SOURCE: "Critical Mass: The Science Fiction of Frederik Pohl," in Voices for the Future, Volume Three, edited by Thomas D. Clareson and Thomas L. Wymer, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984, pp. 106-26.

In the following excerpt, taken from an essay first published in S-F Studies in 1980, Samuelson explores the social criticism in Pohl's short fiction from the 1950s through the 1970s.

The problem of determining Frederik Pohl's rank among SF writers is not a simple one to resolve. As a satirist and thinker, he is at the top of American SF writers who are "fan-oriented," but as an artist, even as a technician, he often shows significant defects. Even the best of his fiction is sometimes marred by the intrusion of melodrama, sentimentality, unrationalized fantasy, and other features more or less calculated to appeal to an addicted audience. For the most part, his work seems to lack depth...