Frederik Pohl
Fred and Cathy (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes)
Cathy Pizarro, Betty’s oldest daughter, who helps Betty and me deal with computer malfunctions and much else, came back to live with us years ago after her husband, Tony Pizarro, was hit and killed by an unlicensed driver in a stolen car in New York. Among other things, she took herself back to college, earning her first degree of Associate in Arts.
(We don’t know how we ever got along without her!)
Elizabeth Anne Hull, me, the Hugo and Steven Silver. (Photo by Cathy Pizarro.)
I didn’t get over to the Worldcon in Australia, so when I won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, my friend Bob Silverberg accepted it for me. Here is what he said at the ceremony:
“A couple of weeks before I left for Australia I received an e-mail from Fred Pohl asking whether I would accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for him if he won. This is what I replied:“‘Of all the goddamn crazy things. Here we are in 2010, you are 90 years old, I’m no kid myself, the worldcon is in Australia, and you are sending me some kind of newfangled electronic message about the possibility that you might win the Best Fan Writer Hugo. What would Sam Moskowitz say about all this? Don Wollheim? Hugo Himself? Are we both trapped in the future, swept off into this nonsense by some inexorable force? Of course I will accept that Hugo for you. It will be one of the great moments of my life.’
“And it gives me immense pleasure now to accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for my friend of more than fifty years, Fred Pohl.”
After Silverbob accepted the Hugo Award, the trophy was ferried back to Chicago by Helen Montgomery, who passed it along to Steven Silver, who brought it over last week. Thanks to everyone concerned!
Thanks, also, to everyone for all the congratulatory messages, of which this one from Encyclopedia Britannica might be the most extraordinary. I wrote their entry on Tiberius in the 1960s!
Lava fall from Kilauea
As all you trained navigators out there know, that latitude and longitude means that my wife, Betty Anne, and I are on a ship, dodging around the islands of Hawai’i. Why? you ask. Cruising around the Pacific beats staying in Illinois in January, for one excellent reason. Because this is a beautiful part of the world, for another. And because there are things to be seen here, even from shipboard, which are simply unique. We saw one of them last night — an erupting volcano — and not for the first time.
Our first occasion for wandering around these islands on a giant cruise ship came more than a dozen years ago. A total solar eclipse was about to occur. Hawai’i would be one of the best places to see it. Omni magazine sent me to cover the event, which we did from the deck of a former transatlantic liner, the Independence, commanded by Captain Richard Haugh. He did a wonderful job for us, too. On eclipse morning, that whole part of the Pacific was overcast with thick clouds, with few and tiny breaks. Captain Haugh was getting minute-by-minute weather reports, though, and he managed to find one opening just in time for a perfect four-minute observation of the whole eclipse (but that’s another story).
People on shore on the Big Island saw nothing but the bottoms of the clouds.
Then, that night, Captain Haugh outdid himself. We were sailing around the southern tip of the Big Island toward the port of Hilo and he advised that we all be on deck around ten that night. We obeyed. What we saw, all along the gentle slope of the mountain to the sea, was a scattering of what looked like campfires — like, I thought, King Kamehameha’s army poised to invade the other islands — with a vast conflagration just at the water’s edge.
But that wasn’t the actual case. What we were seeing was in fact lava streams oozing down from the vent of Kilauea. As the lava streams flow, the lava on the outside hardens and forms a pipe through which the molten rock continues to flow. But the shells of the pipes are not very sturdy. Occasionally they crack open at random points revealing the hellfire within. These were Kamehameha’s “campfires.” And when the stream hits the sea, it makes an explosion of violent instant steam, firing glowing fragments of lava in all directions … and that’s what we saw again last night.
It is a wonderful — I’ll say it again, a wonderful — sight. If you ever get the chance, I urge you to take it in. You may not need to hurry, either. That flow has been going continuously for fourteen years now and shows no sign of stopping.
By the way, we’ve kept in touch with Richard Haugh, though he has moved on to more serious jobs than captaining a cruise ship. Last time his travels took him to the Chicago area, he gave us a call. “Hey, this is Captain Dick!” he cried.
But it was our daughter Cathy who answered the phone. When she heard that she hung up on him. She thought it was an obscene call.
