(listen to episode on Spotify)
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Frederik Pohl biography, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This is J.M. and I'm here with Gretchen and Nate and we are continuing our exploration of short stories. This is our second batch of short stories we've chosen for our host choice series. This series is mine, so the last one we did was Gerald Kersh's "The Brighton Monster". And now we're doing another story, this one from the 1970s. This is "We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl.
So Frederik Pohl is somebody we've been talking about on and off quite a bit during the podcast. His name just keeps coming up and we just kind of mention it, name drop and say he was associated with this or that and the other thing. And he's not really a writer we've gone into yet. So now's our chance to talk about it and I'm actually going to get into a lot of the stuff that came up during episodes like our fandom episode. And also talking about the magazines and the professional and even some of the non-professional magazines that started coming out around the 1930s. Basically the entire continuum of American science fiction that was born in the magazines and went on to book publishing. Pohl is somebody who lived through it all and understood very meticulously how a lot of things worked. And a lot of what I'm going to say comes pretty much paraphrased from his memoir slash autobiography, "The Way the Future Was". I guess I'll say more about it as we go but definitely if you are interested in a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about with the American science fiction markets and stuff. I really recommend this book and if you give it some time. It's definitely a different perspective than the ones we've been seeing so far which are a lot of the time told in a detached way from people who maybe became associated with that after the fact or people that were kind of involved but more on the sidelines.
Pohl is basically somebody who lived and breathed this stuff and knew it very intimately.
So Frederik Pohl was born, Frederik George Pohl Jr. on November 26, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York. He was only child, mostly raised by his mother, his father largely being absent and permanently separated from the family when Fred was 13 due to, among other things, undisclosed legal trouble. So he was one of the main actors and fandom in the early days and he helped found the Futurians. And he knew a lot of people and he seems a very affable fellow although John Campbell and his assistant apparently didn't trust him. Probably something to do with his pro-communist sympathies at the time, mainly the 1930s.
He was really into collaborations and that's something that he's definitely known for, collaborated with a whole lot of writers. Everybody from Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Judith Merril, C.M. Kornbluth and Jack Williamson. Kornbluth was probably one of his most frequent, if not his most frequent, collaborator on short stories and novels. Jack Williamson, who we covered a lot in a, we talked about in our "Prince of Space" episode, another elder statesman at the scene who lived well on into the 2000s. Pohl himself died in 2013. So again, he's around for a long time and from starting out with mimeographed zines from his home and old manual typewriters to basically writing a blog in late 2000s.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a really incredible career. He was at the first science fiction convention, which was just him and like 10 other people.
JM:
He certainly was.
Nate:
Pretty fantastic.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He's an editor of Galaxy and also took over the Star Trek books line in the early days when it was under the Bantam imprint. And he was a literary agent to a lot of authors and he seemed to have his ties with everything. Started something called the Hydra Club, which we'll get to in a little bit. But he won a lot of awards, including international ones. And he was also a writer of popular science and history and political articles and books. Apparently, was for a time, encyclopedia Britannica's authority on the emperor Tiberius of all things. Wrote a book on him at one point there. He didn't want to finish his autobiography with a new edition, unlike Jack Williamson. So he just made a blog called The Way the Future Blogs instead. And yeah, you can still find it on the web.
He's married five times, including to science fiction author Judith Merril, of course. And after the Star Trek thing, he got involved with Bantam with the poll selections line. And he published stuff like Delaney's "Dhalgren" and Joanna Russ's "The Female Man". Fred says he came across his first science fiction magazine, Science Wonder Quarterly, sometime in 1930. He was ten years old. On the cover was a picture of a scaly green monster. He moved around a lot as a child, his parents barely together, and him often staying with relatives.
This whole thing with fandom started off pretty early, and he starts off his chapter on fandom in his book in this sort of amusing way. I'll just read what he says because it's pretty funny. He's like kind of mocking biblical language here, I guess. And he says,
"n the Beginning there was Hugo Gernsback, and he begat Amazing Stories.
"In the fullness of time, about three years’ worth, a Depression smote the land, and Amazing was riven from him in a stock shuffle; whereupon he begat Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, looked upon them and found them incomplete, and joined them one unto the other to be one flesh, named Wonder Stories. And Hugo looked upon the sales figures of Wonder Stories and pondered mightily that they were so low. Whereupon a Voice spake unto him, saying, “Hugo, nail those readers down,” so that he begat the Science Fiction League, and thus was Fandom born.
"If there had not been a Science Fiction League, it would have been necessary to invent one. The time was ripe. In the early 30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a sad and lonely thing. There weren’t many of us, and we hadn’t found each other to talk to. A few activists had tried to get something going, digging addresses out of the letter columns of the science-fiction magazines and starting tiny correspondence clubs, but the largest of them had maybe a dozen members, and for the rest of us we had the permanent consciousness of being alone in a hostile world. The hordes of the unblessed weren’t merely disinterested in science fiction, they ridiculed it.
"From Gernsback’s point of view, what he had to sell was a commodity that a few people wanted very much indeed but most people wouldn’t accept if it were given away free. He couldn’t do a lot about recruiting new readers, but he was aware that there were a great many in-and-outers, people who would buy an issue of Wonder Stories now and then, and thus were obviously prime prospects, but had not formed the every-month addiction that he sought. Well, sir. The arithmetic of that situation was pretty easy to figure. If the seventy percent of his readers who averaged three issues a year could be persuaded to buy every issue, he would triple his sales. These were the visions of sugarplums that danced in Hugo Gernsback’s mind."
