Alternating Currents

by Frederik Pohl

Contents:
- The Children of Night
- The Ghost Maker
- Let the Ants Try
- Pythias
- The Mapmakers
- Rafferty's Reasons
- Target One
- Grandy Devil
- The Tunnel Under the World
- What to Do Till the Analyst Comes

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Collections

190 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

Reviews

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: Ten short stories by the master of science fiction in the sub-genre dedicated to the prediction of the future of advertisements and propaganda.

The first story, "Happy birthday, dear Jesus," shows the use of propaganda and advertisements in an impossible situation, to manipulate people so that they'll accept the creation of a base of an extra-terrestrial civilization that in the near past attacked the Earth and tortured the children of Earth. The way to solve the problem is finding a scapegoat that will attract to himself the hate of all the people, both by Earthlings and Arcturians.

The third story, "Let the ants try," tells about the inventor of a time machine that travels back 40 million years to help ants to evolve into a worthy rival of man. The experiment backfires. But even though one of the main characters is a biologist, both of them (and perhaps the author) show a big ignorance about paleontology, for they think they are travelling back to the time of dinosaurs, which had disappeared from the Earth sixty five million years ago.

Another story ("Target one") is similar to the former, as it deals with changing history through the assassination of a single person. Of course, the attempt backfires, for the new history is also quite unpalatable.

I had read previously "The tunnel under the world", and I had liked it. As the first story in this collection, it deals with advertisements and propaganda, but this time used in a very special way and with very special people.

ESPAÑOL: Diez cuentos del maestro de la ciencia ficción en el subgénero de la predicción del futuro de la publicidad y la propaganda.

El primer cuento, "Los niños de la noche", muestra el uso de la propaganda y la publicidad en una situación imposible, para manipular a las personas para que acepten la creación de una base de una civilización extraterrestre que en un pasado cercano atacó al Tierra y torturó a los niños terrestres. La forma de resolver el problema es encontrar un chivo expiatorio que atraiga hacia sí el odio de todos, tanto de los terrestres como de los Arcturianos.

El tercer cuento, "Demos una oportunidad a las hormigas", trata sobre el inventor de una máquina del tiempo que viaja 40 millones de años hacia el pasado para ayudar a las hormigas a evolucionar hasta convertirse en un digno rival del hombre. El experimento fracasa. Pero aunque uno de los protagonistas es biólogo, ambos (y quizás también el autor) no parecen saber mucho de paleontología, pues creen que están viajando a la época de los dinosaurios, que habían desaparecido de la Tierra hace sesenta y cinco millones de años.

Otra historia ("La ecuación de Einstein") es similar a la anterior, ya que se trata de cambiar la historia mediante el asesinato de una sola persona. Por supuesto, el intento fracasa, porque la nueva historia también es bastante desagradable.

Ya había leído antes "El túnel por debajo del mundo" y me gustó. Como el primer cuento de esta colección, trata sobre publicidad y propaganda, pero enfocada de una manera muy especial y con gente asimismo muy especial.

[Rog Petersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars
Ten early short stories from Pohl. None of them his best. Few of them even SF, more Twilight Zoney.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book because it contained a short story that was one of the influences for Dark City, one of my favorite science fiction/noir films.

I was pleasantly surprised. I hadn't read much science fiction but I did enjoy some episodes of The Twilight Zone so I thought I'd just go for it. I ended up liking virtually every story in the book. One particular story about Christmas was not at all science fiction but it wasn't too bad itself either. I am not too familiar with any of his other works but if this book is somewhere, and if it's less than $10, I would certainly pick it up for some entertainment.

[Jose Moa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good collection of sf tales whhere is prominent A túnel under the world, terrorific tale about deceptive reality in a market study

[Justin Benz]

*SPOILERS*



"Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus" - This was a great story to read after getting home from Christmas shopping at the mall. Pohl's story approaches Christmas in a dark and satirical way by imagining a future where consumerism has run completely rampant and the Christmas season has come to engulf the greater part of the year leading up to Dec. 25th. This story follows the exploits of George Martin, a middle manager who works long hours at a busy and competitive Sears-like store called the Emporium. Martin is a 30-year-old work-a-holic who lives alone, never made time to get married, and spends his nights hooked up to a "dreamster" device that allows him to experience fantasies. As I was reading this, I was impressed with the prophetic nature of Pohl's writing. Similar to the way Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' included a Facebook/Myspace-obsessed character, Pohl hits the nail on the head about countless modern American men who have allowed work to crush their spirits and internet pornography to stand in the place of traditional (or stable) relationships. In any event, Martin's habitual lifestyle is turned completely on its side when he meets and clumsily falls in love with Lilymary Hargreave, a new part-timer who goes to work in his gift-wrapping department. Hargreave comes from a tightly-knit family of missionaries who spent many years in the Third World spreading the good word. As Martin pursues Hargreave, the story deals with the clash between their two cultures. Beyond the aforementioned soothsaying about the Martin character's paradigm, Pohl's story definitely provides good food for thought about what civilization has done to the Christmas holiday.

