Frederik Pohl: "I Remember a Winter," "In the Problem Pit" and "Some Joys Under the Star"

British edition of In the Problem Pit, cover by Angus McKie

Sometimes I feel guilty because I spend good money on books I never read.  Sometimes I have pangs of conscience because I avoid authors of importance to the SF genre because they are goddamned commies.  Well, today let's salve my conscience a little and read three stories from the 1976 paperback Bantam Books edition of Frederik Pohl's In the Problem Pit which I bought back in May 2018 in North Carolina because I liked the red astronauts cover by Eddie Jones.  

Of all the commies out there, Pohl is one of those I am most likely to read because I liked Gateway and because Pohl was always fair to and supportive of anti-communist writers like Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson; if Pohl could put politics aside to have healthy relationships with those guys it seems a little shabby of me to hold Pohl's own politics against him to the point that his books collect dust undisturbed on my shelf.  And in fact I have already read four stories from this copy of In the Problem Pit: "Rafferty's Reasons," "What To Do Until the Analyst Comes," "The Man Who Ate the World" and "To See Another Mountain."  Those stories were all first published in the 1950s and I condemned three of the four of them when I read them in December 2018.  Today let's read the three 1970s stories in the book with the hope I like them more than those Fifties pieces.

"I Remember a Winter" (1972)

Pohl admits in his little intro that this story, which he wrote on the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel and was printed by Damon Knight in Orbit 11, isn't really science fiction.  What it is, according to me,  is a merely adequate literary story about how our lives are a random meaningless chaos, how society and the world are a huge machine in which each of us is a tiny moving part that affects all the other tiny moving parts in ways it is impossible to predict, impossible to assign responsibility or significant moral weight.

The narrator spend the six pages of the story reminiscing.  He and his half-Jewish, half-Irish, pal Paulie were kids in the 1930s and one day went to the library, where Paulie stole a copy of Beau Geste and became obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier.  The narrator, meanwhile, was obsessed with Paulie's sister, Kitty.  He tries to date Kitty, to get her alone in some place where he can put the moves on her, but everywhere he takes her he finds some other person present, obstructing all his effort to seduce her.  For example, he takes her up on a fire escape, but they are interrupted by a man who has lost his job and is living on the upper reaches of the fire escape.  The narrator theorizes that the random chance of Paulie finding Beau Geste led to him stepping on a land mine at Salerno and suffering a crippling injury which killed him a few years later, and that the man on the fire escape stopped him and Kitty from getting married and leading totally different lives from those they ended up living, Kitty becoming a dancer, moving to Paris, and falling in love and marrying an SS officer during the German occupation of France, and he becoming a successful TV producer after working with the USO.  "Intentions don't matter," says the narrator--obviously the man who wrote Beau Geste wasn't trying to kill Paulie and obviously the man on the fire escape didn't intend to scotch his chance of marrying his Kitty.

Maybe "I Remember a Winter" is an extreme example of a New Wave story, a story that strives so hard to achieve mainstream literary merit that it has shed every single distinctive characteristic of science fiction.  Acceptable for what it is, but those looking for SF content will be disappointed.

"I Remember a Winter" shows up in the 2005 collection Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories.

"In the Problem Pit" (1973)

This anthology's title story debuted in the special Frederik Pohl issue of F&SF, the somewhat crude (if we are being nice we say "naive"*) cover of which is by the second of Pohl's five wives, Carol (they separated in 1977.)  Yes, that is Fred on the cover.  Time for a haircut, Fred.  This issue also features Barry Malzberg's "The Helmet," which we read in 2022, and a portion of F. M. Busby's Cage A Man, a novel which I enjoyed when I read it long ago. 

*I had no interest in the fine arts until I went to college, and part of the reason was that the "serious" art I was exposed to at school and on TV as a child was all modern gimmickry by people like Picasso or naive dross by people like Grandma Moses, stuff that, especially to a child's eye, is less interesting and impressive than an illustrations in The Dungeon Master's Guide or a kid's book about dinosaurs.  Maybe if I had been exposed to Michelangelo or Raphael as a kid I would have been interested in painting and sculpture before I was 18.  

This is a long one--like 50 pages!  This better be good!

Arghh!  This is not good!  In his intro to the story, Pohl admits "In the Problem Pit" is basically a bunch of trivia he learned in conversations he had over a period of months thrown together, additional material being added that is based on his visit to Arecibo Observatory and time spent in an "encounter group."  And it shows.  Thumbs down! 

The story, if we can call it that, recounts the doings at what at first appears to be a sort of group therapy session slash artists' retreat in the near future of the 1990s, when there are 54 U.S. states and America has endured "pollution riots" and a short-lived revolution in California.  The group therapy retreat (they call it a "problem marathon") is held in a series of caves in Puerto Rico near the aforementioned abandoned radio telescope; among the sixteen participants are volunteers, professional staff of the managing institution, and draftees.  Draftees!  Yes, while in real life the government doesn't forcibly admit you to psychiatric care even if you punch an old woman in the face and kidnap a little girl, in the world of Pohl's lazy and ridiculous story, citizens accused of no crimes get conscripted into these subterranean "problem marathons."

In the second half of the story we learn that these sessions are an exercise in participatory democracy, Pohl pushing the idea that the best way to solve the world's problems is to collect a random sample of citizens--a sample leavened with professionals and filtered and sifted by the government to make sure the proper race and sex ratios are met--and have these people brainstorm identifications of and solutions to the world's problems.  The authorities monitor the sessions, and have a points system and score all the ideas that come out of a session and end the session when enough good ideas have been produced.  Pohl not only describes this system in tedious detail but lets his utopian freak flag really fly, providing us examples of the genius ideas this method has produced--the American defense establishment has been abolished (it is suggested war is now prevented with forcefields) and professional police departments are all augmented by a citizens' militia.