This is a fun way of doing the whole thing. I mean, it's just kind of an interesting contrast to DeCamp's style. DeCamp kind of seems like he has a pretty high opinion of himself, and he's kind of funny and all, but, like, at the end of the day, you might start to get the feeling that he was talking down to you or his Fred Pohls kind of... He could hang out with them at a bar or something, and he'd tell you a bunch of cool stories, and he likes to go on about the kind of people that he met, especially in New York, and, well, basically throughout his life, because being all tied in with publishing and so many other things, he did meet a lot of interesting characters outside of the science fiction field as well.
He's, like, very canny about advertising and stuff like that, too. He went to school at the new and rather industrial sounding Brooklyn Tech, and he dropped out of high school before graduating. He says it wasn't a wholly unpleasant experience, appreciating the machine shops and mathematics and other technical matters. He says his biggest regret was not learning foreign languages in school, figuring that when he was older and really wanted to, he was unable to assimilate them.
He says in his autobiography that, with some slight note of pride, perhaps, "I never attended any college, though I've taught at a few." It seems like a lot of his childhood was dedicated to exploring New York City, watering around at a pretty young age, and he lists a good number of ways to circumvent ticket collecting and payment in the subway system at that time, none of which would probably work now, I'm sure, so don't try it at home.
He talks about the streets, shops, burlesque shows, etc. Also attending the very first meeting of the Science Fiction League. It's short-lived, but very cool, it seemed, to young Fred. Even if, according to him, they didn't really do very much. They did decide to produce a mimeographed zine, eventually, though, and he was its editor, possibly because he owned his own typewriter. He talks of the slightly older Donald Wollheim and John Michel, annoyed at how Hugo wouldn't pay them. And he says that's why they hung out with the younger dudes to complain and express their wrath. The Brooklyn boys were going to secede and cause lots of trouble for Hugo until he straightened up.
Funny enough, Pohl's first sale was to T. O'Conor Sloane and not Gernsback, amazing. He never sold to Wonder, and that thing that he sold was a poem written in 1935, accepted in 1936, printed in 1937, and paid for in 1938, so nothing changes.
Pohl also relates his experience with fanzines in a wry and fun way. Definitely recommended reading, if you like our piece on the fanzines of the early days. Of course, he focuses a lot on the letters and how active these columns always tended to be. Pohl's first wife was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt. She became a science fiction writer and illustrator. I haven't read any of her stuff, but yeah.
The job market was tough in the early 30s, but he started working for an insurance underwriter delivering letters for $10 a week and commenced more exploration of old New York. He said the job was without dignity, but had its charm. Maybe this is how he started getting his experience in various fields that he would often satirize in his fiction from the 50s onwards.
He heard of literary agents, and since many of his friends were aspiring writers, he thought it might be a pretty cool idea to become one himself. He reasoned that for 10% deduction for trouble, it would be a better paying job than actually writing, which he was doing now, selling a story every now and then. But he said he never was able to work very fast.
So Pohl was a leader, a chapter of the Young Communist League as well. But when the Soviets and the Nazis signed a non-aggression pact, suddenly the slogans changed from "Death to the Nazis" to "Keep America out of the Imperialist war," and Pohl was stunned in disillusion and started distancing himself from the entire movement.
At 19, Pohl went to the offices of Popular Publications who were starting a new pulp line, half a cent a worders, and suddenly he had a new job, the editor of two magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, which he named himself. Budget being between $400 and $450 an issue, each issue requiring about 60,000 words of text. He really breaks it down. He had clever ways of dealing with situations like not enough budget. He had a lot of friends who did a lot of stuff, and he would hire out or borrow their services. This included artists, since he barely had enough budget to put in the magazines.
His older self reflects back on his time as editor of those cheap pulp magazines and talks about, if he knew what he knew now, he could really make a good run of it. But he didn't, and the magazines just lay there.
He did manage to print stories by Heinlein and DeCamp, stories that had been rejected by Campbell, maybe with good reason. He was also saddled with Ray Cummings, who he seemed to have bought every word from at premium rates because he was a nice old-timer, even though he hated all the stories.
In the war, of course, his magazines folded. Actually, they got taken away from him, more or less. And he thinks once again he put his foot in his mouth and said the wrong thing. And he eventually got drafted and went the same route as Jack Williamson, it seems, training as a meteorologist and going to Italy. He was already into his second marriage during the war, and this one also didn't last very long.
So one of the things that Pohl was good at, from what I've seen and what he's known for, is satirizing, among other things, the advertising industry. So his fascination with this seemed to have started during the war, when he was in Italy working on a novel about advertising in New York. And the novel was never finished, and after the war, when he dug it out, he realized it was fatally flawed. His chief problem was that he didn't know anything really about advertising, so he decided to learn about it by becoming an advertising copywriter. And he was hired on by the Thwing & Altman Agency on Madison Avenue, and became chief copywriter. I'm going to quote a couple of things he has to say about advertising writing, because I think it's pretty interesting and cool. Interesting to think about how things have changed between now and then, and yet how much they have stayed the same.
So at first he said, "Advertising writing should be under constant surveillance by the narcs; it is addictive, and it rots the mind. When you spend your days persuading Consumers to Consume articles they would never in their lives dream of wanting if you didn't tickle them into it, you develop fantasies of power. No, not fantasies. Power. Each sale is a conquest, and it is your silver tongue that has made them roll over and obey. If you do not end your day with a certain contempt for your fellow human beings, then you are just not paying attention to what it is that you do.
