Review: The Gold at the Starbow's End, by Frederik Pohl

Review: The Gold at the Starbow's End, by Frederik Pohl

by Rich Horton

The Gold at the Starbow's End is a collection of stories, despite not having "and Other Stories" tacked on to the title. Perhaps that's because you could take the title as a metaphor for the story gold it purports to offer (and mostly delivers.) It was published by Ballantine in August 1972, rather quickly on the heels of the magazine publication of most of the stories. It had a UK edition from Gollancz in 1973, a Ballantine reprint in 1974, and a UK paperback from Panther in 1975, as well as a Canadian edition and a UK book club edition. All in all, not bad going for a collection.

My copy is the 1975 Panther edition. It has a Peter Jones cover, which makes it look pretty 1970s British, especially as this cover, to my eyes, vaguely resembles Chris Foss's work. (Other Peter Jones covers don't necessarily look as Foss-like.) The book has more than the usual amount of typos -- I don't know if that's Panther's fault or that of one of the other publishers.

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was truly one of the giants of the SF field, and he contributed in multiple ways: as an editor of magazines and of books, as an anthologist, as an agent, and as a writer. As an editor, he was essential to the careers of major writers like Cordwainer Smith, Robert Silverberg, and James Tiptree, Jr. He convinced Bantam to publish Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. He more or less invented the SF original anthology series with Star Science Fiction in the 1950s. His fiction writing career lasted for some seven decades, and he won multiple Hugos, and also a National Book Award, and even won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer late in his life. I met him myself once, not long before he died -- we shared a panel at the Chicago convention Windycon. Pohl was physically very frail by then but mentally remarkably acute.

At the time of publication of this collection, Pohl had fairly recently left the editor's chair at Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow, where he had had an exceptional run. He was still editing books -- he was at Ace around this time, succeeding Don Wollheim, and he would soon move to Bantam. But at the same time he was re-energizing his writing career, and entering his most productive period, which I would argue extended from 1972 throughout the '70s -- or from "The Gold at the Starbow's End" through JEM. This isn't to say his earlier writing wasn't good -- he published some outstanding work, such as The Space Merchants (1952, with C. M. Kornbluth), "The Midas Plague", and "Day Million", but for everyone except Kingsley Amis, he tended to be overshadowed a bit by his collaborator Kornbluth. (Amis, of course, called him "The most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced" in his 1960 book New Maps of Hell, an evaluation that greatly surprised American SF readers.) Likewise Pohl did some very fine work after the '70s, including the Hugo winning story "Fermi and Frost". But his work in the '70s represents his peak -- the two pieces I've mentioned plus the novels Man Plus and The Cool War, and stories like "The Merchants of Venus" and "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth, and a Hugo winner.)

Here are the stories:

"The Gold at the Starbow's End" (Analog, March 1972) 20,500 words

"Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" (F&SF, June 1972) 5300 words

"Call Me Million" (Worlds of Fantasy #2, 1970) 1800 words

"Shaffery Among the Immortals" (F&SF, July 1972) 5700 words

"The Merchants of Venus" (Worlds of If, July-August 1972) 25,500 words

I'll treat them in order. "The Gold at the Starbow's End" got the most attention at the time, and remains the most famous of these stories. Interestingly, Pohl himself used it in his anthology Best Science Fiction for 1972, which was essentially a continuation of the World's Best Science Fiction series that Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr had edited for Ace since 1965. Wollheim and Carr had left the company, with Pohl taking over, and thus Pohl also took over the Year's Best anthology. Nominally the book was supposed to include stories from 1971, but Pohl used three from 1972, including this story, and in fact the anthology was published a month after the collection. Pohl claimed that he used one of his stories because he had blown his budget (I got the sense, perhaps unfairly, that the extra money went to Harlan Ellison for his two(!) stories, "At the Mouse Circus" and "Silent in Gehenna", but also possibly he was paying a translator for the one Japanese story he used.) Pohl claimed he was the only writer he was comfortable in paying below market rates to; but also conceded that he was extremely proud of "The Gold at the Starbow's End" and felt it deserved this honor. The story was also reprinted in Donald Wollheim's new Year's Best for DAW, and in the Ben Bova anthology Analog 9, the last of the original series of "Best of Analog" collections. It won the Locus Award for Best Novella, and was shortlisted for each of the Hugo and Nebula awards. The March 1972 issue of Analog appeared quite early in Ben Bova's editorship, so in theory it could have been purchased by John W. Campbell, Jr., but I am pretty sure this was a Bova purchase. Pohl expanded the story into a much weaker novel called Starburst in 1982.

It's about an expedition from Earth to Alpha Centauri, theoretically with the goal of colonizing a planet found orbiting Alpha Centauri A. The starship Constitution hosts 8 crewmembers -- four married couples. They were selected by the director of this project, Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen, specifically for high intelligence. Knefhausen has lofty (and largely secret) goals -- he believes that by having the crew concentrate on certain scientific "games" he has assigned them that they will make spectacular discoveries, which they will transmit back to Earth and allow the US at least to turn around its decaying fortunes. For this future (which seems to be around the turn of the millennium) is pretty dire, with riots everywhere, economic and environmental unrest, etc. And -- not really a spoiler -- the crew do indeed become essentially superhumanly intelligent, and make amazing advances. But they also develop their own opinions about what do with what they've learned. Especially after they realize the unpleasant surprise awaiting them at Alpha Centauri. 

