Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl at Windycon 39, Nov. 10, 2012 (Photo by Leigh T. Hanlon).
Fred made a rare live appearance last month at Windycon in Lombard, Ill., talking about his 75-year career. Leigh Hanlon of ChicagoScope recorded it, so you can hear it, too.
Elizabeth Anne Hull also features, and blogmaster Leah A. Zeldes is the interviewer.
Tim Cook
In the United States, we have 5 percent of the human population in the world, but 25 percent of the humans who are in prison.
For the year 2012, loopholes in income-tax returns will amount to approximately $1 trillion — $1,000,000,000,000 — in losses to the government, or more than it spends on either defense or education.
In Chicago, suburbanites who sold their cars and switched to public transportation to get to work saved approximately $1,000 per month. (Amortized cost of owning and maintaining a car figured in.)
Through the use of “National Security Letters,” which are under review on constitutional grounds but at present still have the force of law, over a two-week period in 2003 every hotel, garage and airline doing business in Las Vegas was ordered to report to the FBI the identities of every single customer.
Signing bonus for Timothy D. Cook, new Chief Executive at Apple: cash and stock, $376.3 million, or approximately $42,000 per hour of working time.
The cost of having a prom teenager in the family — tux/dress, limo/party bus, hair, makeup, flowers, dinner and dance tickets — altogether more than $2,600 for families earning between $20,000 and 30,000 a year. For families in upper-income brackets, between $700 and $1,000.
Listen, guys. I wasn’t just making conversation when I said I wished I could be at the Worldcon this year. I really do like cons, and I’ve been thinking.
There’s going to be a Windycon in November. That’s only a couple months away, and at Windycon, I wouldn’t have to face quite as many problems of getting in and out of elevators in a wheelchair, or driving in heavy traffic, or being just a little too far from my medical support systems and what the dickens am I going to do when I discover I’ve forgotten to bring that pink and white candy-striped pill that I have to swallow with my first bite of breakfast or my nose will fall off? (Joke. I don’t have one of those. I do have fifteen or sixteen other kinds which do the job of making me appear reasonably human, though.)
There are a few other considerations, of course, but nothing that doesn’t get a lot easier if the con is in the suburbs, and a bit nearer to where I live, instead of downtown in a city which I happen to be fond of for many reasons but can’t quite handle right now.
So unless some sort of game-changing event happens between now and then, I’ll try to be there. Check the blog in October and I’ll keep you posted on how it looks.
I’ve been hoping till the last minute that I could join you, but now it’s definite that that isn’t going to happen. You see, I suffer from a serious and incurable condition. (The medical term for it is “Being 92¾ years old.”)
So my wish for all of my old friends, as well as for all the new ones I haven’t met yet is—
Diagram of the workings of The Plant, an urban aquaponics farm in Chicago.
The idea started with Chinese rice farmers long ago They had learned that rice grew best when they flooded the fields, then drained them to harvest the crop at the end of the season. That was good farming, but why waste all that water that was doing nothing for all those months? One of them got the idea of throwing a bucketful of baby tilapia into the fields when they planted the rice seedlings, and, sure enough, then when they harvested the rice they also harvested a handsome crop of eating-sized fish,
That was what first started the tilapia boom a couple of decades ago, but an Illinois city farmer named John Edel has carried the idea a lot of steps farther. When tilapia eat they also excrete, and the water is fouled; when the are marketed they have to be degutted and beheaded, producing more waste. Edel puts the waste water and its polluters in a tank that he seeds with bacteria. The bacteria eat the waste and turn it into high-grade fertilizer … which, of course, is what closes the circle by making his next year’s rice crop grow so abundantly.
His objective, as Edel puts it from his indoor factory farm, The Plant, in Chicago’s old Stockyards district, is, “Nothing leaves the plant but food.”
If you happen to be in Chicago on May 7, you can tour the place, during its open house.
Algis Budrys
(Photo by William Shunn).
By the mid-1960s, Algis Budrys had become a darling of the critics. In the field of science fiction, two of the most respected at that time were Kingsley Amis and James Blish. Kingsley said that the way A J was going, he might become the most honored sf writer since H. G. Wells. Jim was less restrained. He thought that A J was becoming the finest writer in a second language since Joseph Conrad. One of A J’s stories had already been made into a film, though not a particularly good one, and his future was bright.
It was at that point that A J basically stopped writing science fiction and went off to Chicago to get into the public-relations business.
Why?
Well, I don’t know why. When A J took off for Chicago and a brief career as Mr. Pickle in a relish promoter’s PR campaign, it was a surprise to me. Perhaps it was because of the merciless difference between salary income and writer income that I alluded to earlier. By then the Budrys family census stood at six, with four healthy infant sons that needed to be fed every day — and would inevitably need more and more as the years advanced. But I lost touch with him for a year or two.
When I reconnected with him he had escaped from advertising and gone to work as the book editor for Playboy.
That made a certain amount of sense to me, particularly as he was showing signs of getting back to doing writing for me again. I was still editing for Bob Guinn, who had gradually enriched my expense account enough to permit annual trips to spur authors along . When in Chicago, I always spent some time with the Budryses. Their lives appeared to have slowed down and smoothed out.
But in that, too, I was quite wrong.
One day, back at home in New Jersey, I got a phone call from A J. He had news. The Church of Scientology had decided to honor their founder and principal sage, the science-fiction (and everything else, but best known for his science fiction) author L. Ron Hubbard, by establishing a new contest for talented entry-level sf writers that would pave the way for some of them to make the transition to professional success. Since none of the Scientology people knew much about publishing, they needed to find someone who did to save them from making too many blunders, and they had found A J.
“What I’m trying to do for them now,” he said, “is to try to find them major writers who —”
“No,” I said.
“— would be willing to be judges — what did you say?”
“I said, ‘no,’” I told him.
“But you didn’t let me tell you the good parts,” he said,
“That’s right,” I said. “I said, ‘no.’ ”
See how I handled it? A quick, firm decision, and then on to the next thing. No looking back, either.
Except that a few months later, when A J called again to tell me that Theodore Sturgeon, who A J had taken on as my replacement, was gravely ill, and A J was in a really tough spot, and if I could just help him out until he could find someone else. . . .
So I did it. I helped him out, and kept on doing it for the next thirty years.
In my defense, I will say that Writers of the Future, now broadened to include artists of the future, is indeed a good thing for beginning writers and artists, who can use all the help they can get. But there it is.
A J didn’t confine his efforts to Writers of the Future for the rest of his life. There was a prolonged, and expensive, period when he tried his luck as publisher of his own magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, but what happened at the end was simply that his health gave out. For the last several years of his life he was housebound in his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he complained that illness had so sapped his strength that he didn’t have energy for anything. Once he said, “There’s a novel I started in January and I’m not even a quarter through it.”
This was sometime in late spring. I said cheerfully, “So keep on plugging away. Sooner or later you’ll get it written.”
“Written?” he said, “I’m not talking about writing a novel. I’m talking about reading one.”
What was wrong with A J’s health was not a single, simple thing. I believe it was diabetes that kept him housebound for so long, but think it was metastasizing cancer that took him away in June of 2008.
He is missed.
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