everything he does he gives maximum effort. So Fred gave Bob Silverberg grief, even when he was buying his short stories, when he thought they should be better; he
turned the magazine
Worlds of If
into a Hugo Award–winning machine; he invented and defined the term
original-story anthology
with the
Star Science Fiction Stories
series; he bought, edited, and helped market SamuelR. Delany’s remarkable, bestselling novel
Dhalgren
; he’s written close to a million words of thought-provoking, entertaining short fiction. And when he’d already been writing longer than most people in the field, he began to write the string of startlingly original novels that began with the multiple award-winning, bestselling
Gateway
.

All these endeavors illustrate his drive for excellence in himself and in others, a big reason why he’s a living legend, and why all the people who have contributed to this book were eager to jeopardize other deadlines so they could be included.

Others have discussed many aspects of his career; I will add only one thing that has struck me, which marks Frederik Pohl as unique in the annals of science fiction and perhaps all of modern literature.

He started writing at the end of the 1930s. The “Golden Age” of science fiction was in full flower, John W. Campbell was editing
Astounding Stories
, and World War II was on the horizon. He has written stories in every decade since. What so impresses me is not his longevity, but rather that he is what I think of as a “complete” science fiction writer. By that I mean to say that his best work functions on many levels.

More specifically: from his early work to this day, he has demonstrated an ability to tackle a range of subjects and styles that has developed and matured throughout the course of his career. He has an uncanny talent for creating viewpoint characters that fit the needs of the story, whatever they require.

Many of his stories are political, not surprising considering, as Betty pointed out, his strong interest in politics. But even in his blatantly political fiction his humanism, as expressed through his characters, is never sacrificed to an agenda. In his stories and novels, his nonfiction and in his editorial decisions as well, he is consistently mindful of the things that make us human, for better or worse.

Most particularly important to the science-fictional validity of his work over the decades, he has successfully integrated science and technology into the fabric of his stories. He has continually found new and diverse ways to cogently present possible outcomes of a mind-boggling variety of potential scenarios inspired by new scientific theories, discoveries, or technological advances.

Science fiction readers are fond of dividing the genre into hard- and soft-SF. But Frederik Pohl defies that distinction as do few other writers.
He has the skills of those who write soft-SF—i.e., stories with the social sciences as their basis. But he also uses the tools of hard-SF—works with plots that are inspired by an idea based in one of the physical sciences—to craft stories that readers find both accessible and challenging, tales that intrigue them, that make them
think
and consider the possibilities inherent in the story’s premise. That may sound easy but it isn’t.

When you put together all these virtues, you get what I think of as a “complete” writer. A writer for the last century, and for the current millennium.

One last thing: if you are familiar with Frederik Pohl’s
oeuvre,
you may already have noted that among the stories in this book some are, essentially, Fred Pohl stories. Not stories written by him, but ones that use some trope, style, or technique that reflects his influence. This is only fitting. His stylistically diverse work, wide-ranging in subject matter, has provided the marvelous authors who fête him in these pages ample food for thought, as it does for all of us, the lucky ones who read and enjoy his work.