The story is told on two tracks -- one consisting of various increasingly incomprehensible reports from the crew back to Earth, and the other following Knefhausen's fortunes -- or misfortunes -- as his plans disintegrate in parallel with the world situation disintegrating. It's a very satirical piece -- savagely so -- and its message is quite dark. Unless you believe in the fantasy of what the crew of the Constitution achieves -- which I admit I kind of bought at age 14 but don't buy at all now. (The superhuman powers are developed simply by studying the right concepts -- sort of a mental "grammar" -- to be honest a sort of situation like that in Poul Anderson's Brain Wave or Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought books makes more sense to me now!) But really, that magic isn't the point of the story -- that lies in the satirical and somewhat despairing depiction of this near future (now past, I suppose) which is established by Knefhausen's portion of the narrative and reinforced by the crew's reports, which serve as a sort of crirical outsider viewpoint. It's a very good story, though not now and not back when I first read it was it my favorite of this book. 

"Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" features aliens monitoring Earth for its worthiness to survive. If Earth fails, the planet will be scoured of life completely, in the hope that in a few billion years something better will emerge. (Oh, and Mars and all the other potential life-bearing planets/moons get the same treatment.) The evaluation process involves picking a single representative and deciding if he's a decent person. In this case, the choice is Sam Harcourt, a struggling screenwriter whose latest idea is to adapt A Princess of Mars for the screen in honor of the actual Martians who are about to visit Earth. Of course, Sam fails. (Though there is a twist in the tail of the tale.) The story is amusing enough to read, but it's REALLY REALLY STUPID on multiple levels. For one thing, though Sam is kind of a loser, he's really not that bad a guy. In the end, I get that Pohl is just being sardonic, but this story is just not convincing.

"Call Me Million" is a brief piece about a sort of vampire who sucks the life essence (or something) out of other people, and what happens when he realizes he isn't the only one. First, this is a terribly familiar idea, and second, it doesn't do anything new. This is minor magazine back of the book filler, slightly elevated by Pohl's slick storytelling ability.

"Shaffery Among the Immortals" is about a sad sack astronomer, whose rather stupid attempts to make his name via an Einstein level discovery have come to nothing. He is head of a small observatory in the Lesser Antilles, whiling away his life with more silly experiments such as irradiating mushrooms, hating his wife, struggling with his two assistants who would rather aim the telescope at the windows of a nearby hotel; but still desperately hoping to make his name immortal. Pohl's dark conclusion (and a somewhat timely one here in the 2020s) does reveal his name becoming, ironically, world famous. It's another pretty minor piece, really, again enlivened mainly by Pohl's mordant descriptions of Shaffery's life.

And, finally, to my favorite story of this book, which was indeed my favorite back when I first read it decades ago. This is "The Merchants of Venus". This is the first Heechee story, followed by the very fine novel Gateway and a host of increasingly weaker novels and stories. It's not at all clear how much he knew about the Heechee when he wrote this particular story, and it doesn't really matter -- the story works on its own. It's told by Audee Walthers, who grew up in Amarillo, the son of the Deputy Governor of Texas. That seems privileged, but it's not really -- the story makes clear that economic conditions on Earth are horrendous, and even a Deputy Governor of a big state isn't much -- indeed, only the super rich are in any sense comfortable. Audee is now on Venus, scraping by as the owner of an airbody, with which he can transport rich tourists to interesting sites on Venus. He's also deeply in debt, and very sick -- if he can't keep up payments on the medicines he needs for his decaying liver -- or, preferably, buy a new liver -- he'll be dead in three months.

And what do tourists in Venus want to see? Heechee sites. The Heechee were aliens who visited the Solar System a long while ago. They made a bunch of tunnels on Venus (even they couldn't tolerate the surface conditions) and then they left. They left behind a fair amount of stuff, most of it basically garbage, but some of it, accidentally perhaps, very valuable, potentially offering insights to revolutionary tech. The humans on Venus who make a living mostly sell souvenirs or cater to the people who try to make a bigger score, like Audee. Audee is desperately hoping to finally make a really big find, and he does have some interesting knowledge, that just might give him a chance. But he needs to attract a really wealthy tourist to bankroll this effort -- and that tourist will keep most of the rewards if it works -- but Audee might get a new liver out of the deal. And finally he has a chance -- Boyce Couchenor, a hyper rich tourist, 90 years old but with the medical treatment to make him look 40, shows up. He's got a much younger girlfriend (or so Audee thinks -- Pohl plants hints that made me think that this woman, Dorotha Keefer, is actually Couchenor's granddaughter, though Audee never seems to realize this) and he is really interested in investigating unexplored Heechee tunnels. So, he does end up hiring Audee, and the expedition of Audee's dream goes forward ... And there are a couple of well set up twists, and lots of dangerous reversals and crises. It's a well told story, and an exciting one, with an partly expected, partly surprising conclusion. I like the story a lot. It's not at all inconsistent with the rest of the Heechee stories, but it's also not dependent on them -- it's quite independent. And it's the most optimistic story in the book -- admittedly a low bar to clear.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection, though mostly due to the bookend novellas. The three short stories are minor works, though all are worth a read. Still, this stands as a herald to the most productive decade of writing for a very worthy SFWA Grand Master.