Frederik Pohl: Hatching the Phoenix

Frederik Pohl (1919- ) is both a writer of the first rank and one of the most important editors in the history of the SF field. He has edited magazines such as Galaxy and If, original anthologies such as Star Science Fiction, and the Bantam Books SF publishing line.

Back when SF fans were cellar Christians, a small group of, for the most part, teenagers holding meetings in basements and planning for the future, Frederik Pohl was a member of the most left-wing of the fan groups, the Futurians. Pohl says in his autobiography, The Way the Future Was (1978), that some of them were Communists and some fellow travelers in the 1930s and into the 1940s. (Damon Knight wrote a book, The Futurians (1977), devoted to the club and its members, its struggles, tragedies, and triumphs. And recently Justine Larbalestier has published a book on women in SF devoted in part to the Futurians.) But to a very large extent in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, the real life politics of the writers was not overtly present in the fiction.

SF had built a consensus future involving atomic power, space travel and the exploration of space, and the eventual evolution of a human-dominated galactic empire in the distant future. But politics was certainly present in the fanzines, and in the reviewing and criticism -- Damon Knight's famous demolition of A. E. van Vogt is based in part on van Vogt's monarchism. When SF discovered its capacities as a genre for social satire and covert political criticism in the 1950s, when American SF became the major literature embodying criticism of McCarthyism, Pohl and his friends were leaders. As a group the Futurians were the cutting edge of the satirical movement of the 50s, and he was the satirical SF writer whom Kingsley Amis in his influential book on SF, New Maps of Hell, called "the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced." Although he edited pulp science fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in 1940-41 before he was twenty-one, he became prominent in the 1950s, for his novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth -- including the classic The Space Merchants (1953); for a number of powerful and satiric short stories including "The Midas Plague"(1954) and "The Tunnel Under The World" (1955); and for editing anthologies -- the most innovative all-original anthologies (and the first such in paperback) of the decade were the six volumes of Star SF (1953-1959).

His second flowering, as a hard SF writer, began in the 1970s with "The Gold at the Starbow's End," Man Plus (1976), and Gateway (1977), and has never abated. The continuing center of his later works has been stories and novels in the Heechee series, of which this is one. He was still at the peak of his powers in the 1990s and a continuing influence on other writers. It is interesting to compare and contrast Stephen Baxter's Xeelee series to Pohl's. Although Pohl's chosen mode has frequently been extrapolation of politics and society, with a deep and canny bow to psychology and psychiatry, his rigorous methodology has lent an underpinning of "hardness," to much of his best fiction (especially his work since 1970) that places it rightfully beside the best of Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, and Heinlein.

"Hatching the Phoenix" follows the human crew of a Heechee ship being taken to observe a supernova.