That's more likely to be reddit's vote fuzzing mechanism; any post with lots of upvotes will automatically get tempered with "fake" downvotes by the system.
I have the notion that bad voters are canceled out by sticking in votes on the other count. That makes it harder for them to sniff out the fact that they don't really count.
Reddit uses a hellbanning system like HN. Spammers and the like don't realize they are banned until they try to read their own posts from another account. The auto-downvote system along with score caching makes it a lot harder to tell if your upvote/downvote went through or not. It's just one of the many, many anti-bot systems built into Reddit.
Discovered Gateway when I was about 13. What a story to expand a young mind! Beyond The Blue Event Horizon and Jem, which I re-read earlier this year, also made big impressions.
His role in supporting other authors can't be overlooked, either -- check out his two-part blog account of how Delaney's Dhalgren got published (1).
One of the other remarkable things I discovered about Pohl through his blog is just how long he was involved with science fiction. This 2009 post talks about what it was like being a hard-core sci-fi fan in the 1930s (2). I read another one (can't find it now) where he talks about joining the first "con" in the same decade, and meeting some early writers. Almost all of them were gone by the time he wrote the blog post ... he was the last one who remembered that era of raw imagination, and had lived to see many future technologies and concepts become reality. His writing reflected a pessimism about humanity, but also a sense of hope.
Besides being one of the truly great writers of the 20th century, Mr. Pohl was a kind man, and just a really great guy. I got to spend a day with him way back when-- I think it was in 1980 or '81. He had been invited to be a guest at a small university in Missouri and I showed up because I loved his stuff. It became apparent that most of the people at his lecture were non-SF types who were only in attendance because their teachers forced them. (Remember, this was 1980-- SF was not widely popular.) After the lecture, the professor who had invited Mr. Pohl was desperate to provide some "SF fellowship" for his guest and asked me to be accompany them to a faculty-&-community-leader lunch. It was hilarious-- no one at the table knew who he was. And then-- I was invited to have dinner with the prof and Mr. Pohl that evening, just the 3 of us. It was one of a handful of outstanding moments in my life-- we talked about SF, religion (he said that he had a close friend that was a Jesuit priest with whom he discussed religion from time to time), politics, space exploration-- it was amazing. Rest in Peace, sir.
He also wrote a lot about the early days of science fiction in his 1978 memoir, The Way the Future Was. I was particularly fascinated by his association with the Futurians, a NY-based science fiction club which included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Cyril Kornbluth.
Heechee Saga is a wonderful piece of science fiction, making humans think of many controversial themes. Especially likes of us, Hackers, Scientists, IT workers. Some of these themes are;
- What happens after you die?
- If possible would you record your consciousness into a computer?
- If some kind of human recordings and/or simulations are possible
what happens to the source person's inheritance/belongings?
- How would consciousness cope with energy outages?
- What of human - computer love affairs?
- Can we correctly analyse Extra Terrestrial artefacts?
- How would science and society behave in rationing possible synthetic food
in case of global famine or drought?
- If we ever build synthetic body parts that's
absolutely compatible with human bodies and can replace
old/defect ones who can reach these?
I'm very sorry about Mr.Pohl's death. If a human recording was possible he was someone worthy of binary encoding.
I loved his work. It was about expanding our horizons. But sometimes the narrative would suffer. Why could super-intelligent energy lifeforms not conceive that matter-based creatures were intelligent, but human science fiction writers could imagine that energy-creatures could be? Do 10^17 super-intelligences inside a black hole have no science fiction writers at all among them?
They were non fiction intelligences. Also they were so afraid of the upcoming doom so they locked themselves in a blackhole and lost track of time outside. (U.S. see the resemblence?). But of course some matters are mind tingling :-) This can't soil his brilliance.
No,not soil certainly. But I remember my great disappointment when the entire Heechee series' ultimate mystery turned out to be - that superintelligent beings couldn't conceive of something a science fiction author could.
I first head of Mr. Pohl work by playing that game (and its sequel)
And indeed, it is really impressive and interesting! Lots of food for thought on them.
And considering a game cannot have much story as a book, it is only a glimpse of Mr. Pohl full body of work, but it still is really, really impressive and awesome.
