Flavors of Fred
Fred Pohl was editing Astonishing a year before I was born. He was a giant in the field by the time I started reading science fiction. He won a shelf of Hugos for editing, and another shelf for writing.
I’ve probably read 80% of the words he’s written, which is one hell of a lot, and I subscribed Galaxy and If, and I read most of the Bantam books he edited, plus those early Star anthologies. But when I think of Fred, those aren’t the memories that pop to mind first.
I think of Fred, and I instantly smell cigarette smoke. I was a heavy smoker when we were both hitting a lot of Midwestern conventions, so was he, and we seemed to always find ourselves in each other’s company, sneaking out of some boring banquet for a smoke, sitting in splendid and befogged isolation in the smoking suite, or otherwise polluting the convention.
I also remember a Windycon where there was a Fred Pohl Roast, and the committee asked me to be the roastmaster because no one else would say anything nasty/funny about him. I poured through his wonderful autobiography, The Way the Future Was, and found a most interesting fact hidden away in the middle of it. Once, when (like so many writers) Fred needed a little salaried income, he took a job at a racetrack as the guy who irritates the winning horse’s genitalia with an electric prod to get urine samples for the track vet. I built an entire routine about how after years of causing the same reaction in editors and readers, he’d finally found his calling. Just before the roast a couple of panelists insisted I couldn’t say those things about an icon, but I did—and no one laughed louder that Fred.
When our mutual friend Algis Budrys died, it was Fred who contacted me and suggested we put together a collection of his very best works before they were forgotten—but only on the condition that we take, at most, an absolutely minimal fee, and that the bulk of the advance and all of the royalties go to Ajay’s widow. I accepted instantly. Why? Partially because Ajay was a friend…but my main reason was that after well over half a century of reading him, and smoking with him, and appearing on panels with him, and roasting him, I was finally offered the opportunity to work with one of my heroes. Health considerations have slowed the project down, but it’ll still come to fruition one of these days.
Everyone knows what a fine writer and editor Fred is, but he also has some accomplishments that have gone relatively unheralded. For example: a lot of writers have found one teammate and turned out a series of fine collaborations. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt come to mind, or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, or Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. But no one’s ever been part of two long-lived, stellar, wildly successful teams—except Fred, who did it with Cyril Kornbluth, and then, just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, did it all over again with Jack Williamson.
He also wrote the single best article on self-promotion to appear in the past fifty years: “The Science Fiction Professional,” which appeared in Reginald Bretnor’s The Craft of Science Fiction back in 1976, and so impressed me that when I collected seven years of my “how-to” columns from Speculations in book form, I titled it The Science Fiction Professional. (Holster that lawsuit, Fred; the statute of limitations ran out in 2007.)
Science fiction doesn’t have many renaissance men, no matter how much we like to believe we do. Fred’s been an authentic one for damned near three-quarters of a century, and has improved his art with almost every passing decade. We’re not going to see too many men like that, and I’m proud to have known him.