Fred Pohl: Heechee
Saga
Terry Bisson
Fred Pohl was there at the beginning, the Big
Bang as it were, when what is today a vast commercial and cultural universe
(some would say, wasteland) that includes film and TV as well as books and
magazines, started as an improbable singularity known only to precocious,
oddball teenagers (mostly boys, of course) obsessed with a new ÒliteratureÓ
that was just appearing in the pulp magazines that they could buy for a dime or
a nickel.
They first called it scientifiction,
but the name didnÕt stick.
Science Fiction did.
It was 1935 in Brooklyn. The USA was in the
throes of what we still call the ÒGreat Depression,Ó perhaps because we miss it
so keenly. Today we are lonely for the past but back then we hungered for the
future, we lusted for it, and SF delivered it to the eager and the willing.
As a literary form, Science Fiction had been
around since Verne and Wells, and perhaps even Mary Shelley with her mournful
electrically-animated monster. Some would claim that it began earlier, with GulliverÕs
Travels or even AristophanesÕ ÒThe Birds.Ó But surely we can all agree that
as a modern phenomenon, a cultural and commercial commodity as well as a
literary curiosity, it began in the 1920s and Ô30s when the ÒpulpsÓ appeared on
American newsstands with garish covers depicting rocket ships, ray guns, robots
and buxom women threatened by bug-eyed monsters (ÔbemsÕ). It was, as the
magazine titles promised, Amazing; it was Astounding, it was Thrilling.
Pohl describes those heady days in his
brilliant memoir, The Way the Future Was: ÒMy head was popping with
space ships and winged girls and cloaks of invisibility, and I had no one to
share it with.Ó
He was not to be lonely long.
Science Fiction was fishing for souls. If the
lurid covers were the bait, and the stories the hooks, the net was the clubs
that the magazines created to haul in new readers: the Science Fiction League and its many descendants.
The catch was extraordinary: Pohl, along with
his friend and collaborator Cyril Kornbluth, Isaac Asimov (another Brooklyn
kid), James Blish, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim and a vast school of others,
including Ray Bradbury and Jack Williamson, who showed up at the first SF
conventions.
ÒMost people wanted to talk about what they had eaten or bought or done,Ó Pohl remembers today. ÒWe wanted to talk about what we had read.Ó And these early devotees did more then talk. They set to work creating what we know as SF today.
Fred Pohl was a wunderkind. As a
pimply teenager he was editing the fanzine for the International Scientific
Society (which was, he points out, neither international nor scientific). He
slept every other day and wrote the rest of the time, or hung out talking space
ships and winged girls with his colleagues in the Futurians, the first split
off the extremely fissionable SF world.
Pohl didnÕt bother finishing high school. He
was far too busy. By age nineteen, in the late 1930s, he was editing two
magazines on 42nd Street: Astonishing Stories and Super
Science Stories. He was also writing his own stories under an incredible
panoply of pen names, representing his friends (and his pseudonyms) as an
agent, and of course attending and organizing (and occasionally boycotting) SF
conventions as one of the original fans.
Then there came a war. After serving in both
Italy and France, Pohl returned to New York make a living in the field he had
done so much to help create. The Great Depression was over. America (and SF
with it) was booming; the boy readers had grown up and even brought a few girls
along with them. No longer satisfied with the pulps, they wanted novels. Pohl
wrote his own and collaborated with Kornbluth and Williamson, developing his
famous Trollope-like regimen that resulted in four pages a day, like clockwork;
meanwhile bringing the magazines he edited (including Galaxy and If)
to new levels that accounted for most of the major SF awards.
It was a career that would stagger many, and
satisfy most. But not Fred Pohl.
Cut to the 1970s, when Pohl discovered he was
tired of editing, tired of agenting. He began writing more seriously. In the
meantime, SF itself had turned a corner with the New Wave. The two events
together produced that rarest of all things in American literature, a second
act, and a brilliant one at that.
Fred Pohl, who had always been a star, went
nova.
