The Way the Future Blogs

Frederik Pohl IV
 

I used the word “movie” in conjunction with the word “Gateway” the other day, and several quick-witted blog readers wrote in to ask what was going to happen with a film for my novel of that title. I shouldn’t have said anything, because it’s a long way from anything tangible, but I was kind of excited about it.

The small amount of news behind my remark is just that, after the previous producers spent somewhere around a million dollars on scripts without finding one they could film, I decided, in collaboration with my son Rick, aka Fred the 4th, to write our own. I do hope it works out well and maybe earns us at least an Emmy or something.

Rick already has three Emmys of his own, but his problem is his good wife is collecting them faster than he is, so what he would really like is an Oscar.

Of course, before we can start thinking about that we really should finish writing the script.

 
Related posts:

• Me and the Biz, Part 1, Part 2, Part 2 (continued)

 

We do apologize for forgetting to announce the winners of the drawing for copies of Gateways, the best book ever written as a birthday present for me, but here are the names:

 

How many of you have read that excellent novel, Gateway? And, pray tell, how many of you remember the novel’s most important character? No, I’m not talking about Robinette Broadhead, though it’s true that he gets more space then the other guy. I’m talking about the wise, kindly and super-smart computer who goes by the name of “Sigfrid von Shrink.”

Happens I know that there were groups of readers who paid special attention to Siggy because I know that a couple of them, one around MIT in Massachusetts and the other in England, tried to build working models of Sigfrid for themselves.

(Actually that’s not hard. I believe both groups were inspired by a math-teaching program that I had seen in operation in, if I remember correctly, North Carolina and written something about at the time. These pseudo-Sigfrids were not really at all intelligent, but they could carry on a conversation, and if you looked at a transcript of it it looked pretty much like a real psychologist and couch session.)

Anyway, for reasons connected with the movie business, I’d like to know if any old Sigfrid-builders are still around. If you are, or if you know of someone who is, please drop me a line c/o this blog.

A new book worth a look

Back in 1935, The Boeing Company was proudly getting ready to show off its brand-new four engine bomber, not yet named either B-17 or Flying Fortress. It had a few problems. Little ones like the fact that its control surfaces, rudders and elevators, were of a size and flexibility that could be damaged by even gentle wind gusts when the aircraft was parked. The engineers fixed that right away with an automatic high-tech locking mechanism, and the plane was readied for a demonstration flight.

That didn’t go well, though. The pilots lost control. The plane crashed and burned, and it looked like this new plane, on the development of which Boeing had sunk big chunks of its capital, would lead the company into bankruptcy. The engineers began developing foolproof devices to do the job —

Until somebody showed up and told them to sell all those automatic devices for scrap. What he offered instead was a typewritten list of every last setting of dial and turn of switch that had to be properly done before the big ship could be allowed to lumber onto its takeoff strip to get airborne.

“The co-pilot,” he said. “will just read this list to the pilot, who will check every item to see that it is in compliance before they set the brakes and build up the speed for takeoff.” And so the co-pilot on that next test flight of one of those four-engine monsters did, and so has done every co-pilot who sat down at a B-17′s controls since. That is, he read the checklist for every pilot ever since, and not one of those 13,000 B-17s that were then built and sold crashed because someone forgot a step on that checklist, as they came to be called.

Since then checklists have been developed for surgical operations, running a restaurant kitchen, building a skyscraper and many other complex tasks. See how great real simple ideas can be?

(The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande, Henry Holt, $24.50 US.)

 
If you’ve read a lot of my work you know that I do sometimes try to keep up with the latest Big Thinks in cosmology — starting, as a matter of policy, writing about the steady-state universe with Jack Williamson way back when. That novel was The Reefs of Space, and Jack used the idea to create parts of the Everything where new matter and new space were being created before your very eyes. Great stuff, I can say with little vanity, because those settings were almost all Jack’s.

But that was then. This is now, and I have to say I have met my match. It is called M Theory and cosmologists say that for the first time they have a Theory of Everything which explains much of what Everything is all about. What’s more, it does this without producing useless infinities as the answers to all the equations that might produce testable predictions.

But as to using M Theory to provide the background science for a science-fiction novel, oh, spare me. One of the predictions that M Theory makes is that there isn’t just one universe, even not just a million universes, but 10 to the 500th power universes, and,. guys, I just can’t count that high. My newest novel, All the Lives He Led, which (hint) is just out, doesn’t move one skillionth of a millimeter off the surface of the Earth, and the one I’ve barely begun (about 75 pages of rough draft so far, completion date God knows when), hasn’t yet told me if any of it will get Off Earth at all.

So, sorry, Stephen Hawking. I admire you intensely and treasure the one time I heard you lecture, back at Fermilab years ago, but you’ve gone way too far for me to follow right now. But do send me a postcard when you get there.

How I Came to Edit Frederik Pohl
Guest post by James Frenkel

James Frenkel (Photo by Joshua Frenkel)

For years I wanted to edit the works of Frederik Pohl. I loved his fiction, and not just the novels, but a lot of his stories as well. I also thought he was a terrific editor, because I read Galaxy and Worlds of If magazines in the 1960s, and when Fred was the editor they published a lot of great science fiction. So when I starting to work in book publishing and then began to edit science fiction for Dell Books, I thought it would be extremely cool to get Fred to write for Dell.

But I didn’t have a chance. The first time I ever really talked with him, at, I think, the Secondary Universe Conference at Queensborough Community College in New York City in 1969, he was polite, but I was not even close to being an editor yet. I was still in college, and meeting a bunch of big-name science fiction people all at once, and overwhelmed by the experience. It seemed to me that everywhere I looked was someone whose books or stories I had read: Poul Anderson, Ben Bova, Lester Del Rey, Gordon R. Dickson, Frederik Pohl … and lots of others, including Ivor Rogers, who wasn’t an SF writer, but did write the occasional article for Time Magazine. and was a fascinating participant.

So years later, when I was now editing SF for Dell, I knew who Fred was, and I knew that he was hot — Gateway had just been published, and if he hadn’t been famous enough before, for all of his previous accomplishments, Gateway made him nothing short of the hottest SF writer on the planet. He was published by Del Rey Books, which was arguably the best sf and fantasy publisher in the world at that moment. It took enormous courage for me to even introduce myself to him, but I managed to do it — I think it was during Lunacon, New York’s annual SF convention. And then I asked him if he’d like to have lunch sometime and maybe talk about publishing a book with Dell.

I have the feeling that he humored me because he knew that an editor for a major publisher could afford to take him out for a very nice lunch at a fine New York restaurant. I don’t know for sure, but he did agree to lunch with me, and we did so, at a nice place on the East Side in Kips Bay … I remember it was Italian food, and I was really nervous. And when I asked him what he was working on — a classic opening line for an editor to dangle the bait of publication to an author — he readily told me that he had just finished the sequel to Gateway … and Del Rey was going to publish it, of course.

And before I could ask much more about future books, he let me know that he was very happy wit Del Rey. They were paying him well, advertising and promoting his books well, and he had more books under contract to them.

Basically he was telling me that it would be a cold day in Hell before I had any chance at all of getting to buy the right to publish one of his books. So why, I thought, was I buying him lunch?

Continue reading ‘Bearding the Wild Pohl’ »