"Most of the advertising I did in my three years in the business was mail-order, and most of the commodities I sold were books and magazines. Book clubs were the specialty of the Thwing & Altman agency, and after six months there I moved over to Popular Science Publishing Company, pushing magazine subscriptions and our line of how-to-do-it books.
"One of the characteristics of the advertising business that rots the brain and destroys the disposition is that most people in it hardly ever know whether what they are doing is any good. You can see whether your product sells well or poorly, yes. But what did it? Is it the TV spots, the jingles, the billboards, the space ads, the point-of-sale displays . . . or maybe just the fact that the weather suddenly turned warm, so people are drinking more of your soda pop or acquiring more of your air conditioners? And even if you know that your ads are working, is it because of your copy, or the art department's layout, or none of the above?"
It's interesting because, yeah, now, of course, companies put all sorts of effort into figuring out exactly what the key is. It feels like, yeah, I mean, in the 1940s a lot of things were, you know, you can see advertisements from back then, and listen to old radio spots, and it's a lot of fun hearing what advertising was like at that time. I mean, nowadays, I think we talked about this in one of our episodes before, maybe it was the Astounding one where we actually did talk about the ads, but it seems like such an insidious thing to me when we're nowadays and looking at how advertising is infiltrated culture and everything, and we are going to talk about that some more when we talk about James Tiptree in a little while. Just really interesting how nowadays, yeah, there's all kinds of surveys done to figure out exactly that, and what is successful and whatnot, what works for different demographics and so on, and what do they call it, AB comparisons and stuff like that, and it's become a real dedicated science, I guess.
I'm going to relate another, something more humorous to do with his advertising career here, because I just think this is funny.
"Almost the first problem George (his boss) laid on me was a big coffee-table picture book called Outdoor Life's Gallery of North American Game. Mostly it was full-color reproductions of the cover paintings from Outdoor Life itself, and it was really quite handsome, if you like that sort of thing. But in the market it was no wily white-tailed deer or battling steelhead salmon. What it was in the marketplace was a dog. The company had printed fifty thousand copies of it, and forty-nine thousand-plus were still in the warehouse. They had tried everything: buckeye four-color circulars the size of a bedsheet and personalized we're-all-art-connoisseurs-together letters on embossed stationery. And nothing worked.
"I decided to test some new copy appeals. At the time, penny postcards still cost only a penny, so I wrote up a dozen or so sample appeals for postcard testing and we sent out thousand-piece mailings to test them out. I tried all the angles I could think of—
"The book is beautiful and will impress your friends. . . .
"With this book you will be better able to kill, crush, mutilate and destroy these beloved game beasts. . . .
"This book will teach your children the secrets of wildcraft and keep them from turning into perverts and drug addicts. . . .
"And then I tried one more card, which said:
"HAVE YOU GOT A BIG BOOKCASE?
"Because if you have, we have a BIG BOOK for you. . . .
"and that was the winner."
So you can see what he means by kind of feeding into your cynicism about the people that you're talking to and the market that you're appealing to.
And I'm sure that the experience figured in greatly with one of his most well-known works, the collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, the novel "The Space Merchants", which is a huge satire of the future advertising industry. And of course, the 1953 story "The Tunnel Under the World", which is, I think, one of the first exposures to Frederik Pohl that I had on the X Minus One sci-fi radio program that was produced in the 50s, which is mostly stories from Galaxy and Astounding Magazine. Pretty cool story. You could imagine it being on the Twilight Zone or something like that. This is about, like, a guy who keeps waking up every morning and he's had the same dream of some huge explosion and he goes to work. He keeps being bombarded by all these weird advertisements and then there's a twist in the end, it turns out. Pretty dark and cruel little story.
Gretchen:
Seems to be a theme with Pohl, so...
JM:
Yeah, well, the thing is, I mean, the story we're going to cover tonight is pretty dark, but usually his stuff is kind of funny. Like, usually there's more humor to it. Again, I think this one's a little unusual, but we'll get to that.
Interestingly, Pohl's first sale outside the pulps was, for me, anyway, a detective story to the Toronto Star, and he even created a regular detective series character. And it was after the World Science Fiction Conduction in Philadelphia in 1947 that Pohl and Lester Del Rey and some other fellows, writers, got together and formed the Hydra Club. This seems like it was a big, happening thing. Meeting in several places around New York City, from Debbie Crawford's apartment to hotel ballrooms, where there would be a lot of what we would now call networking. All sorts of literary people were invited, along with other VIPs.
Around this time is when Pohl was courting Judith Merril, who would be his third marriage. And as a result of all these organized activities after the war, things were really kicking off for science fiction. And the slicks were occasionally publishing stories by Heinlein, Bradbury, and Sturgeon. Hydra/Futurian David Kyle and his newspaper publishing brother started Gnome Press, an imprint of genre books. It was a small concern, but it started to grow. And they started with a single printing press, not adapted to book printing. And it was a beginning. And the firm didn't last too long, going bankrupt in five or six years. But at the time, its catalog contained the who's who list of works from the best known SF writers of the year.
Kind of interesting because I just heard that publisher name dropped in the Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars", which I watched recently. And one of the writers says he's got a book published by Gnome Press. So that was kind of a cool name drop there. There's a lot of interesting references in that episode, including to Galaxy Magazine.
