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

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