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.

The Last Theorem

I never realized that Arthur C. Clarke lived most of his adult life in Sri Lanka. That explains the setting for The Last Theorem. The book centers around mathematician Ranjit Subramanian. We start with him in college, and later see him achieve great fame after proving Fermat's last theorem. He gets married has kids, becomes a professor, gets involved with the US government and eventually is given a "mechanical" immortality.

He also plays a role in some important events for the future of humanity.

Aliens picked up radio signals from earth. They also noticed the nuclear blasts. The "Grand Galatics" decided that the earth needed to be destroyed, so they sent out a crew of "1.5s" to do the destruction as well as "9 limbs" to communicate. However, a Grand Galactic passing near earth saw that the humans were not all bad, so he called off the invasion. Unfortunately, the other aliens did not have the resources to return home, so they occupied a vacant part of earth. The Americans initially tried to attack them. However, this failed miserably, and they eventually became friends, sharing technology and eventually leading earthlings to be the guardians of the galaxy.

Back on earth, a "peace coalition" uses "EMP" bombs (silent thunder) to disable all electronic activity in rouge states. They deploy this over North Korea and quickly dispose of the "benevolent leader". They also had a humanitarian crew standing by to provide supplies after the attack. Thus they are able to quickly install a peaceful leadership without bloodshed. They later use this on Colombia and Venezuela. (The drug trade had dried up in Colombia after it was legalized in America. However, the kingpins decided to join the trade in another lucrative addiction - oil. This led to a lot of fighting that was finally ended by "silent thunder".)

Earth has also developed greater space exploration technology, with a "space elevator" enabling Moon travel to be easier. Ranjit's daughter competes in the first "space olympics". She also competes in a "solar sail" race. However, in the process, her vehicle is commandeered by the 9 limbs who clone her body to use to interrogate leaders of the earth.

There is a lot of stuff going on. However, most of the narrative is spent talking about the life of Ranjit. While we get little bits of the alien activity throughout the book, actual human-alien contact doesn't happen until the end. Even here, it seems like it will be aborted before it is started. We finally get a quick landing and a paranoid US response. When that fails, they seem to make peace and live together nicely.

I liked the way that the novel started. We get a couple prologues about the life and interest of the authors, and these meld directly into the story of Ranjit. I was left wondering whether this was still a bit of "fact" related to the authors. Then the aliens pop in, and I finally realize it is fiction.

The ending seems to jump up a little suddenly. I was expecting some sort of bang with the aliens, but it is just a little whimper. The earth ends up in a highly optimistic peaceful existence. The US uses its technical warfare superiority to ensure peace. They almost go too far in their quest, but luckily, they are stopped by aliens and the earthlings are able to have a peaceful, educational co-existence.

After this seeming peace, another bit seems tacked on where Ranjit's wife dies in a Scuba accident. Her mind is saved in an "electronic" body, with her husband joining her. This seems to only allow the narrative to come back to them a few thousand years later after the Grand Galactics have returned and decided that earthlings should take over their role.

There is a lot of interesting content in this story, and a nice narrative style. The ending seems rushed, but manages to serve its purpose in spite of leaving out a lot that we were expecting.