I loved Gateway, the first novel in the Heechee series by Frederik Pohl. Where Pohl came up with the term "Heechee" would be interesting to know, although I dislike this word. It sounds so lightweight to me to represent in language sentient beings and a culture that will have such a huge impact...
This is an excellent collection of short science fiction stories. I'd read some of Pohl's work and knew he was prolific, but I don't think I had the appreciation for him that I now have. This is some kick ass work, encompassing decades of writing. Philip K. Dick is probably my favorite sci fi wri...
Frederik Pohl is prolific. He handles so many diverse ideas with great skill. I was completely intrigued by nearly every one of the tales contained in this collection. Here, then, is an accounting."The Tunnel Under the World" - A man wakes up to find everything very different from the way he reme...
Frederik Pohl is a science fiction great who published work between 1937 and 2011 before he passed away in 2013. Pohl won multiple awards, including the Nebula Award for Man Plus. He followed that up with a Hugo and a Nebula in 1977 for Gateway. Man Plus features a brilliant premise in which a hu...
Review: Heechee #3; Heechee Rendezvous, Fredrick PohltThe first two Heechee novels were entertaining and suspenseful. This novel is peppered with the intensity of any given adventure/suspense novel but woven in like a spider web is the story of Essie and Robinette Broadhead whom the novels hav...
If you're a fan of the first book, or even of the first few books, please, do yourself a favour and leave this book on the shelf. You'll learn nothing new in here, and I seriously doubt there's anything new to be gleaned in the final book, which I won't be reading. There is no story to speak of, ...
What this book isn't: A novelization of the television show of the same name. Which I found outrageous. Truly, truly outrageous. However, I got over it pretty quickly as I kept reading.What this book is: An indictment of industrialism, capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism. If you don't want t...
I’ve had a very miss-and-miss relationship with recent novels and short stories that, claiming to be science fiction, venture into our future a few years to some kind of corporate dystopia. It’s not that I don’t take the threat seriously, but the refrain is so familiar and blunt. It doesn’t chall...
The World at the End of Time is an interesting sci-fi classic by Frederik Pohl that takes a whole lot of brilliant ideas and mixes them in one book. In the book, two narratives are explored, one from the viewpoint of a human named Viktor and another of an Entity know only as Won-To. They contrast...
Science Fiction. Humans have colonized the inhospitable world of Pava, but they still have to worry about budget cuts back on Earth and their own lack of resources. I've said it before, I will say it again. Pohl: excellent at science fiction; bad at people. His human characters spout cliched, bor...
SF. Oh give me a home, where the cyborgs do roam, and the grid is not silent all day! It's 2043 and Mars has been colonized by earthlings. They live underground in domed cities run by a computer system known as the grid, and the circuitry is getting a little tired of the humans thinking they know...
review of C. M. Kornbluth's Not This August by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 28, 2011 The front cover review excerpt from the Chicago Tribune reads: "The most shockingly realistic science fiction book since Orwell's '1984' - establishes Kornbluth as one of the best writers in the futurist...
A very fine YA/"juvenile" from 1954, reminiscent of the works of, say, Robert A. Heinlein or Lester Del Rey. The first-person narrative is fast-moving and adventuresome, with many cute cliffhangers that are not cheesy or overdone. I was struck by how beautifully evocative the novel is--the colors...
A good YA for 1956, though for some hard-to-define reason I would rate it just a hair lower than the first of the series, Undersea Quest. The handling of the sometimes-savage imperialism, I suppose we can call it, of Jason Craken is decent for the period, although Jim is a little slower than I wo...