Tag Archives: writer: frederik pohl

The Age of the Pussyfoot, by Frederik Pohl

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Forester opened his eyes. He was in something that lurched and hummed. A girl in a tailored blue suit, her back to him, was staring at what seemed to be a television screen showing a sort of arena, where the screaming girl, face flushed and happy, stamping with excitement, was standing over a blindfolded man who held a gun.

I got this book because Wikipedia said that it was partly set in the year 2027, when the protagonist is killed in a fire, put into cryogenic sleep and revived in 2527 to experience the new world. Wikipedia is wrong; in both my paperback copy and in the original magazine publication, the fire was in 1969, so I’m taking this off my list of science fiction set next year. (You can go and correct Wikipedia if you like. It actually has the correct 1969 date further down the page.)

Anyway the entire book is set in 2527, with the story of the fatal fire barely taking up a page. Protagonist Charles Forrester has all the usual fish-out-of-water problems of someone who wakes up in the future; he has what at first sounds like vast wealth, but turns out not to be so vast taking inflation and other factors into account; he slips into being the target of a Martian vendetta; and he hopes to get the girl. Some parts of it have aged better than others.

Wallace Wood’s depiction of life in the year 2527

Wikipedia rightly calls attention to Pohl’s depiction of ‘joymakers’, future devices that basically have all the functions of today’s smartphones, notably including communication by voicemail. It is an impressive prediction for 1965. In the afterword, written in 1968, Pohl apologises for the future historical timescale that he gives the novel. “I don’t really think it will be that long. Not five centuries. Perhaps not even five decades.” The iPhone was launched thirty-nine years after he wrote those words (and he was still alive to witness it).

You can get The Age of the Pussyfoot here.

The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Frederik Pohl

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Time-Tombs”, by J.G. Ballard):

Most of the time-tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the warm ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on some endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure.

An anthology of ten stories from the sf magazine Worlds of If, all published between 1963 and 1967, all by white men (though two at least were British). Several of these were familiar to me from their appearances in other collections, mostly chosen by their authors; the one exception, published only here and in its original magazine appearance, is a spooky-little-girl story, “Toys for Debbie”, by Dave Kyle, who is better remembered for his activities in fandom but published three authorised Lensman novels in the 1980s, ten short stories between 1941 and 1994, and contributed art including the cover of the first edition of Asimov’s Foundation. Most of these are effective enough, but there are noticeably few women (Brian Aldiss scores here, with his tough warrior girl in “In the Arena”).

My copy, the 1951 Sphere edition, has no table of contents or index, and clearly the publishers struggled to squish the material into 256 pages. You can get it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is an Ace double, Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett, half of which I have already read.