But despite Gnome Press going under due to distribution issues, some of the bigger publishers were starting to bite. And Pohl was responsible for selling them some works. Simon & Schuster published Williamson's "The Humanoids" and a hardback edition in 1947. Doubleday, through a connection made at the Hydra Club, planned to publish several science fiction books a year. And Asimov was one of their first finds, along with John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids", which Pohl also helped to sell, though that one had been printed first in Collier's Magazine for what Pohl considered a hefty sum. Judith Merril got on it too, along with Cyril Kornbluth.
His favorite publisher, though, was Ian Ballantine, founder of Ballantine Books, and the Ballantine Fantasy series, and so on. Now, to guess, Pohl's agency was taking care of half the SF writers of the late 40s and early 50s. But with so many of these new ventures, as with many of them, it struggled with capital, and paying advances to the writers was very generous, but left him pretty strapped. And the office kept getting smaller and smaller. All in all, his agency lasted about seven years, and during this time, he, that is Fred, always wanted to write more, but never seemed to find the time. But now, though, he could devote himself to it.
So, he was a busy writer in the 50s, churning out short stories, novels, including collaborations, and non-fiction works. As well as the book on Tiberius, there was a book called "Practical Politics" with an American focus, and apparently that was used as a textbook for a certain time there. But it seems like it's long out of print now and impossible to find.
And he continued to do the odd non-fiction work, some of which were also collaborations. There's a book on Chernobyl and mathematics. There's ecology with Isaac Asimov, a book in 1991 called "Our Angry Earth", and most of his science fiction in this period, and that is the 50s, was done for Galaxy and editor Horace Gold. Pohl blames the demise of the vast majority of the science fiction and genre magazines in the 1950s on the liquidation of the American news company, a vast distribution conglomerate and network. And it was done by a shady stock acquisition on the market, and in "The Way the Future was", Pohl explains exactly what was done and gives his views on the market itself. Galaxy avoided this through some mysterious insider info and was able to secure their distribution with independence.
Editor Gold was becoming increasingly ill, and so he was relying more and more on his friend, Frederik Pohl, to help with magazines. In 1960, he took over on a quote, temporary basis, but that gig ended up lasting for 10 years, and along the way he started a sister magazine, If. Which is a pretty cool magazine, I actually have a couple of issues of that that I found at a shop once. Some neat stories in that. And there's also a short-lived magazine called Worlds of Tomorrow, which published some weird stuff, including an excerpt from a book by Robert Ettinger called "The Prospect of Immortality," about the possibility of freezing humans to be revived at a future time. And this book arguably kicked off the whole cryogenic craze. Pohl became a kind of spokesman for the whole thing, though after a while he had to admit to himself that he didn't particularly see any reason why anyone would care to revive him in the future. He likens it to Pascal's wager, though. Says, well, what's the worst thing that you can happen? You might die. But actually, he doesn't comment on this, but I definitely noticed some sci-fi writers did imagine some worst things that could happen to you. If you were revived in the future, and what you could possibly be used for, against your will.
He ended up becoming a frequent guest on nighttime talk radio as a result of this stuff, especially the Long John Nebel show out of New York City, which was really popular at the time. And Pohl seems like the guy who would look into anything, and he was game to try all kinds of stuff. And it's pretty cool.
He kept writing up until 2011. And, like I said, he's had a blog, which you can still read. And it's really interesting to see science fiction publishing perspective from this perspective. And, you know, somebody who lived it intimately from its earliest days to nearly the present. Pohl and his book, "The Way the Future Was," although that one's from the 1970s. It's really the place to go if you want to see really meticulous and yet not dry at all. In fact, very humorous and wry, breakdown of pretty much everything about the industry. He likes going on interesting tangents as well about all sorts of things. So that's definitely a cool nonfiction find for the podcast, I think. I might bring up again during the next bonus episode or something like that. But it's just interesting, quick read that definitely recommend to pretty much any science fiction fan, I think, if you want to get to grips with some of this stuff that we've been talking about over the last while.
But now we're talking about a little story called "We Purchased People." I first read this story in the "Foundations of Fear" anthology which is a kind of sequel of sorts to "The Dark Descent." A very large horror anthology. This one focusing more on slightly longer works although this story doesn't really qualify. It's pretty short. So there's still some shorter works in there that just feature more novella-length works so it has actually not quite the voluminous table of contents that "The Dark Descent" has, but also seems to have more science fiction adjacent content in it than the previous anthology does. And I was kind of surprised to see a Pohl story just because even though some of the stuff I read by him is dark and there's a lot of social commentary and stuff, I'd certainly never really thought of him as a writer of horror. There's usually a lot of humor in his works. This one really stands out as a surprise because this is not funny at all. That's a really, really dark story.
Kind of a funny anecdote about this. Pohl talks about how this was actually the result of a collaboration with Jack Williamson in an indirect way. They were working on one of their books called "Farthest Star" and he says, well, a lot of time when you're doing a collaboration with somebody, each one has some ideas that they're really excited about that don't seem to fit into the work that they're doing. So Jack Williamson, they both had this kind of brainwave. So Jack Williamson had this idea about a mountain and it was a majestic, tall, beautiful mountain called "The Knife in the Sky". And I don't know what the story was about but apparently because it didn't fit in and he still wanted to use it, he ended up publishing it in Boys' Life magazine and I just picture it as this really nice, wholesome thing about the beauty of nature and stuff like that.
And Fred Pohl had this.
