SOURCE: "Critical Mass: The Science Fiction of Frederik Pohl," in Voices for the Future, Volume Three, edited by Thomas D. Clareson and Thomas L. Wymer, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984, pp. 106-26.

[In the following excerpt, taken from an essay first published in S-F Studies in 1980, Samuelson explores the social criticism in Pohl's short fiction from the 1950s through the 1970s.]

The problem of determining Frederik Pohl's rank among SF writers is not a simple one to resolve. As a satirist and thinker, he is at the top of American SF writers who are "fan-oriented," but as an artist, even as a technician, he often shows significant defects. Even the best of his fiction is sometimes marred by the intrusion of melodrama, sentimentality, unrationalized fantasy, and other features more or less calculated to appeal to an addicted audience. For the most part, his work seems to lack depth, density, an authentic personal voice, and a sense of style as anything more than a serviceable medium. This makes it difficult to take him seriously as a major writer, addressing with authority matters of significance.

One reason for these "flaws," if such they are, is not far to seek. Pohl's intimate connection with commercial SF over so many years has no doubt limited him at times to what he thought his known audience was willing to accept. If it was narrow and provincial, so were his stories prior to 1952. When satire and social criticism were in, he still felt constrained to gild them with snappy patter, melodramatic plots, and irrelevant aliens. His Hugos as editor were won for a magazine committed largely to adventure stories and essentially lightweight material—IF or Worlds of IF—in which he once objected editorially to the pessimism and anarchy being brought to SF in the 1960s by the "New Wave." Yet his own work later shows signs of his having accepted without hesitation the greater freedom of content and complexity of form brought to SF by the "New Wave" controversy, not to mention the broadened audience.

The reader who comes to Frederik Pohl through his short stories anthologized by others, his novels written alone or with Kornbluth or Lester del Rey, even through most of his short story collections, is bound to recognize a critical bent, out of harmony with the simpleminded optimism of most SF adventures. The obvious butts of his criticism are individual incompetents, power-grabbing manipulators, and such communal vices as war, waste, overbreeding, and the kind of gullibility that allows manipulators to prosper. Some of these gulls and failures, wheeler-dealers and baby makers must have come from experience, however broadened and universalized. Though not alone, SF readers are addicted to power fantasies, escapism and an ever-rising material standard of living. However indirectly, then, Pohl is taking aim on his own readers, as well as the masses they look down upon. Furthermore, by acknowledging the underside of SF dreams and even by telling a familiar tale better than others have done, he implicitly criticizes his own predecessors and peers.

Over the years, the audience for SF has grown, and part of it has even grown up. Pohl himself has outgrown his role as enforcer of just such rules as hampered his own talents. But the habits of 30-plus years can be hard to break. Even some of his "mature" works continue to rely on melodramatic action, unearned sentiment, thin characterization, and a rapid pace that disallows contemplative savoring of people, places, acts and consequences. Style and structure take on more importance for themselves, realistic detail and emotional intensity have increased, and the often facetious comedy of his earlier works has turned toward an almost tragic representation of the human condition. The "great work," however, still lies beyond his grasp. . . .

Aside from the collaborations with Kornbluth, Pohl's most famous consumer story is probably "The Midas Plague" (1954). Positing a "utopian" economy of affluence, Pohl turns upside down the idea of conspicuous consumption: the "poor" are burdened by having to consume huge amounts of foods and products churned out by automated factories. The desultory and forgettable plot, involving a newly married couple from disparate classes, concludes with the "happy idea" (long since telegraphed to the reader) of short-circuiting the process by involving robots in consumption as well as production. Well aware that the premise (suggested by Galaxy editor Horace Gold) was untenable, Pohl didn't really try to shore up its believability. Instead he turned it into a "tall tale" with logically extrapolated details and a rarely flagging faculty of comic invention. Complaints of the story's impossibility or lack of verisimilitude are beside the point, which was to expose and skewer the naivete (or duplicity) of the attitude (not limited to the 1950s) that affluence is a never-ending spiral, meanwhile softening the blow with comic exaggeration.

Only the second story to bear his exclusive byline, "The Midas Plague" marked (along with The Space Merchants) the emergence of Pohl as comic satirist. Frequently reprinted, sometimes as "serious" Utopian speculation, it was popular enough in its time to inspire three sequels. "The Man Who Ate the World" (1956), "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" (1958) and "The Waging of the Peace" (1959) do not come up to the original, but each has its moments of comic brilliance, as does another broadly conceived satire on the commercialization of Christmas. In "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus" (1956), however, the proffered cure is a love affair between the sales-worshipping narrator and a missionary's daughter, characters too simple and cliched to shoulder the burden.

