Skip to main content

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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more