This was originally published in Edward Ferman's anthology, "The Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology." So it was called. Very lofty title. But it also made it into the best science fiction of the year, every year. Right up to nowadays, there's a couple of books published where some editors get together and talk about what the best sci-fi of the year was. And also a good way of chronologically looking at the genre and other styles of course have these kind of anthologies too.
So anyway, this one really leaves you feeling icky, doesn't it?
Gretchen:
Yeah, this one was one that I read back to back with "The Savage Mouth." This one is definitely every sort of topic that makes you just feel bad is in this one.
Nate:
Yeah. It reminds me of, I will be talking about "The Girl who was Plugged In" a little bit later, but these two stories are kind of similar to one another, I thought.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, this one definitely has a much nastier undercurrent.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was also thinking about "The Girl who was Plugged In" with this.
JM:
I guess it's not exactly a spoiler, but that's to get it to later. It definitely calls to mind a couple of things. It's kind of an original and very discouraging look at first contact almost. Like, the first contact's already been made and it's like, it's almost an anti-climax. It's almost like, oh, that's all it is really. And actually it sucks and the story's dystopian, really, in a way that's like, it's not so much that the first contact made the dystopia, but it's just like, on top of the fact that life for humanity is kind of shit, we now have first contact with aliens and it's not all that you might hope that it should be.
Nate:
Really a very cynical look on the slave trade and reducing humans to commodities.
JM:
Yeah. And there's a real dissonance in this story, which I'm sure is on purpose because you can't really feel too bad for this person because he actually is kind of a monster. At the same time, you know, it's like, the solution is not to reduce humanity to this level, right?
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like it works in the same way with "A Clockwork Orange" where it's like, you don't sympathize with the main character and yet you still sort of like, you don't think he deserves that, you know? It's one of those like moral questions of, sure, that is a horrible person who did pretty terrible things, but this is a fate that I don't think anyone should go through no matter who they are.
JM:
Yeah. And here they're not even trying to force somebody into being good. They're just kind of turning him into a remote-controlled zombie. And he still has moments of lucidity and being able to like function as a human being, but ultimately this is his prison sentence, basically.
Nate:
It's like a lab experiment, like we were talking about last time with "Dr. Moreau" and some of the other vivisection stories. Plays into a lot of those themes here where, yeah, I mean, it's not a paragon of virtue that is being experimented on and toyed with, but still you feel pretty uncomfortable about the level of psychological and physical torture that these people are being put through.
JM:
And there's also, I think, an element of like almost, I mean, I don't know if it's an overused word, but like almost Lovecraftian quality to the creatures that, specifically the creatures that control him. Like they're not really, he didn't go on into too much, but this idea that they're like from somewhere really far away, like further away than most of the other aliens, and they're very, very far from human in appearance and physiognomy and in thought processes. And so the fact that, you know, like they basically have possession of human beings that they can do whatever they want with is made to seem more disturbing than maybe some of the other aliens who also buy people, but maybe they're a little more relatable somehow, right? Like he actually does go into their quirks a little bit during the story and describes how some of them have their preferences about the kind of people that they're willing to use and stuff like that.
These particular aliens are not, they're not very discerning, or if they are, they're discerning in a very negative way.
Nate:
Well, I don't know, it's kind of like the experience that you get when you go to a record store that's been picked through clean by everybody else.
JM:
Oh, all you get are the bad Metallica albums.
Nate:
Yeah, right, the copies of Angel's "Helluva Band" for a dollar.
JM:
Chinese democracy.
Nate:
Yeah, later, Uriah Heep albums, and yeah.
Gretchen:
It's like going to the book sale, it's only for a few days, and you end up there at the last day, and all they have are like multiple copies of like the same James Patterson novel.
Nate:
Yeah, there's this one thrift store around here that is exactly like that, where there's always nothing of value, but so many books, like every popular Fox News host who was on TV 10 years ago and wrote a book, like it's filled with those people's stuff.
I've seen more copies of "Pride and Prejudice" there than I think like any other novel. Yeah.
JM:
So we should probably be talking about this after the summary, but I just like making this point home. So they're buying the real dregs of the criminal class at very low rates, but they're also buying works of art that humanity has made, stuffing them into rockets and sending them off into space, knowing full well that they'll take thousands and thousands of years to reach their destination. But these aliens are so detached, and so I guess like the ancient ones, they can live for presumably hundreds of thousands of years. So to them, it's nothing. It's like they'll get here in 20,000 years. That's fine.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's like colonialism and the slave trade, pretty much stripping everybody's resources and goods and precious works of art overseas. It doesn't matter how long it takes to get there or how long you're going to stick it in the basement of some museum before you put it on display 300 years later. It's systematic deprivation of another culture's culture.
JM:
And meanwhile, humanity is more than willing to just do this. Hence again, I mean, it feels like this might be that not too distant future in some ways, but it also feels like it's a very 70s look at what the near future might be, because he describes Idaho as mostly a nuclear waste dump now.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting to think about Pohl, because again, like you mentioned, he started off very early in the 1930s fanzines world and getting into that as a teenager. But I think a lot of his most well-known work is from this later period of the 1970s, when he would have been like in his 40s or 50s writing this stuff. The only other thing I've read by him is the novel "Gateway", which I think is his most popular work, but it's from around this time as well, the 1970s. And it definitely feels like a very 70s novel, again, despite being like 40 years into the career of a lifelong science fiction author.