More successful as stories are four which attack, grotesquely but with less zanniness, aspects of social control. "My Lady Greensleeves" (1957), ostensibly about a prison riot, examines the society of which that prison is a symptom. The riot fails because the white-collar thinkers and blue-collar workers can't get together to engineer a break-out. A discordant note is provided by the fortuitous presence of a Senator's daughter, pretty and innocent, available as a hostage. Rebelling against the exaggerated system of segregation by occupational specialization which is the real issue of the story, she has to be made to fear for her life, and to recognize the "good sense" of the system, which eliminates illogical biases based on color, religion or ethnic origin.

Governmental overcontrol is rejected as one solution to wasted human resources in "Rafferty's Reasons" (1955). The title refers to inchoate causes of homicidal tendencies in a former "artist," retrained (brainwashed) to fill a niche society finds useful. Mind-numbed by his involuntary conditioning, Rafferty finally attacks a politician with a cigar butt, thinking it a knife. The underdog draws some sympathy, but he is too pathetic and monomanical to earn much of it. The politicians, however, are much more unsavory both as characters (caricatures) and on the grounds of their "principles." They have eliminated unemployment, overproduction and economic depressions, but at the cost (lightly dismissed) of love, religion, free speech, free elections, even—as in the case of Rafferty—of anything more than a semblance of free will, except for themselves.

Without controls, however, overpopulation and/or ecotastrophe are likely, as in "The Census Takers" (1956) and "The Snowmen" (1959). The job of the census takers is to regulate and reduce population, by execution if necessary, which the protagonist-narrator, an efficient but unimaginative civil servant, carries out well and without compunction. The latter story postulates a rapid approach to the "heat death of the universe" through overuse of "heat pumps" (shorthand for any temperature-regulating device). The satire is obscured, however, rather than illuminated, by the presence in both stories of alien beings. They serve as sane viewpoints, but the reader might be trusted to develop the same on his or her own, and their presence blunts the social criticism by turning our attention from human folly to alien invasion.

Cliched responses to alien invasion are definitely germane to "The Children of the Night" (1964). During an uneasy armistice, the Arcturans want a base in an American small town, which requires voter approval of rezoning. The narrator is another negative hero, a high-pressure public relations man, who doesn't let misgivings about the morality of his work stand in the way of doing a job well. Manipulating the good, the bad, and the public at large, he wins the referendum for the Arcturans by uniting the electorate with the hated aliens in opposition to himself as an agent of disruption, a scapegoat. Style and structure and rapid pace are all-important to this story, but the moral is far from clearcut. Pohl exploits his reader's anticipated sympathy for vivisected children and a decent politician to make the narrator's work look bad, even though the result may be a gain in peace and communication between the races.

Manipulation need not be so overt or organized. Sedation, voluntarily chosen, can do the job, as two other stories of the 1950s point out. At first glance a space opera, "The Mapmakers" (1955) shows a spaceship crew suffering hallucinations, and without the services of their navigator in hyperspace. Blinded in an accident, he is heavily sedated by a solicitous medical staff, until he convinces them of the reason for his agitated condition. The technicians' complacency is upset by his "second sight," which can guide them home unerringly and offers a definitive solution to the problem of interstellar travel. Chaotic and voluntary "control" by tranquilizers is the subject of "What to Do Till the Analyst Comes" (1956). Before hallucinogens were in the public eye, though long after Huxley's "soma" and right after the furor over "Miltown," Pohl posited a "non-habit-forming" drug which banishes worry, simultaneously freeing society from accuracy, efficiency, productivity and safety. Only the narrator is well situated to tell the story; overdosed at the drug's inception, he is allergic to it, making him the last person left to worry about anything.

None of these stories bogs down in melodrama and sentimentality. Extrapolation leads to exaggeration, action threatens to boil over, and the reader's sympathies are openly manipulated. But the author usually pulls back from the edge of bathos or overaction, achieving an emotional tone closer to the sardonic, most evident in "The Children of Night" and "What to Do Till the Analyst Comes." "The Mapmakers" is almost pure wish-fulfillment, "My Lady Greensleeves" pushes its message too much, the overconsumption tetralogy is maybe a little too zany, and "Rafferty's Reasons" is almost too dispassionate. And science, for stories ostensibly of SF, is almost conspicuous by its absence; it is a prop at most, since the stories are concerned primarily with social change. Simple moral judgments are generally avoided; the issues are real, if taken beyond contemporary parameters; and the characters, for the most part, are believable, though thin, which can be blamed both on the shortness of the stories and the pointed edges of the satire. Less credible are the cardboard figures in "Rafferty's Reasons," and characters in tales so zany (the tetralogy) or miraculous ("The Mapmakers") as to make believability irrelevant.

