Platinum Pohl

Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories by Frederik Pohl

This is a long science fiction short story collection that spans a half century of Pohl's work.

The works are various lengths and explore different topics. 

A few that stand out: 

"The Day the Icicle Works Closed" - this gave the name to the "Whisper to a Scream" singers. A "company planet" is moved to an economic tailspin when the company's product is no longer needed. All it has left is tourism, and as part of this people rent out their bodies to tourists. The plot covers a lawyer defending some kids that went through lengths to avoid renting their body. He ends up discovering that the products are still needed and that it was just a plot by some to get the company stock on the cheap. It shows stock manipulation gone crazy.

"The Celebrated No-Hit Inning" - a baseball story where a star player travels to a time where sport is played primarily for TV audiences and robots have a role in the game. Robot ball players and games just for TV don't seem too far off today. Heck, this could just be a twitch-streamed videogame play. What seems the most far-fetched is baseball still being relevant in the far future.

"Waiting for the Olympians" - The Roman empire never fell and proceeded to advance to the modern days. People are awaiting extraterrestrials that have been communicating with them. At the last minute they cut off communication and decide not to come. The book focuses on the experience of a writer who had tried writing a novel that made fun of this extraterrestrial olympians. This story is censored. He then decides to write an alternate history novel where Christianity rose up and Rome fell. This has a number of twists with alternate history within alternate history with a mixture of science fiction bits.

There are a number of other good stories in this collection as well as some fairly forgettable ones.

The list of stories (thanks to the Wikipedia page):

• Introduction by James Frenkel
• "The Merchants of Venus", Worlds of If, July/August 1972.
• "The Things That Happen", Asimov's, October 1985
• "The High Test", Asimov's, June 1983.
• "My Lady Green Sleeves", Galaxy, February 1957.
• "The Kindly Isle", Asimov's, November 1984.
• "The Middle of Nowhere", Galaxy, May 1955.
• "I Remember a Winter", Orbit 11, Damon Knight (ed.), 1972.
• "The Greening of Bed-Stuy", F&SF, July 1984.
• "To See Another Mountain", F&SF, April 1959.
• "The Mapmakers", Galaxy, July 1955.
• "Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair", F&SF, October 1983.
• "The Celebrated No-Hit Inning", Fantastic Universe, September 1956.
• "Some Joys Under the Star", Galaxy, November 1973.
• "Servant of the People", Analog, February 1983.
• "Waiting for the Olympians", Asimov's, August 1988.
• "Criticality", Analog, December 1984.
• "Shaffery Among the Immortals", F&SF, July 1972.
• "The Day the Icicle Works Closed", Galaxy, February 1960.
• "Saucery", F&SF, October 1986.
• "The Gold at the Starbow's End", Analog, March 1972.
• "Growing Up in Edge City", Epoch, Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg (eds.), 1975.
• "The Knights of Arthur", Galaxy, January 1958.
• "Creation Myths of the Recently Extinct", Analog, January 1994.
• "The Meeting" (in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth), F&SF, November 1972.
• "Let the Ants Try", (as by James MacCreigh) Planet Stories, Winter 1949.
• "Speed Trap", Playboy, November 1967.
• "The Day the Martians Came", Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison (ed.), 1967.
• "Day Million", Rogue, February/March 1966.
• "The Mayor of Mare Tranq", The Williamson Effect, Tor, 1996.
• "Fermi and Frost", Asimov's, January 1985.
• Afterword : Fifty Years and Counting.