I am not particularly a fan of Sci-Fi but I know he was a well regarded author. My condolences to those who knew him and to those who enjoyed his work.
I can't help but think of this Kurt Vonnegut quote (He put these words into the mouth of a character, Eliot Rosewater, who gate-crashed and addressed a conference of SF writers):
"I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."
I also liked his Man Plus novel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus ), which pointed out the uneasy relationship between sensory input and brain, at a time the subject was not yet popular.
(The purpose of the human modifications in that novel is Mars colonization. I feel it is somehow a serious answer to Clifford D. Simak's City [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28novel%29 ], a poetic tale where humans leave Earth to the dogs and go to Jupiter to frolic in giant kangaroo bodies ...)
I enjoyed his work, I think my favorite was "Midas World" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World . Midas World explores a future reality where there is cheap energy, and cheap robotics, and the poor have to consume the output of the automatic factories while the wealthy get to enjoy the simple life. It is an interesting exploration of a possible future where everything can be made for virtually no cost (except for the environmental damage).
I'm pretty sure I got introduced to Fred in one of Groff Conklin's HUGE and GREAT anthologies published back in the 50s. Thanks to a great, open-minded small-town librarian I was already mainlining SF as a young teen.
Fred was very much a pioneer, and if you look through his few-dozen blog posts (93-year-old blogger!) of the last year or so he shares stories about the early SF conventions (#71 just ended).
Have you ever met someone and known immediately they were brilliant, a complete gentleman, and giving his full attention to you? I had the honor to meeting Frederik Pohl once and that's really the only way to describe it.
Well said-- "giving his full attention to you." I knew I left out an important point in my comment about meeting Mr. Pohl, and that covers it. I was a 20 yr old who knew close to nothing & had delusions of being a great SF writer one day, but Mr. Pohl treated me as if I were completely sane. He was definitely one of a kind.As you said, a complete gentleman, in the very best meaning of the word.
I find it interesting that some great people only get the proper credits they deserve when they die.
Does anyone bother to write a list of great people that are still alive?
The AI (Sigfried) that he wrote into Gateway had me noodling at AI (and writing BASIC interpreters, of all things) when I was in high school, in the 70s. Even though I knew the "compterese" bits he wrote into the sidebars of Broadhead's conversations with Sigfried were bogus, I had fun making sense of them.
So, I politely disagree with you.
Other computers-in-SF works that influenced me include: _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, _The Shockwave Rider_, _The Adolesence of P-1_, _When Harlie Was One_, _Michaelmas_, and a number of others. I will treasure these books, as they got my imagination started early, and they were a lot more palatable than computer reference materials in those days, which were dry and rather hard to come by if you were a kid.
Some of us had our career paths substantially affectd by, in particular, SF writers of a certain era. For me, Pohl was one of them who, in part, made me who I am.
IMHO, I believe, HackerNews is a place for intellectual discussions related to hacking culture and I think a good and respected Sci-Fi writers obituary is a perfect but sad opportunity for starting great discussions.
So if you look into HN Faq Question 1's answer:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
Yes Pohl's obituary gratifies my intellectual curiosity.
Sure. If you want to find out whether one of those people is relevant to other hackers, then try posting the obit here. If it gets upvoted to the front page, then you'll know the answer is yes.
It must be terrible to wade through the one obituary on the front page to get to the stuff you want to read. I feel for you, I really do. So much wasted time you could have spent reading about JavaScript or people's opinions about the accents of non-native English speakers.
It's almost time to start drinking here on the east coast and I still haven't seen a story about what Marissa Meyer had for breakfast. If only these troublesome obituaries about iconic writers would get out of the way.
Well I'd sure as hell rather see obituaries for SF authors than the stupid 'Site X is down again' notices on HN.
Pohl is part of the old guard SF, his writing has influenced people and technology for decades. If that doesn't deserve the front page then I don't know what does.
Let me get this straight: you flagged the post but you are whining because not enough people have joined you in disliking this? Truly an outrage. I wonder how we will all sleep at night knowing your inalienable right for the world to be just as you wish it to be has been violated.
Science fiction and speculative fiction writers have done much to inspire and shape the world that we're all making a living in today--do not begrudge those of us who mourn their passing.
I always thought that could be the HN motto.