Comic or serious, these stories display a consistent motif, one familiar in the satiric tradition, but also pointedly relevant to the situation of a clear-sighted individual writing in an escapist medium. This paranoid sense that only one person can see clearly in an insane world is carried to its logical extreme in "The Tunnel Under the World" (1955). Arguably Pohl's best short work, this may be the ultimate fictional statement against commercial manipulation. Structured as a horror story, but without Gothic trappings, the story reveals its menace gradually, as Pohl takes his hero and us through several mistaken constructions of reality before announcing the devastating truth, which justifies the apparent melodrama.

Disturbed by insultingly strident advertising techniques and some bewilderingly effective salesmanship, Guy Burckhardt discovers—seemingly by accident—that the day of his experiences is being repeated again and again. It is his efforts to find out what is really happening that lead to startling but seemingly nonsensical revelations and then to a horrifying discovery. He and all his fellow-citizens, victims of an industrial accident, have been preserved through a miracle of science to function through miniature manikins in a table-top model of their small town. As a trade-off for this involuntary half-life, they sacrifice the consciousness of the passage of time, which might alter their responses. They must live, over and over again, the day after the accident. The advertising gimmicks with which they story began are their reason for existence; the whole town is nothing but a controlled test market for an advertising research firm. And knowing the truth, Burckhardt is powerless to do anything about it.

The technical premise is hard to credit, especially within the time frame suggested by the characters' manners and mores, but the idea that advertisers would do such a thing if they could is not all far-fetched. Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders detailed practices then going on, which Pohl's own experience in the ad business could verify. Burckhardt's nightmare of timelessness may be beyond their reach, but the advertisers' grasp is hardly exaggerated. Our contemporary fascination with designer labels worn on the outside of clothing, not to mention T-shirts and apparatus blatantly advertising other products, shows how we willingly enter into complicity with the hucksters, more today than ever.

"The Tunnel Under the World" works in part because of its continued relevance, but also because of the appropriateness of its horror conventions and the "mechanical" nature of its stereotyped characters. These might put off readers for whom the satire could be a valuable dose of medicine, but for the SF reader who chews up those features as his daily bread, the application of the story to him as an SF reader may not be apparent. The satire seems to be directed at those other guys, who are not aware of Madison Avenue shenanigans. But like the other stories of manipulation, "The Tunnel Under the World" has an uncomfortably close fit to the cottage industry of SF itself, more today than ever, as movie makers and producers of spin-offs from SF properties make millions of dollars off their "harmless" addiction.

Besides relating to its audience, Pohl's attack on manipulation parallels the task of the writer himself manipulating his characters. This was especially evident to Damon Knight, who asserted that Pohl's characters just didn't care (nor apparently should the reader). The author as puppet master was too conspicuous to Knight, but the reason could be just the opposite from what Knight implied. Pohl was not disinterested, but passionately involved, if his life and his writing have anything in common. This is a man who, however naively and lightly, was active in the Communist Party for four years, and whose liberal conscience frequently shows through his writing, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in his political primer for the 1972 election year.

It may be that he didn't have the tools, the desire, or the "permission" of the SF field to let that caring show, except in fictional polemics which raised issues above characters, and pulp fiction conventions above both. No doubt it is also true as Pohl has said that, even in the 1950s, few people in SF were writing for the ages. Writing for a deadline, for grocery money, and for an audience with a dubious memory, they had to produce a story good enough to fill pages in a cheap monthly magazine, but not to withstand repeated and critical readings. The wonder is not that these stories have flaws, but that they stand up so well after a quarter of a century. Within the sharply limited selection considered here, Pohl's stories certainly come close to deserving [Kingsley] Amis's high praise of the time, if your taste, like Amis's, runs to SF as a social criticism. . . .

