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Frederik Pohl 1917-2013

Pohl has always been my favorite; thanks for the notice.

I'm going to pretend that he's just stuck on the edge of a black hole somewhere, or maybe being replicated by aliens in a distant galaxy.
 
Sad news. I've only read one of his books, Gateway, but I think I should start reading some of his overlooked back catalogue. Sadly, a lot of my leisure reading time has been taken up doing the same for Iain M. Banks, which also meant I had no time to dedicate to Richard Matheson.

Gah! Sad days for Sci Fi.
 
sad news indeed. I still have several of his books, even after purging a few hundred SF paperbacks.

I take some consolation in the idea that he was a SF writer who was born when movies didn't have sound, and lived to see a day when the average teenager carries a combination computer/communicator/navigation device that would have been considered too far-out for Star Trek.
 
Another writer born 7 years later (and still seems to be alive since he got back into writing in 2010 - with a book suggesting doom and gloom in 2013 so alive in the Pohl timeline) was Roger Lee Vernon. His 1st book came out in 1955 and his second in 1959/60. The second came and went but the first achieved a sort of fame - it was reviewed in depth in one of the classics about SF pub'ed by Advent (an offshoot of Greenleaf Books run by a fan and adult book publisher) as possibly the worst ever collection of SF stories written and many examples of scientific errors were pointed out.

Took me a while to get a copy but it was worth the effort - and the reviewer (I think James Blish, but do not hold me to that - it has been quite a while) if anything overestimated the high school teacher's (at that time) writing skills. He's in Wiki and, this is the book: http://www.amazon.com/space-frontie...d=1378190800&sr=1-5&keywords=Roger+Lee+Vernon
 
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One of my all-time favourites. Gateway was fantastic, but I don't think I've read a bad book by him. One of the greats of the golden age of sci fi.
 
That's a shame - always one of favourites, and was still publishing good stories until quite recently.
 
There was a long period he was my favorite science fiction author, and I read everything of his I could get my hands on.

Farewell, old friend.
 
I liked his how his work was always so humanistic. The protagonist of "The Cool War" was even a Unitarian minister. Not as peaceful as Simak, but it was nice to read stuff without gun boners in it.
 
I downloaded several of his books for my Kindle free from Arthur's bookshelf a while back and greatly enjoyed reading them (most again, some for the first time), but I can't seem to find anything by him there at the moment.
 
"Only the Good die young."

Another member of the Second Golden Age has gone. One of the many greats.

I, too, am beginning to feel old. :(
 
I remember reading something Pohl wrote about how he thought editing a story while it was still a computer file contributed to a certain degree of laziness and probably wouldn't work well. So, once he finished writing something, he said, he printed out a copy-- and erased the file. I thought that was a very strange way of doing things. However, we must remember that, as dasmiller noted, Pohl was born at a time when movies didn't even have sound. His attitude about erasing files once he had a hard copy might well have been an emotional artifact from his years of using typewriters.
 
His "The Merchants Of Venus" and the "Gateway:"novels (also known as the Heechee series) are true classics of the genre.
 
ISTR reading that we are only a few years away from being able to download brains. That and jet packs. Sad that he may have missed it by so short a time (if it ever happens).
 
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