NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY LIZ ARMSTRONG
PORTRAIT BY ANDREA BAUER

Let’s talk numbers for a minute: Pohl has won at least 16 high-profile awards for his writing, including six Hugos and three Nebulas. He’s edited or coauthored stories with all the sci-fi magis—Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein, Cyril Kornbluth, Donald Wolheim, Harry Dockweiler (aka Dirk Wylie)—and represented lots of them (and more) as a literary agent, most of this while he was still a teenager.

And he still writes. Just this past August, The Last Theorem, which he coauthored with Arthur C. Clarke, was published. It was the last book Clarke wrote before he died. That’s a pretty big deal.

But even when not behind the desk, Pohl’s always been an ass kicker. His house burned down in the early 1960s, so he became a volunteer fireman. His family begged him to quit doing that and support them, so he took the first real job offered to him, and that was collecting urine samples from racehorses. Around the same time, in 1962, Pohl first brought cryogenics to the light of day, and he was also an expert in crystal gazing.

What happened to you politically in the 70s?

I’ve been a Democrat my entire adult life. Nixon was a slimy little beast. So I became a Democratic County Committeeman, the absolute lowest elected office in America.

Your wife, Betty Anne Hull, ran on the Democratic ticket for House Representative in 1996 and lost to the incumbent Republican. Actually, Betty, can you tell us about that?

Betty Anne Hull: It was sort of like, who wants to be the sacrificial lamb? I like to think I prepared the way for his final ousting. It’s now solidly a Democratic district. Although I didn’t prevail, at least what we do when we’re candidates and we know we’re not going to win is get the voice to speak with reason and try to let the world know that not everybody thinks one way.

While Pohl was out romanticizing politics and signing up for whatever seemed like the most dumbass, dangerous thing to do, Bradbury decided as a teenager he was a pacifist and prayed he wouldn’t be drafted. Luckily for him, his army physical determined that without his glasses he was blinder than Helen Keller and thus unfit for service. In fact, the most outright politically bold thing Bradbury ever did was on paper. Eisenhower had just won 1951’s election; disappointed, Bradbury took out a full-page ad in Daily Variety denouncing Republicans and Senator McCarthy’s communist hoedown. “I have seen too much fear in a country that has no right to be afraid,” he wrote. “I do not want any more lies, any more prejudice, any more smears. I do not want intimations, hear-say [sic], or rumor. I do not want unsigned letters or nameless telephone calls from either side, or from anyone.” Wow, dude. You really told them.

Pohl started off a few steps ahead of the game: Months before Bradbury’s first story was published in Super Science Stories, Pohl had already quit editing that magazine. And later, both had long-term working relationships with an editor but Bradbury was selling him stories as an author and Pohl was selling him stories as an agent.

Did you and Ray Bradbury cross paths often?

Very little of Bradbury’s life involved any of mine. We did meet now and then but not very often. We ran into each other a couple of times at the Worldcon. Whenever I went out to Los Angeles we’d have lunch together. But he moved up the food chain and traded in his roller skates for a chauffeur.

You wrote in a review of Bradbury’s biography how a distinguished Soviet academic came to see you, a specialist in sci-fi. And when you offered to take him anywhere he wanted to visit in the Chicago area, he said he wanted to see the “boyhood home of the most famous science-fiction writer in the world, Mr. Ray Bradbury.” Ouch.

I don’t really care. We don’t have the same audience.

You’re awfully cool about all this. Don’t you get offended?

Not really. I went to talk to a MENSA group once years ago and before I gave my talk someone approached me with a copy of one of my books in his hand. I said, “Oh, you want me to sign that?” He said, “No, this is the worst book I’ve ever read in my whole life.”

Do you remember which book it was?

No. There are some books of mine that are out of print and will stay that way.

Pohl helped shape the world of sci-fi for Bradbury to live in—and then admonish. Eager for breadcrumbs anywhere else in the freelance world, Bradbury’s always denied a science-fiction pigeonhole, worried it’d hinder his career. When Doubleday published The Martian Chronicles, he was dismayed to see a science-fiction disclaimer emblazoned on the cover. When the house next published The Illustrated Man, Bradbury politely demanded that his editor omit the tag. And Pohl doesn’t have even one tiny sour grape.

No one remembers firsts. Seconds get all the attention. I had to call ten bookstores in New York to find The Last Theorem—and there was one copy left.

Betty Anne Hull: At the last Worldcon, there wasn’t one single copy to be found.

That’s crazy, and sad.

You can’t always account for why something didn’t work out.

It makes me angry that people still don’t seem to know who Fred is.

As he says, he’s famous among about a million people in the world, and out of seven billion that’s not that much. We travel all over the world and people recognize him and go into shock and want to kiss his ring or something, and then other people, people I tell that my husband writes, they go, “Oh yeah, what does he write?”


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