SOURCE: Clareson, Thomas D. “The 1940s: Apprenticeship and Collaboration.” In Frederik Pohl, pp. 1-10. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, Inc., 1987.

In the following essay, Clareson elucidates the defining characteristics of Fred Pohl's early science fiction stories.

In an introductory note to “Red Moon of Danger,” an early story which Fred Pohl included in Planets Three (1982), he remarks that “the only thing a writer has to sell is his personal, idiosyncratic view of the universe” (66). Such an assertion has importance because it belies that separation which some academic critics, especially, would still make between the author and the text, be it social realism, science fiction, or fantasy. His insight applies equally well to Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Lee Smith, Joanna Russ, Theodore Sturgeon, or Robert Bloch. In this case, of course, it provides the readers of the 1980s with a guideline to the development of Pohl's fiction...