Through the 1960s, Pohl was also experimenting with "sketches" in which the story proper hardly interferes at all with the satire or speculation. Displaying a verbal economy surpassing his previous efforts, they are essentially static, crammed with information rather than action. Four of them feature aliens, but not as the melodramatic menaces of hoary tradition. The first of these, "The Martian Stargazers" (1962), comments obliquely on our history and conceit, explaining through speculative Martian star lore why they killed themselves long before men landed there. "Earth 18" (1964) uses the Martians as the butt of racist jokes, irrelevant to a Florida hotel-keeper, but worth their weight in gold to his black bellman. And "Speed Trap" (1967) implies alien involvement in a suspected conspiracy to use travel, conferences and administration to keep real research from being done.

The best of these, "Day Million" (1966), is a self-proclaimed lovestory imagining really altered people and conditions in the future (the millionth day, A.D.). Genetic engineering and social change have modified the meaning of gender, the forms human bodies can take, and the immediacy and exclusiveness of a love relationship. Without actually telling us a "story," the narrator presents us with two "genetic males" who "marry" by obtaining electronic replicas of each other to use for that era's version of a "full" love relationship. The jolting shift of perspective common to many Pohl stories occurs not once but several times in this story, as contemporary terminology proves inadequate, even misleading, for describing the future. The richness of this verbal experience may be marred for some readers by the narrator's direct address, even browbeating them into taking historical change into account when they look past tomorrow. The overall effect, however, is contemplation of, not recoil from, the supposedly outrageous circumstances, and vindication of the claim that this is indeed a "love story."

"Day Million" and The Age of the Pussyfoot suggest the maturing of Pohl and his greater control of fictional techniques during the 1960s. Editing as many as four magazines at once, he was living through a change in social conditions which, along with more important things, made all kinds of SF seem vaguely respectable, and both allowed and expected it to be all things to all people. Changes were also happening in SF, if not most overtly displayed in his magazines, as the "New Wave" writers in England and their American counterparts rebelled against the old editorial formulas.

Long considered an apostle of doom, Pohl reversed his field slightly late in the decade, calling in an editorial for more hopeful and constructive stories in SF. Backing this call with at least limited action, he printed in Galaxy and IF, as other SF magazines did also, paid advertisements for and against the American presence in Vietnam, signed by other SF professionals, and announced a contest to seek feasible solutions to this problem then ripping apart the fabric of American society. But the magazines soon were sold, and he resigned as editor, entering a stage of depression in which he claims even living lost its appeal.

Reborn in the 1970s, he began re-examining the past, present and future. From that introspection came a series of autobiographical reconstructions, at least four retrospective anthologies, and something new in his writing. No longer tied to the editor's chair, and allowed, perhaps impelled, to write what he pleased, he surprised Pohl-watchers with some of the best writing of his career. Not simply comic infernos, these are coherent works of speculation and extrapolation tied to reasonably "hard" science, something almost completely lacking in his previous fiction. Pohl regards science as a great "spectator sport." It can reveal vistas inaccessible elsewhere, supply constraints or limits to work within or against, and lend authentic or authentic-sounding details to a narrative. But though science may have an inside track to the "truth," or at least a close approximation, it is not a panacea; as Guy Burckhardt found out in "The Tunnel Under the World," the truth may not set you free, but rather define the boundaries of your prison.

Ecological consciousness has long been apparent in Pohl's work; over-population and exhaustion of resources play a role in his major and minor fictions. These newer stories seem even more clearly to be rooted in such matters and the problems of social control arising out of them, what the Stanford Research Institute has designated the "World Macroproblem." Rather than simply bemoaning the crisis, Pohl's stories propose solutions. The solutions may still be fantasies, but they do not settle for aliens, ESP, or unlimited resources pulled out of a hat. Pulp conventions are subdued; he depends less on sentiment and more on emotional commitment, less on melodrama and more on plausible action. Satire is still present, but it seems more integrated into the fabric of the moral fable. The satire is still directed at human vice and folly, at insane or inhumane social arrangements, especially at our apparent incapacity to undertake coordinated activity to prevent or alleviate foreseeable disasters. Most of SF is indirectly indicted in these stories by taking easy ways out, simply crying "j'accuse" or resorting to magic formulas.

Formally, these stories are more complex, with interwoven viewpoints, narrators of questionable reliability, denser characterizations, radiating images, and an iron control of tone. Though every one of them has something resembling a "happy ending," they all apporoach the condition of tragedy. In "The Gold at the Starbow's End" (1972), for example, we have a "noble experiment" overseen by a science advisor to the President (vaguely similar to Henry Kissinger), in which ten healthy, sensible, disciplined and mathematically educated young people are sent in a starship to a nonexistent Centauran planet, in the hope that ten years' concentrated thinking will have unexpected results. It does. The adventurers develop new languages, arts and sciences, transcending contemporary scientific paradigms; they also develop hostility toward those whom they discover to have hoaxed them.

