SOURCE: "Frederik Pohl, Alternating Currents" in Science Fiction: Ten Explorations, Macmillan, 1986, pp. 35-56.

In the following essay, Manlove discusses major themes in Pohl's short fiction, focusing in particular on the stories collected in Alternating Currents.

Pohl began his trade with conventional short stories of travel to far planets, but in the early 1950s discovered that his métier lay as much in this planet, in the portrayal, via fantastic metaphors, of men caught up in social and technical changes beyond their control. Pohl did continue to write (in collaboration with Jack Williamson) plain adventure stories in the form of the Undersea novels (1954, 1956, 1958), but the central thrust of his work became less 'escapist', more committed to visions at once comic and nightmarish, of disasters man might bring upon himself. Pohl's primary output, and the one for which he is remembered, during the 1950s and 1960s is the short and...