X-Message-Number: 9961 Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 22:37:01 -0400 From: "Stephen W. Bridge" <> Subject: Fred Pohl stays warm To CryoNet From Steve Bridge, Alcor July 1, 1998 In reply to: Message #9949 Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 12:02:43 +0100 From: (John de Rivaz) Subject: Re: Pohl >Wasn't he [Frederik Pohl] actually offered free suspension membership by >Alcor at one point, and rejected it? Actually, he was offered a free suspension by The Institute for Advbanced Biological Studies, Inc. (IABS), an Indianapolis cryonics group started by Mike Darwin and myself back in the 1970's. I believe our offer to Pohl was in the summer of 1979. IABS later merged with Alcor. Pohl had previously stated he hadn't signed up for cryonics because of the cost and not wishing to short-change his family. He was stunned by our offer, but turned it down because he said he was a product of the present and didn't feel like he would fit into the future. He felt that the pattern of friendships he had today were what made life worth living. I spoke with Fred at length at a library convention in 1992 and he repeated his reasons. This was a odd opinion from possibly the most flexible and adaptable of all the older SF authors. Fred Pohl is one of the few 1940's writers to write much better SF in the 1980's and 1990's than he had in his youth. He has traveled all over the world, is still marvelously intelligent and thoughtful, and has certainly changed his pattern of friends more than once in the past twenty-years. I can think of few people who would adapt BETTER to the future. Oh, well. If even people like Frederik Pohl turn this down, I'm afraid that "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" is not going to disappear from the language for a long time. Steve Bridge Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9961