Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

• Book ID: 126927131
• Publisher: Orb Books
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 3 MB
• Category: Standards
• ISBN: 1466826444

✦ Synopsis

Frederik Pohl, the bestselling author ofThe Boy Who Would Live Forever, is famous for his novels, but first and foremost, he is a master of the science fiction short story. For more than fifty years he has been writing incisive, entertaining SF stories, several hundred in all. Even while writing his bestselling triple-crown (Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Award) novelGatewayand the other Heechee Saga novels, he has always written short fiction. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the best of his many stories. Spanning the decades, these tales are in their way a living history of science fiction. Because Frederik Pohl has been on the frontlines of the field since the halcyon days of the late 1930s, and has written short stories in every decade since. And because he has always been a keen observer of the human condition and the world that is shaped by it, his stories reflect the currents of political movements, social trends, major events that have shaken the world . . . Yet at their core, all his stories are most acutely concerned with people. All sorts of people. Some are people you’ll love, some you’ll hate. But you will need to find out what happens to the people who inhabit these stories. Because Frederik Pohl imbues his characters with a depth and individuality that makes them as real as people you see every day. Of course, he also employs a mind-boggling variety of scientific ideas and science fictional tropes with which his characters must interact. And he does it all with seemingly no effort at all. That’s some trick. Not everyone can do that . . . but that’s why he was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by his peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America. Here are his two Hugo Award winning stories, “Fermi and Frost” and “The Meeting” (with C. M. Kornbluth), along with such classic novellas as the powerful “The Gold at the Starbow's End” and “The Greening of Bed-Stuy,” and stories such as “Servant of the People,” “Shaffery Among the Immortals,” and “Growing Up in Edge City,” all finalists for major awards. And dozens of other wonderful tales, like “The Mayor of Mare Tranq” and the provocative “The Day the Martians Landed” and many others.
Altogether, a grand collection of thought-provoking, entertaining science fiction by one of the all-time greats!From Publishers WeeklySpanning the five decades of SFWA Grand Master Pohl's career, these 30 stories stand out for their gritty, straightforward style and for their insightful ideas about our political, social and ecological future. The opener, "The Merchants of Venus," is an old-fashioned SF adventure yarn, but most of the rest are cautionary tales of environmental and ideological catastrophes. Stories such as "My Lady Green Sleeves" and "Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair" take social attitudes to the extreme and explore what horrible places we might end up and find normal. "The Greening of Bed-Stuy," in which New York City has crumbled to all but dust, shows how a child could still call it home and love it. Not every selection has a point to make. In "The Mapmakers," "Shaffery Among the Immortals" and other "what if" stories, the idea is all that matters. Pohl has won Hugo, Nebula and other major SF awards many times.(Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistSince beginning his writing career as a teenager in the early 1930s, Pohl has produced so steadily and well that corralling his finest short fiction into one volume is a daunting proposition.Platinum Pohlsolves this dilemma by concentrating on award winners and nominees as well as stories out of which his most popular novels were born. The first and longest entry, "The Merchants of Venus," introduces the mysterious, artifact-producing aliens called the Heechee, who became the focus of Pohl's Hugo and Nebula Award--winning novelGateway(1977). Other particular standouts include "My Lady Green Sleeves," an account of a bizarre prison rebellion on a world of strictly divided social classes; "The Middle of Nowhere," a quaint Bradbury-like tale penned in 1955 that describes humanity's first encounter with Martians; and the 1986 Hugo winner, "Fermi and Frost," a chilling vision of Earth's final hours during a nuclear war. An essential treasury for every Pohl fan and every sf collection.Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

✦ Subjects

Научная фантастика