Category: Frederik Pohl

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents, 1956) is, partially, an “if this goes one” satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story’s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann’s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers’ Christmas purchases, and it’s here where we get the first dose of satire (apart an earlier mention that this Christmas rush is happening in early September):

[Lilymary] called me over near closing time. She looked distressed and with some reason. There was a dolly filled with gift-wrapped packages, and a man from Shipping looking annoyed. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.”
The Shipping man snorted. “Look for yourself, Mr. Martin,” he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann’s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card—a simple Yule scene and the printed message:

The very Merriest of Season’s Greetings
From …………………………………
To ……………………………………
$8.50

The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann’s idea was for the customer to fill it out and mail it, ahead of time, to the person it was intended for. That way, the person who got it would know just about how much he ought to spend on a present for the first person. It was smart, I admit, and maybe the smartest thing about it was rounding the price off to the nearest fifty cents instead of giving it exactly. Heinemann said it was bad-mannered to be too precise—and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.

When Lilymary says she can’t complete the job as she needs to go home to her father, Martin does it himself. Then, when she doesn’t come in the day after, Martin goes to her house. There he finds that the father, Lilymary, and the other three daughters are Sabbath observant.
The rest of the story sees Martin romantically pursue Lilymary, which provides a clash-of-cultures situation between him and the family, who have just returned to the United States after a long time in Borneo as religious missionaries. Consequently, they don’t have a TV or dishwasher or any mod-cons, or any interest in them. They also provide their own entertainment and, during an after dinner session, when Martin sings a particularly commercialised version of ’Tis the Season of Christmas (“Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.! Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!”), the atmosphere sours. Then, when he later arranges for the visit of a Santa Claus and the Elves sales team to the house, the relationship breaks down completely. Eventually (spoiler), at the suggestion of his boss, Martin proposes to Lilymary (“Why not marry her for a while?”), she rejects him, and then he finds out the family is leaving once again for Borneo, so he tries again. He eventually succeeds when he tracks them down to a church service, prays with Lilymary, and then gets religion.
This is okay I guess, but it would have been a more interesting piece if it had concentrated on the Christmas satire and not the boy-wants-girl story.
** (Average). 8, 250 words.

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl (Asimov’s SF, January 1985)1 opens in the TWA terminal at JFK airport after a maritime military exchange leads to an imminent nuclear war. Initially the story focuses on a young boy called Timothy, who has lost his parents in the crowds trying to flee New York, but we are soon introduced to another character, Harry Malibert, a SETI astronomer sitting in the temporary island of calm that is the Ambassador Club. The two are flung together in the increasing chaos at the airport and, when Malibert gets the offer of a flight to Iceland just as the nuclear attack warning sounds, he takes Timothy with him.
The central part of the story sees the two arrive and settle in Iceland (just as Reykjavik is accidentally nuked by a bomb meant for the US airbase at Keflavik), and details, in graphic and precise detail, the nuclear winter that encompasses the globe—killing off nearly all of the remaining survivors:

The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled.
The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.
And the darkness stayed.
The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.
The missiles went off on the 11th of June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.  p. 87

During this period Malibert parents Timothy and works as a geothermal engineer (Iceland’s constant supply of hot water provides its survivors with heat and electricity, which means artificial light for crops), and Malibert later has time to run an informal SETI club—this is where the “Fermi” of the title enters the story, from Fermi’s Paradox: if there are aliens out there, why haven’t we met them?

“One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.  p. 92

Shortly after this the story—which had been interesting, detailed, and well developed—comes to an odd ending where Pohl goes all meta, stating in an authorial voice that in one ending sunlight returns too late to save the Icelandic survivors, but that in another ending they survive and, generations later, aliens finally arrive. (“But that is in fact what did happen! At least, one would like to think so.”)
An irritating finish to an otherwise good story.
*** (Good). 6,200 words.

1. Pohl won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Story for this, an achievement which hugely overrates the piece. Perhaps 1985 wasn’t a particularly strong year in this category—the other Hugo finalists, which I haven’t read but haven’t heard of either, were: Flying Saucer Rock & Roll by Howard Waldrop; Snow by John Crowley; Dinner in Audoghast by Bruce Sterling; Hong’s Bluff by William F. Wu.)