The story develops fairly slowly, however, as the narrative alternates between scenes at home and messages from space, which sets the stage for the destruction sent back by the "new, improved" species. The "final solution" engineered by the supposed subjects of the experiments makes for entertaining reading but uncomfortable reflection on our present way of doing things.

A more conventional adventure story is "The Merchants of Venus" (1972), which centers on the successful quest of a tour-guide and prospector to make a big strike in an undiscovered tunnel of the Heechee, an ancient alien civilization which once honeycombed the planet. This is the hellish Venus of contemporary scientific knowledge, and only the existence of the Heechee tunnels makes it possible for man to settle there, while the hope of scavenging useful artifacts makes it more or less desirable. The society is built up in the tradition of cutthroat capitalism, people preying on tourists and servicing each other, with the dangers somewhat obviated by highpowered medicine, provided you have lots of money. More prized than money is "Full Medical" insurance that covers you for anything short of resurrection of the dead (and maybe even that). The hero's health and wealth are both in bad shape when the story begins, and they get worse as he takes his tourist-employers out to the planet's surface. They turn on him, and time starts running out, but we know from the traditions of adventure fictions that he will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The real interest, however, is in the carefully worked out physical and social background, including the disastrous ecological-population situation implied on Earth which makes Venus even slightly attractive.

"In the Problem Pit" (1973) is only minimal SF and an unusually positive speculation for Pohl, in which the bad guys (and innocent bystanders) don't have to be killed off to realize some Utopian results. The premise is that at regular intervals, groups of citizens, some voluntary and some "drafted" to make representative samplings of the population, be brought together and isolated with professional facilitators in a marathon problem-solving session. These rotating "encounter groups," starting from their own personal problems, also engage those of their whole civilization. Like Pohl's "sketches" of the 1960s, this is an essentially static idea—which calls for character interactions within the closed environment. But the story turns on an apparently lost member of the group, a search party, and the rescue of an attempted suicide, utilizing sentimentality and melodrama to make conventionally exciting what might have been a very moving and meaningful story.

Easily the most negative of the recent works is "We Purchased People" (1974), a superior narrative treatment of several recurrent themes in Pohl's work. A love story with a sado-masochistic twist, it reminds us of the possible tragic consequences for individuals in certain "Utopian" solutions to social problems. Wayne Golden and Carolyn Schoerner (symbolically named "beautiful people") are would-be lovers, star-crossed in a literal sense. Found guilty by human tribunals of heinous crimes (at least Wayne was), they have been sold to aliens, who exercise remote control to use them as agents for their business dealings on Earth. They rarely meet or see each other, except when one or the other is controlled, although they do have a few "stolen moments." When the aliens themselves finally decide to bring the two together, it is not for a happy ending. The aliens wish to experiment, to learn more about patterns of human sexual behavior.

That would be bad enough as an invasion of privacy, which is what Wayne and Carolyn both think it is, but an added complication makes this story definitely not for the squeamish. Having been introduced to Wayne as a frustrated lover, we only discover just why he is a "purchased person." A homicidal maniac, he got his kicks from young girls, not exactly sexually molesting them but "watching them die." Unaware of any reform of his personality, such as the reader seems to be privy to, the aliens control him according to the "sexual behavior which has been established as his norm." Given the story's premises, the result is sick, even outrageous, but predictable, even inevitable. Moreover, a simple moral judgment is once again impossible. Unlike the protagonist of "Rafferty's Reasons," Wayne had no reason to expect anything better (Carolyn's guilt is obscure, her end more pathetic). Like the earlier story, however, this one also raises the question of what price is appropriate for a society to pay for benefits received. If the politicians were suspect, what of the aliens who brought us progress as an afterthought, while buying up our primitive artworks and artifacts? . . .

There is no question that Pohl has matured as a person, grown as a writer, come close to a representative in SF terms of a tragic vision of life, without renouncing his roots, both in commercial writing, and in the mode of satire. . . . Whether he can tap more of his unconscious, incite more passion, progress beyond the confines of this still and incestuous field I cannot predict, nor can I be sure that he even wants to. SF has been good to Pohl, and he continues to return the favor. If he can get beyond this plateau, however, as he has risen past others, he may realize a mission his writings about SF seem to suggest he envisions for it. Then his work will be not only a criticism of society, and of other SF, but also a serious and constructive criticism of life.