Science Fiction and Nonfiction from Frederik Pohl

Pohl, Frederik. Digits and Dastards. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1966. Print.

Digits and Dastards compiles six short stories and two nonfiction articles.

“The Children of Night” presents an intergalactic public relations game of chess that features political maneuvering akin to what might be found among the politicians of Asimov’s Foundation.

In “The Fiend” a lonely sociopath of the stars pines for what he cannot have.

“Earth Eighteen” offers a traveler’s guide to a prominent flyway of the future that crosses the United States, complete with descriptions of some of the strangely familiar roadside attractions that lie in wait off the beaten path.

The mind of man cocoons itself in the body of chimp for the duration of distant voyages in “Father of the Stars.”

To fend off a common enemy, egg-shaped beings with detachable limbs attempt to communicate with an alien race with which they have no mutual reference points in “The Five Hells of Orion.”

Four greedy, entrepreneurial humans must join “With Redfern on Capella XII” in order to escape the strange customs of a planet of arthropodal beings.

These stories are not the most thought-provoking in the world, but they are entertaining and kept fresh by unforeseeable twists of plot and resolutions as catchy as fishing hooks.

The two nonfiction articles are almost more intriguing than the science fiction preceding them. In “How to Count on Your Fingers” and “On Binary Digits and Human Habits,” Pohl explores the advantages of the binary numbering system over the ubiquitous decimal system. Here the compiling and expression of information is considered in terms more familiar to machines and computers, but vastly useful to humans versed in the right language. Indeed, Pohl goes so far as to suggest several languages for verbal indication of binary digits. Not only are these articles interesting, but they are entirely lucid and aimed at the reader whose experience with numbers goes no farther than school. As complex as the applications of the binary system are, Pohl’s arguments can be fully understood with the skills learned in fourth grade math. It would be interesting to see such nonfiction considerations put into the context of the science fiction Pohl otherwise sticks to.