The problem marathons are unstructured and people are encouraged to raise their own personal problems as well as social and political problems, and, at the start of "In the Problem Pit," by way of introductions, we have to hear all about each of the sixteen character's sexual relationships, religious beliefs, and political affiliations.  The psychological problems these people have are banal, soap opera garbage we've already heard too many times before--a guy has been trying, without success, to win his father's approval; an artist can't maintain relationships with women; a woman can't find a man because she's fat; a woman can't find a man because she's tall; blah blah blah.  You'll be glad to hear that the characters are cured of their "hang ups" about love and sex and race and we are treated to scenes of people getting drunk and crying and expressing their affection for each other and having breakthroughs.

Then there are the political and social problems raised in the group.  A septuagenarian African-American factory owner is about to go bankrupt and be forced to lay off his 300 employees because he manufactures dental supplies and people's teeth don't decay anymore thanks to "halidated sugar."  A doctor complains that syphilis and gonorrhea could be wiped out if people were more conscientious about reporting their ailments and sexual partners.  A volunteer fireman complains that ordinary citizens don't detect and report fires quickly, leading to lots of property damage.  The members of the group sit around and offer possible solutions to these problems, and Pohl spends lots of ink describing the proposals, largely as a kind of joke.  For example, the fat girl thinks the dental supply manufacturer should retool to produce self-warming specula because when she visits the gynecologist the speculum is always very cold.  I'm calling this a joke, but the black businessman actually seizes upon this idea.

Pohl finishes up the story with tedious and incompetent melodrama--love triangles, an out-of-nowhere announcement from a black woman that she will soon die of sickle cell anemia, the black businessman declaring he doesn't care about other people and then showing up a few pages later with aid, having had a change of heart.

I don't blame a professional writer for trying to sell junk like this--everybody needs or loves money--but I blame F&SF editor Edward Ferman for buying it and inflicting it on readers.  But Ferman was not alone in shoveling this repulsive grab bag of boredom at SF fans.  In 1985, the indefatigable anthology team of Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh included "In the Problem Pit" in one of their innumerable volumes, one that has been published multiple times under several slightly different titles--one of them even bore the title The Mammoth Book of Fantastic Science Fiction.  ("Fantastic" is hardly the word I'd use to describe the mind-numbingly mundane "In the Problem Pit.")  "In the Problem Pit" was also reprinted in 1984 in the French edition of F&SF, in an issue with a cover that reminds me of Chriss Foss's work and portrays a battle against some kind of gigundo spider robot.  

"Some Joys Under the Star" (1973)

This is a cynical joke story illustrating how the United States, and maybe the entire human race, and maybe all intelligent life, is evil.  It has something of the form of that old cliched story about "for the want of a nail," describing how one event follows after another, from small cause to huge final effect.

A comet has come into view in the skies over Earth for the first time in 2000 years.  A seventeen-year-old boy takes a girl into Central Park on a date in hopes he will be able to get his hands on a girl for the first time; they are stalked by a serial killer.  The President of the United States and his Secretary of State decide to bomb Venezuela so they will give us their oil.  A loser boards an airliner intent on blowing it up to impress his mother, who never appreciated him; aboard the airplane is a senator who wants to shut down NASA as a waste of money.  The Irish have conquered the entire British Isles.  

We learn that our part of the galaxy is dominated by a sadistic imperialistic race of crab people.  (We meet plenty of crab people here at MPorcius Fiction Log, courtesy of Emil Petaja, Robert E. Howard, Alison Tellure and now Fred Pohl.)  The comet is one of their spy ships, keeping an eye on the Earth, manned by people of a subordinate race.  The comet crew scans Earth, realizes the human race has reached a high enough level of technology to pose a theoretical long term threat to the crab empire, and sends a message to the crabs to come blow up Earth.  The spies also hit the Earth with a ray projector that is meant to make people docile and happy, so they can't resist an attack of the crabs.  The projector is not very well designed, I guess, and some of the radiation bathes the spies and makes these subaltern aliens so happy they die of happiness.

The serial killer and the young virgins are made so happy that they become friends and have a threesome in Central Park.  Everybody in the US government and military is so happy the bombing is called off, and the Venezuelans are so affected by the happiness ray they decide to give us the oil out of friendship.  The airline bomber's bomb goes off by mistake, killing all on board.  The crab people don't destroy the Earth because they are too busy losing a war against another space empire, of one insect people.  

The senator died, so NASA is still around and sends a manned probe to the comet.  The astronauts find the spy ship, and bring back some alien equipment.  Fear of aliens leads to one-world government here on Earth, and the captured alien equipment jump starts the human race's technological development and soon the human race has conquered the galaxy, wiping out the insect people and unwittingly avenging the crab people and taking on the role of the crab people as sadistic interstellar imperialists.

This is better than "In the Problem Pit" but less ambitious and risk-taking--"Some Joys Under the Star" is lame filler.  Or so says me--the story was reprinted in Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories and in one of the Asimov-Greenberg-Waugh troika's anthologies, the one on comets, so I guess opinions differ.

**********

Not good, I'm afraid, not good.  Are my harsh judgements a reflection of my prejudice?  Maybe so, but I hope I have offered some concrete apolitical reasons to look askance at these three stories and the entire In the Problem Pit collection.