Hatching the Phoenix

A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of mod­ern SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces — as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he has won Nebula and Hugo Awards several times (making him the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as editor and as writer), as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—such as The Space Mer­chants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law—and many solo novels, including Man Plus, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, A Plague of Pythons, Slave Ship, Jem, The World at the End of Time, and Mining the Oort. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, The Years of the City, Critical Mass (in collaboration with Kornbluth), In the Problem Pit, Pohlstars, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. He also wrote a nonfiction book in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and an autobiography, The Way the Future Was. His most recent books are the novels O Pioneer!, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time. Coming up soon is a new nonfiction book, Chasing Science. His stories have appeared in our Second and Tenth Annual Collections.

Pohl’s most famous book is probably Gateway, a book which won both the Nebula and the Hugo, and which is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the ‘70s. It’s also the book in which he introduced the Heechee, a race of enigmatic and (seemingly) long-vanished aliens whose discarded technology enables humanity to begin the exploration of the Galaxy — a series that Pohl would return to several times throughout the rest of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s,--with sequels such as Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, The Annals of the Heechee, and The Gateway Trip.

Occasionally, Pohl writes about the Heechee in shorter format as well. There were two Heechee stories published this year, for instance, including the intriguing novella that follows, in which he takes us far across the galaxy and deep into the past to show us that, no matter how alien the setting, some things don’t change—alas!