JM:
Oh, yeah. And he was very like in tune with the ecological concerns and stuff like that. And like, certainly it was a big deal to him right from before this time, you know, on to 90s and his collaboration with Isaac Asimov, which is probably one of the last books that Asimov participated in, which is, you know, nobody probably knows what we're talking about because we haven't described the story yet.
(music: rumbling under eerie synth)
spoiler plot summary and discussion
JM:
Interstellar travel has been discovered, sort of, but not really. It's actually radio. And Earth nations have various trade agreements with alien races. So the aliens can't actually visit us. They can only send radio signals. And I was kind of neat, like I kind of think about, even though I think it is a bit of an anti-climax, like deliberately, I also think kind of neat to think about, like, because we're always sending radio signals off into space, right? And like, this was a big thing in the 70s and 80s, especially, you know, like the SETI program and stuff like that. And just kind of thinking like, oh, one day, the aliens will contact us. And we're like, no, no, we never actually visited you, but we're going to give you some instructions now, and we're going to tell you how to build some stuff, and then we'll be able to be in communication forever.
And it'll be great.
We send up rockets all the time, and they, of course, don't travel that fast, but the aliens don't seem to care much.
So the story partially takes the form of a cold, dispassionate account of the activities of one Wayne Golden, a, "purchased person" who travels the world in the service of his operator, a creature from Groombridge Star are possibly multiple creatures, 12,000 years away by rocket. He makes negotiations, buying up precious earth artifacts and other items, and selling useful stuff like a device to turn nuclear waste into usable fuel cells.
He lives in a kennel in Chicago,a nd sometimes he's allowed a few minutes of freedom during which time he is himself. So we get to see his first-person narrative, too. Wayne is a prisoner, and he has a metal plate in his head. The aliens bought his bodies to use for their purposes. Wayne is basically a remote-controlled zombie, and real contact with aliens is not possible, but we do have the fast radio and can transmit signals over vast interstellar distances.
The Groombridge aliens are a strange lot indeed, seeming very cold and calculating, and apparently looking pretty scary/nasty, as Wayne knows since he looked it up once in a library.
The relationship is one-sided. They don't control his thoughts, just his body, and he thinks they probably see it as some kind of machine they use. And he wants to spend his 85 minutes of newfound freedom with his girlfriend, Carolyn. But she isn't around.
I say girlfriend, but Carolyn and Wayne haven't really spent much actual time together. Only about eight minutes, in fact. And they are seldom free at the same time. But they see each other, and even when they are on duty sometimes, they're not actively doing anything, so it can touch. And one person can talk, the free one, obviously. And there's definitely some corruption at work in the purchasing system. And he gets some condescension from the kennel clerk, but at the same time you kind of get the feeling that maybe he's reading that into it, maybe it's not actually there. Because, you know, as it becomes very apparent very quickly, Wayne is definitely not a reliable person to take trust in, or even really, necessarily to feel that sorry for.
He eats a meal in a Mexican restaurant, enjoying every minute of it, though kind of rushing everything. And yeah, feeling pretty horny. And he tips big and asks a random lady on the street to give him a kiss, when he only has a few minutes to spare. Human contact, you see? Feels good.
He makes it back to the kennel just on time for the owners from Groombridge to take over again. And we lose the first person. And he does a bunch more globetrotting, completing assigned tasks, and then is relinquished with a whole 1,000 minutes.
We do learn a bit about why Wayne is a prisoner. He is, to put it bluntly, a murderous pedophile. And he makes sure to tell us that he didn't sexually molest any of his victims. He just needed to see them die. Eventually, he's put in a ward for the criminally insane where he lived for years until the aliens from Altair make contact. And I guess they are the first ones.
And yeah, like Alex DeLarge, he's interested in being one of the ones to get the treatment. And it takes a while. We learn about the, "funny habits" of some of the alien purchasers. And they all have their preferences. It's kind of interesting. Like some of them, there's a race of aliens that are only interested in black folk. And there's the aliens that insist that their purchased people never eat fish.
But yeah, there's a humiliating experience. It's quite humiliating being a purchased person, generally. You don't get to control your body, but the body still does its automatic things. Once Wayne crapped his pants at an astronomical conference in Russia. And yeah, this kind of gone into, it's like, it would be funny, but it's really not. It's pretty nasty.
This time, with a thousand minutes, he gets a prostitute to come to his room. But is too tired and drunk off scotch and falls asleep. Wakes up to an empty wallet and just a few minutes to spare. "All I got of it were clean clothes and a hangover."
Later in the spring, Wayne has a long period of being controlled. And at one point, Carolyn, free, shows up. He's watching riots outside an embassy window on behalf of the masters. And while the room is empty of anyone else, she tries to pleasure him. It doesn't work, though. His mind must be aware of it, though.
In June, something unusual happens. Wayne's placed on indefinite furlough, though, at a 50-minute notice, the aliens can still use him. And he uses this time to go on a mad-dash hunt for Carolyn all over the place. But he keeps missing her.
He gets a call to report to a kennel in Philadelphia. There's Carolyn. But she's not happy. The Groombridge people have taken note of their human's interest and want them to be intimate while they're working.
They take over Wayne while he's screaming and upset that it isn't right, that it isn't fair, but they are owned and the aliens can do whatever they want with them.
Carolyn doesn't survive the experience or experiments, as the dispassionate third-person voice tells us. Her account is terminated. Wayne continues to function as a purchased person. But now, his control is relinquished, he is self-destructive and violent. The aliens determine to continue experiments with Wayne and other partners in the future. And it continues.