Enter the Heechee.
`It is a mark of PohlÕs satiric genius that
in GATEWAY, humankindÕs first voyages into the depths of interstellar space are
made not for science, or even glory, but for money.
Loot.
Gateway (later called Òwrinkle rockÓ) is an
asteroid discovered in an eccentric orbit around the sun. It is criss-crossed
with tunnels and clustered with spaceships, all of which are preprogrammed for
a round trip to a different, an undisclosed, and often disastrous destination.
All humans have to do is climb aboard and
ride.
The ships and the honeycombed asteroid itself
are all artifacts of the Heechee, a mysterious and long-departed (or so it
seems) race that once colonized vast sectors of the universe.
Some ÒGateway prospectorsÓ return as
millionaires, loaded with valuable Heechee artifacts and gadgets, while others
return tangled in their own entrails, or mad as hatters; or not at all.
The one thing they never (or almost never)
encounter is the Heechee themselves. Pohl, who had always grounded his work in
the actual mysteries of science, speculated that even if there were other
civilizations in a Universe so vast in both Space and Time, it was unlikely
that they their timelines would intersect with ours.
Thus humankindÔs story begins when the
HeecheeÕs is running out. Or almost.
GATEWAY burst upon the SF world like a new
star. It was hard for many to believe that it was written by one of the most
familiar names in the field. The writing is difficult at times, brilliant
always: allusive, tender, erotic, and often wry and humorous.
The novel exhibits PohlÕs characteristic
distrust of authority, his scorn for capitalismÕs excesses, and his materialist
(ie, Marxist) view of how history is made, and how it in turn makes mankind.
All these concerns carried over from SFÕs depression-era origins. But GATEWAY
is also a departure, reflecting the psychological preoccupations and literary
predilections of the New Wave that had so recently opened up new territory in
SF.
The journey of prospector Robinette Broadhead
is as much inward as outward. His story is told elliptically, much of it in the
form of a dialogue with his artificial psychotherapist, as Broadhead tries to
come to terms with the fact that his spectacular success as a prospector has
come with a disastrous personal cost-Ñthe loss of the woman he loves.
In PohlÕs Universe, as in EinsteinÕs, there
is no free lunch.
GATEWAY swept every award in the field: the
Hugo (not PohlÕs first, but his first for a novel), the Nebula and the Locus
awards. And there was more to come.
BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON is, as its
title might suggest, even more daring, and more difficult. Broadhead is now a
background character, and those in the foreground (Gateway prospectors, all)
include a horny teen, a grumpy old man, and a not-so-innocent orphan. The
mysterious ÒgiftsÓ bestowed on humanity by the Heechee now include a periodic
psychic plague that strikes the Earth at regular intervals, causing death and
destruction.
In HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS, the Heechee themselves
finally emerge in all their wizened glory--smelling faintly of ammonia, weary
with wisdom, and as bemused by us (whom they have known from our earliest
hominid days) as we are by them. They are especially puzzled by money, which
they regard as a Òrough servo-mechanism for social priority setting.Ó
Pure Pohl.
The novels have proven immensely popular and
have spurred countless imitators. GATEWAY was even made into a popular game,
which is fitting, since the voyages them selves were a kind of game, a sort of
Russian roulette one played for fortune or death.
As an author, editor, agent and anthologist,
Fred Pohl helped create the SF we know, celebrate and love today. He nurtured
(and coddled, and berated) the greatest talents in the field, even while
creating such classics as MAN PLUS and THE SPACE MERCHANTS.
But his most amazing accomplishment was
perhaps the re-creation of himself, as an author, with the Heechee Saga, which
functions as our ÒgatewayÓ into a fully realized, intricate and inexhaustible
fictional world of Òwrinkle rocks,Ó Kugelblitz, Assassins who make war on
matter itself, Dream Seats, Albert Einstein simaculara, Voodoo Pigs, and CHON
food.
A universe that is still as fresh, as surprising and as thought-provoking
today as when it was penned, some thirty years ago.