One of the brightest stars in the science fiction world has been extinguished.
Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Frederik Pohl, a sci-fi editor who launched several notable careers and an author whose gifts for word-crafting and world-building made him one of the genre’s most acclaimed figures, died Monday afternoon of respiratory failure at a hospital near his Illinois home.
He was 93.
“Rest in peace to my beloved grandfather Frederik Pohl, who showed me by example how to be an author. 1919-2013,” Emily Pohl-Weary tweeted.
Over the course of his eight-decade career, Pohl penned more than 60 novels — including 1977’s landmark, Hugo Award-winning “Gateway.”
Pohl started his love affair with the genre as a 19-year-old editor of two professional fanzines and continued writing right up until his final days. His most recent novel, “All the Lives He Led,” was published in 2011.
Pohl also was a prolific writer on the computer — a technology he had predicted would be a household staple — with his “The Way the Future Blogs” site. The blog won Pohl his sixth and final Hugo Award in 2010 as “best fan writer.”
“Fred left a thick file of things he wanted to tell you, so we’ll likely keep posting for a while,” a note on the site read after his death was announced.
But long before “Gateway,” Pohl contributed to the genre as an editor and literary agent — and helped broker the sale of good friend Isaac Asimov’s first novel, “Pebble in the Sky.”