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.

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.