The Man Who Ate the World (SF) - Frederik Pohl ****

Fred Pohl was a truly imaginative science fiction writer. Perhaps his best books were his collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth, but solo he was capable of some remarkable work too. This collection of 6 long short stories from the late 1950s is amongst his most original writing. Like many writers of the period, what we get here needs a small health warning - this was the Mad Men era, and women rarely get a totally fair treatment in these stories - were things different, the book would have received five stars.

What Pohl did so well was turn aspects of modern society on its head. This is never more obvious than in the brilliant title story, The Man Who Ate the World, which describes a society recovering from a position where consumption has become a requirement - the poorer you are, the more you are expected to consume (not just food, but all kinds of consumer society goods). Although the ending is a little facile, the concept is breathtaking.

Another highlight is The Day the Icicle Works Closed Down, which combines the impact of a colony losing the value of its only export with a Dollhouse-like (for Joss Whedon fans) scenario where humans rent their bodies out for cash. We return to regular Pohl themes of the dangers of consumerism and advertising in the final two linked stories, The Wizard of Pung's Corner and The Waging of the Peace, which see a small town in America take on the might of an advertising-driven post-apocalyptic society where more and more updated products are released from self-powered and protected AI underground manufacturers, which seem impossible to stop from flooding the world with unwanted products.

One thing is clear - how much Pohl's thinking was ahead of its time. The America of the late 50s might have been in full Mad Men mode of emphasising novelty and pushing products far beyond what would now be acceptable - but Pohl was able to see beyond this and do what science fiction does best: examine the future consequences of today's actions.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this is now out of print in the UK, but is available in the US.

Paperback:

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog