Frederik Pohl

writer
Short Story

Trouble in Time


I enjoyed this early effort from the two young Futurians, especially the beginning where chemical engineer Mabel Evans of Colchester, Vermont, goes to visit the newly arrived mad scientist who offers her ethyl alcohol and a trip to the future.
That was approximately what Stephen had said, so I supposed that he was. “Right as rarebits,” I said.
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  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

A Hitch in Time


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  • Science Fiction
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

Let the Ants Try


After a nuclear war, Dr. Salva Gordy and John de Terry decide to use their time machine to see whether a recently mutated form of ant might do a better job than mankind if the ants were given a 40-million-year head start.
And I doubt that you speak mathematics. The closest I can come is to say that it displaces temporal coordinates. Is that gibberish?
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  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Target One


Thirty-five years after the death of Albert Einstein, atomic bombs have left 2 billion corpses; the bombs came from Einstein’s formulae; so what is it we need?

I had the good fortune to meet Fred Pohl in July of 2003 at Jim Gunn's workshop in Manhattan, Kansas. On a warm day outside the student union building, he kindly sat and talked to me about the background for a story I was writing about him and Asimov.
Quite simply, it is the murder of Albert Einstein.
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  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

The Mapmakers


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

The Day of the Boomer Dukes


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

The Celebrated No-Hit Inning


If pitcher and star hitter Boley—the league’s best player and certainly on par with Snider, Mays and Mantle—has any weakness, it is a lack of modesty, but the team owner’s uncle has a plan to address that involving the future of baseball.
Don’t you see? He’s chasing the outfield off the field. He wants to face the next two men without any outfield! That’s Satchell Paige’s old trick, only he never did it except in exhibitions where who cares? But that Boley—
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  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass


This cautionary tale about Snodgras—time traveler who brought modern-day healthcare back to the Roman Empire—originally appeared as an essay in the editorial pages of Pohl’s [⁠Galaxy[/em] along with a nod to L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, but it’s since made its way into more than one story compilation. —Michael Main
Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through 20th century medicine.
A probe with four large panels at right angles and a green exhast approaches
                the Horsehead Nebula.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Farnham’s Freehold

  • by Robert A. Heinlein
  • (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, October 1964) [We chose October 1964 as the publication date based on a 1 November 1964 review in the Anniston Star and the probability that it appeared after the July to October serialization in If.]

Hugh Farnam makes good preparations for his family to survive a nuclear holocaust, but are the preparations good enough to survive a trip to the future?

In his blog, Fred Pohl wrote about how Heinlein’s agent gave permission for Pohl publish the novel in If and to cut “five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring” (and Pohl agreed to pay full rate for the cut words). But apparently, Heinlein “went ballistic” when he saw the first installment, so much so that when the book appeared as a separate publication, Heinlein made sure people knew who was responsible for the previous cuts by adding a note* that “A short version of this novel, as cut and revised by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If Magazine.”

* The version of Heinlein’s note that Pohl recalled was much funnier than Heinlein’s actual note in our timeline, but sadly, we have lost track of where we saw Pohl’s version.
—Michael Main
Because the communists are realists. They never risk a war that would hurt them, even if they could win. So they won’t risk one they can’t win.
Sketch of a clean-cut, older man’s face.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Age of the Pussyfoot


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Novella

Hatching the Phoenix


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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel