Frederik Pohl passed away this weekend just as the 73rd annual WorldCon was coming to a close – his granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary broke the news Monday afternoon via Twitter.
Pohl blogged regularly until his death; his blog won a Hugo in 2010 for Best Fan Writer, one of four Hugo awards he won over the course of his lengthy career; he also won three Nebula Awards.
Pohl grew up in Brooklyn, New York and served with the US Army in the Second World War. His first published work was a poem in1937, but he is probably best known for his 1977 science fiction novel Gateway, the story of a space station hidden in an asteroid. It won the Hugo, Locus, Nebula and John W Campbell awards and was adapted into a computer game.
The Science Fiction Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998.
Upon hearing the news of Pohl’s death, Canadian science fiction and fantasy author Jo Walton blogged that “it’s impossible to over-estimate the importance of Frederik Pohl to the science fiction genre…. He wrote stories and novels that were absolutely essential to the genre, and he kept on writing them, from his early stories in the 1930s to his most recent novel in 2011.”
I must confess I’ve only read a few of Pohl’s novels and particularly enjoyed the quirky Narabedla as a teenager; I wish I still owned a copy.
Frederik Pohl was 93.