And yeah, that's the end of the story, really. Again, it's not very long, but there's a lot packed in there. And I can't really do it justice by just describing what happens. You just read it. You get sucked into the bleakness right away. It has a strange, discomforting feeling to it. Read it.
That really makes you want to take a shower, even though he doesn't describe anything. It's kind of the worst part, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the implications and also that it really is effective, the switching from third to first, depending on who's in control.
JM:
Yeah. At the same time, you can't help but feel that maybe this is how his victims fell, right? They had no control. And they were just not even, they didn't even have a chance. They were just young girls and they died after he was, I don't know, he said he didn't molest them, but who knows, really.
Nate:
Yeah, he's definitely an unreliable narrator, for sure.
JM:
Oh yeah, for sure. Even when he talks to the guy at the kennel, he's so on edge and disrespectful. And he calls him a slur and stuff like that. But any earlier kind of thinking, it seemed like he's being that mean to him, right? But he can't help but feel condescended to because it's probably because of his status as a purchased person, right? And he's always like, he feels like people who know this about him, people who know that he has a plate in his head and that he can turn into a remote controlled zombie for a race of distant Lovecraftian aliens are going to disrespect him no matter what. Like, this is like really angry inside, right? And what happens at the end makes him even angrier and he's like completely self-destructive now. He's gone over the edge.
And yeah, like he's just really fucked up too because you think about how like somebody like him, I mean, yes, he's a monster, but and maybe it's best to put people like that away so they don't impinge upon society. But at the same time, if you believe that the object of justice should be rehabilitation and not absolute punishment, this kind of stuff is really hard.
The way the society does it is so dispassionate too. You can see how the authorities convince themselves that it's not even about punishment. It's just like, well, we have this opportunity now. Nobody else is going to do it, right? Who would surrender themselves to be the moving part, the machine of a distant race of aliens, right? Nobody would do it unless they were coerced to do it somehow.
And the guy, when he's "free" he has a certain amount of freedom that he probably wouldn't otherwise have. I mean, he's able to rent a car and drive all over the place looking for his would-be girlfriend. But he always knows that like within an hour's notice he could be shut down and he could be back to traveling the globe and purchasing valuable works of art to send into space never to be seen by the human race again.
It's such a grim future.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's interesting what you said, J.M., during the non-spoiler section, that like kind of anti-climactic feel of it, because it is like these aliens don't change the way that people are treated. They're just like integrated into things that humanity has already done and is just now doing for another species.
JM:
Yeah, it's really something. I guess it seems like that's a theme that we've been hammering on with these stories a lot this batch, is this dehumanization aspect. Like, it's definitely really there in the Tiptree story that's coming up as well.
Nate:
Sure, yeah. This is definitely an interesting contrast to "Gateway" which I read kind of recently, and that "Gateway" also deals with first contact and colonialism and various other things that we see in lost race type stories, but it approaches it from a totally different angle than this. I wouldn't call "Gateway" a comic novel, but it's definitely not a horror novel, even though there's definitely like some moments in there that are just terrifying due to their sheer scale and scope. But yeah, it's interesting to see a real dark and cynical take on these themes.
JM:
It makes me wonder what kind of place he was in when he wrote this, just because, yeah, like I'm used to seeing a pretty light touch from him, even when he's covering dark subjects. He usually, it's cloaked in a lot of satire and humor, and like, yeah, the implications are usually pretty dark, but it's not right out, like, in your face like that.
I just find the anecdote with the Williamson thing to be really funny, because like, I could just picture Williamson's thing being so wholesome and nice, and, you know, like, it's like, Pohl's like, wow, what about this? It's like, yeah, I don't think that fits in our novel. I'll do Boy's Life. You can do some crazy horror story thing. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that doesn't really mesh well, I don't think.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
One nice touch I thought that this has, that has really nothing to do with anything else, but there's some nice New Jersey geography described here, in particular, a very seedy stretch on Route 35, and he talked about Long Branch a little bit, so that was nice to see.
JM:
Yeah, he talks about that in "The Way The Future Was", too. He actually describes a lot of places near your area.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
So something he was pretty familiar with, I guess. Yeah. I want to share a funny anecdote online that I read online recently. This also has to do with a Pohl story that we're not, we haven't read, but it's just kind of funny because somehow, I think this was on a, probably a science fiction Facebook group or something like that. It's kind of one of the only reasons why I still stay on Facebook sometimes is because there's some kind of cool groups, and it's good for different things, including advertising the podcast, but somehow Frederik Pohl's name came up, and I think I mentioned this story, and how dark it was, and how somehow like the topic was kind of came around to Pohl's darkness or lack thereof. And yeah, this is a really dark story from him, if you want to go that far.
Somebody brought up a story and he's like, this person basically said, well, if you really want to read a dark story from Frederik Pohl, read the story "Day Million."
So, I didn't know this story. I wasn't familiar with it. I noticed that Pohl said that it was one of his favorite stories from the 60s that he wrote, and that he thought it meant a lot to him. And I read it, and one of the things I do sometimes, especially when we're doing an author that has short stories on a podcast episode is I'll read a lot of other stuff, just to get a handle on what they're like. I'd read some Pohl before, but not a ton of stuff, so I decided to read a whole bunch of short stuff. And I read the story "Day Million." So basically, it's not really a story. It doesn't have a plot. It's more of like, I don't know, maybe it's what they would have called in Astounding, a thought variant, maybe?
