{"id":1430,"date":"2021-07-06T12:10:42","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T12:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1430"},"modified":"2021-07-06T12:10:47","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T12:10:47","slug":"fermi-and-frost-by-frederik-pohl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1430","title":{"rendered":"Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fermi and Frost<\/em><\/strong> by Frederik Pohl (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, January 1985)1<\/sup> 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\u2014killing off nearly all of the remaining survivors:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup> of June. If the world\u2019s larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th<\/sup> 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.\u00a0 p. 87<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

During this period Malibert parents Timothy and works as a geothermal engineer (Iceland\u2019s 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\u2014this is where the \u201cFermi\u201d of the title enters the story, from Fermi\u2019s Paradox: if there are aliens out there, why haven\u2019t we met them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don\u2019t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can\u2019t even guess at. And the third reason\u2014\u201d Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head\u2014\u201cis that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space\u2014when they have all the technology we do\u2014they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can\u2019t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.\u00a0 p. 92<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after this the story\u2014which had been interesting, detailed, and well developed\u2014comes 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. (\u201cBut that is in fact what did happen! At least, one would like to think so.\u201d)
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\u2019t a particularly strong year in this category\u2014the other Hugo finalists, which I haven\u2019t read but haven\u2019t heard of either, were: Flying Saucer Rock & Roll<\/em> by Howard Waldrop; Snow<\/em> by John Crowley; Dinner in Audoghast<\/em> by Bruce Sterling; Hong\u2019s Bluff<\/em> by William F. Wu.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl (Asimov\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[349],"tags":[352,24,4,351,12],"class_list":["post-1430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-frederik-pohl","tag-352","tag-3-2","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-frederik-pohl","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1430"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}