Lauded author and sci-fi pioneer
Frederik Pohl, who helped shape and popularize science fiction as an influential agent, editor and award-winning author, died Sept. 2 at a hospital near his home in Palatine, Ill. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by a granddaughter, author Emily Pohl-Weary. An entry on Mr. Pohl’s website noted that he “went to the hospital in respiratory distress.”
Mr. Pohl had been a presence in science fiction since the 1930s, when he began to organize fan clubs and conventions. He published his first work — a poem under an assumed name — in 1937 and worked as an agent and editor before he turned 20.
He was a lifelong friend of the prolific author Isaac Asimov and, as an agent, helped publish Asimov’s first novel, “Pebble in the Sky,” in 1950.
But Mr. Pohl’s greatest achievement came through his own writing, which included more than 65 novels and 30 collections of short stories, many written with coauthors. He won science fiction’s Hugo and Nebula awards multiple times and in 1980 received an American Book Award (later called the National Book Award) for his novel “Jem: The Making of a Utopia,” about the efforts of three groups of people to survive after colonizing another planet.
Mr. Pohl touched on many common sci-fi themes in his writing: interplanetary travel, overpopulation, cryogenic preservation, cities under domes, parallel universes and colonies on Mars. But he may be most important as a pioneer of what has been called the “anti-utopian” branch of science fiction — or “sf,” as its aficionados often call it — in which an outwardly well-organized society disintegrates from internal pressures, rivalries and greed.
His first major novel, “The Space Merchants” (1953), written with Cyril Kornbluth, was built around the idea that the values of business and advertising had replaced governments, creating disastrous effects.
“Pohl’s work offers science fiction at its best,” Washington Post arts critic Joseph McLellan wrote in 1980. “Riddles posed, examined and solved; basic human problems ... woven deftly into an intricate plot; pure adventure happening to believable (if not deeply drawn) characters in surroundings almost beyond the borders of imagination.”
One of Mr. Pohl’s finest novels, by common consent, was “Gateway” (1977), which won the Nebula and Hugo awards. It was the first of five books about a lost civilization of aliens called the Heechee, who had left hundreds of spaceships at a docking station on an asteroid.
Frederik George Pohl Jr. was born Nov. 26, 1919, in New York. He never completed high school, but in his 1979 memoir, “The Way the Future Was,” he wrote that he was captivated with science fiction by the time he was 10.
After serving in Italy with the Army during World War II, he worked in advertising and as a literary agent.
In 1987, he wrote a novel about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, which he had often visited for research.
“If you read science fiction,” he said at the time, “nothing ever takes you by surprise.”