I don't know, but it's like basically hypothesizing a future where this couple meets, and he's a space pilot or something, and she's had all this surgery, and all this stuff done to her, to make her aquatic. So she's like, basically a mermaid, and she was also at one time a man, but now she's not. And this couple meets, and they fall in love, and they decide to get married, but he's a space pilot, so he's not there a lot of the time. And at the end of the story, Pohl basically says, but it doesn't really matter, because even though they never actually see each other in person, they're able to connect together, and, you know, what is all this wonderful intimate sensation, but things that the brain produces, and if you can reproduce all those sensations, you can have a couple that are like millions and millions of miles apart, and it's like they're still as intimate as they ever could be.
I'm like, I read this story and I'm thinking to myself, that doesn't really seem dark. That seems really nice. That seems like a really nice vision of the future, almost, in a way. And, you know, it just kind of struck me, the person that said that wasn't being sarcastic, they actually did think this was a really, really dark story.
It just kind of goes to show how divided some of our viewpoints are, and how something like science fiction can really bring that out into the open. What's like a really dark, terrible future to somebody might actually be really positive to somebody else.
So, I don't know, I just thought that was really interesting, but I said, yeah, not nearly a dark story like this one, no matter what way you look at it.
But yeah, really cool writer, I think, and again, a person that has had a lot of experience in the field, and I really like the way he breaks things down. I really like the way he talks about things, like, when he goes into the magazines he'll talk about everything from, like, what you have to do to get stories to how you can balance the budget to what kind of corners you might have to cut, and he goes into the industry and describes, like, what it's like working with distributors and how you have to deal with people who might not have a clue about your genre of choice and stuff like that, and, again, talking about publishing and all the different people that he met and stuff like that, and it's kind of a, especially contrast to somebody like Moskowitz, I mean, no disrespect to him, the guy's done a ton of research and he obviously knew his subject very well, but reading his recounts of fandom was, like, a pretty dry and un-stimulating experience, whereas Pohl actually makes it fun. And talking about the magazine publishing and stuff was actually super interesting, especially thinking about the way it was back then and how we've gotten into it, and we did our special on Astounding and where we, like, actually went through an entire issue, cover to cover, here he is talking about how these things are made and the differences between the different magazines and so on, and it's just really cool.
Yeah, just as dark and morbid as this story is, I really recommend it. It stays with you for sure. Definitely, again, like I mentioned in a previewing this one, not to be read if you're, I guess, easily disturbed and put off, but if you like kind of a horror sci-fi and you want to read something that, I don't know, I think this is, like, really unsettling story that you're not going to forget in a hurry. And I'm sure David Hartwell thought so too, that's why it's in "Foundations of Fear."
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would also recommend this story as, like, a really worthy story to read with, like, really interesting moral questions to think about. And I would just say don't go into it for light reading, but it's a great story to read.
JM:
Not only the, like, sort of scuzzy sexual angle, but also the idea that, like, robot-controlled zombies might be wandering around. It kind of reminds me of the robomen from that early Doctor Who story with the Daleks on Earth and stuff where they, like, capture humans and just put a radio transmitter in their head and, like, make them do stuff and, you know, they have no control over their bodies or anything like that. They pretty much expire and die. And I don't know, I always had this morbid thought too of, like, when I was thinking about that, like, yeah, they probably still have to do, like, normal bodily function stuff, right? Like, they probably still have to eat and sleep and crap. And these are things that probably their controllers don't really care about that much, that kind of existence. This is, like, how they must freak people out, like, that description of the incident at the Astronomical Conference and, like, the guys yelling at him, right? And just, like, you have to get out of here! Like, you smell horrible! We don't want your kind around here! Like, just, and you can hear all this stuff. But he's really talking to the alien, obviously, but, like, again, he's, like, well, this alien is 12,000 years of space travel away. I have to shout to be heard, right? So, really nasty piece of work. So, yeah.
But if you want to read a lighter, not really lighter, I mean, it's pretty dark story too, but it's, like, done in that kind of satirical, not quite so heavy way. Definitely some of his 50s stuff, like, that story, "The Tunnel under the World". I definitely recommend, because that's really good, too. And that's, like, that was one of the first pull stories that I became familiar with, so I have an attachment to that one in particular. And the X Minus One radio drama.
So, next up on Chrononauts, we have two really cool stories, don't we?
Gretchen:
Yes. Our next two stories will be "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison, and "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree Jr., or Alice Sheldon, outside of the pseudonym.
JM:
Yes, so I'm looking forward to talking about those. I really enjoyed both those two. I had read the Tiptree and Ellison in the past, but not for a while, especially the Ellison.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I chose the Tiptree just after reading it for the first time, and it's been a while since I first read Ellison's story, so it was interesting to revisit it.
Nate:
It'll be another fun but dark time.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, more kind of dark and disturbing stories, and I have a lot to say about the Tiptree and a lot of questions, or one big question actually, but I won't spoil anything. We can talk about it when we talk about it. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.
In the meantime, don't sell your precious works of art to aliens thousands of light years away. You'll miss them and you'll never get them back. So keep them close and, yeah, if first contact comes with aliens, I hope it's a little nicer than that.
With all that said, we really enjoyed this. You can come and visit us on all our places online at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. You can email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com or you can leave us a comment on any of our social media platforms. And, yeah, we'll be back very soon with the next installment of Chrononauts. This is J.M., Gretchen, and Nate signing off for now.
Good night.
Bibliography:
Pohl, Frederik - "The Way the Future Was: A Memoir" (1978)
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