Legendary science-fiction author Frederik Pohl is 91 years old and uses a wheelchair to get around his home in suburban Palatine. Degenerative nerve damage cost him the use of his right arm about six years ago, so he taught himself to type with just his left. In effect, he writes with one hand tied behind his back. But he writes.
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Pohl says he got the idea for the novel in 1991, when visiting Pompeii with his wife, Betty. He’s a self-taught expert on ancient Rome, having written a long-out-of-print biography—as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica entry—on Emperor Tiberius. (He says he was recently asked to rewrite the entry, but found the assignment “comical. Nothing much has changed.”) Replete with a forum and arena, slave-borne litter rides, gladiatorial spectacles, and dinner parties that end with the inevitable vomiting, the jubilee is staffed by “virts”—virtual-reality Romans and slaves—and “indentureds”: honest-to-god poor folk from Myanmar, Ghana, America, and other ruined parts of the world, who’ve sold themselves into bondage.
A theme park built around a catastrophe is the sort of satirical gesture that won Pohl his first fame in 1953, with the hardbound publication of The Space Merchants, one of several novels he wrote with longtime friend Cyril Kornbluth. In a 1960 study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis said The Space Merchants “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far”—an endorsement that seems all the more significant when you consider the works Pohl and Kornbluth had to elbow out of the way to catch Amis’s attention. Sci-fi scholar Gary K. Wolfe, who teaches at Roosevelt University, points out via e-mail that 1953 was a boom year for the field, which saw the publication of “not only The Space Merchants, but Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Bester’s The Demolished Man (which won the first Hugo Award), Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes . . . etc., etc.”
In New Maps of Hell, Amis calls Kornbluth “a prolific and competent author,” praises Pohl more glowingly, and leaves to others “the final determination of which partner is responsible for which scenes.” Roosevelt’s Wolfe comments in his e-mail that “Rich published a very well documented biography of Kornbluth, which Fred thought portrayed him (Fred) in a very unfair and unfavorable light. He blogged about it quite a bit at the time, and it’s safe to say that the nature of that collaboration as portrayed in Rich’s book is quite different from the way Fred has written about it. . . . It’s likely to remain a question that no one wants to dig into too deeply.”