"The Ghost-Maker" - This story tells the tale of Ehrlich, an anthropologist who seeks revenge after being cast out of the academic community for alleging that magic is real. On his journey, he is able to track down a real magician who, by customs unexplained, gives Ehrlich the means to a powerful magic spell that can conjure ghosts out of the remains of living things. All magic and academia aside, this story's main theme turns out being revenge itself, and Pohl does an excellent job of showing Ehrlich giving himself over to his baser human tendency to 'get even.' I liked the way this story presupposes a subculture of magicians, water-witches, and diabolists that abides by its own codes and ethical guidelines while keeping itself decidedly under the radar from normal humans who would abuse their mystical powers and cause more harm than good.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This thin tome features ten short stories of varying lengths and subjects. They all offer a small dose of intriguing and imaginative sci-fi, but some stories stand out more than others. Fortunately, each one is pretty breezy and should entice genre fans sufficiently.

Of the stories, the ones that I found most captivating were Let the Ants Try (a bizarre tale in which we give ants a try at evolving and controlling the planet in place of humans), The Tunnel Under the World (a rather interesting mystery in which a man discovers that his life is not what it seems), and What To Do Until the Analyst Comes (an amusing yarn in which an addictive chewing gum is successfully marketed and it turns everyone kinda stupid). A few of the other stories I found a little less captivating, but are still worthwhile. The Mapmakers might be the most important tale here: a solidly-written and suspenseful thriller about spacemen struggling to map their way across the stars (this story is especially noteworthy in the way it emphasizes the threat of uncontrolled heat in space travel, which doesn't radiate and therefore just keeps building; it's not something I see mentioned in other works). Rafferty's Reasons is a rather intense tale with some interesting psychology. Target One is a pretty neat idea (something that actually mirrors the premise of the Red Alert video games). Grandy Devil seems like an odd inclusion to the collection, but it has its share of charm. As for the remaining three, I barely remember what happens in Children of the Night, The Ghost Maker, and Pythias. For whatever reason, I found those stories to drag a lot more, and nothing about them really connected with me.

Frederick Pohl crafted each of these stories with a pretty solid blend of prose and dialogue; his writing tells just enough to set the scene, but he doesn't overdo it with the details. His characters often show personality, and each story has a unique premise or twist worth telling.

If you're a sci-fi fan, this collection should be worth checking out. Recommended.

4/5 (Entertainment: Good | Stories: Good | Book: Good)

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published as an anthology in 1956, 'Alternating Currents' is as variable as any other anthology but it does contain the now-classic short story of early 1950s horror-scifi paranoia 'The Tunnel Under The World' which has deservedly been collected in many subsequent general anthologies.

'The Tunnel' is worth dwelling on because it captures nicely the mood of liberal nervousness about psychological manipulation that mirrors today's anxiety about disinformation, fake news and deep fakes. These are bound up with AI algorithms today but with robotics and mind control then.

The question is the 'why' of these manipulations. Pohl gives us a critique that has profit (the advertising industry) moving from flogging us more things than we need to planning the manipulation of the electoral process for the sake of a mysterious power-hungry few.

Liberal paranoia about power over which it has no say and barely understands seems to be an American eternal although the critique tends to miss the point that Marxists tend to see and simply (and typically) exposes things simply on the grounds that they are morally wrong or disturbing.

Pohl was certainly not alone in this Cold War paranoia. Examples are many. 'Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders' would appear in 1957 and Hofstadter's 'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life' would appear in 1963. The advertising and marketing industries were very much villains.

From 1936-1939, Pohl had been a young communist as were many idealistic teenagers. McCarthyism must surely have created a justifiable anxiety as to just how far Cold War anti-communism might go against the more liberal wing of American citizenry.

'Tunnel' is frequently anthologised for a very good reason. Alongside, say, the film of 'The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers' (1956) operating from the opposite political perspective, it captures citizen anxiety in a troubled time of existential nuclear threat and internal conformity.

Many liberally-minded American intellectuals were deeply worried that the drive to produce and consume and the pressure exerted to do so in competition with Russia alongside the closed conformity of national politics were heading America down a very dark path.

The fear was of an occult elite engaged in strategic competition and preparing the population for existential catastrophe by manipulating them into compliance with authority through a manipulation into consumption. Much of Pohl's 1950s work seems to have been on this theme.

Although variable in quality, this collection is superior to Pohl's irritatingly jocular Galaxy stories from the second half of the 1950s collected in 'The Frederik Pohl Omnibus'. I have no taste for the jocular in genre literature in any case but the Galaxy stories now appear like evasion.

There are two stories that are of equal interest and quality to 'Tunnel' in this collection and have perhaps been neglected because they are more of the moment and less iconic, speaking less to the anxiety of Pohl's class, an anxiety which recurs naturally under all forms of populist democracy.

The first ['The Children of Night'] is on a similar theme - the ruthless use of political manipulation - and stays just on the right side of 'jocular' as it deals with the hatreds of a recent vicious interplanetary war against a brutal enemy with whom peace has been made after victory.

Written in 1956 (all the stories except one obviously weaker story written in 1949 were written between 1954 and 1956), this is a surprisingly subtle piece on an unsubtle subject vastly superior to his Galaxy hack work. Its title is for the British market. It has a different title in America.

The protagonist of the story is the cliche of the man of integrity doing a dirty job - Chandleresque with perhaps Bogart in mind, cynical but with the intelligence to come out with the right moral result through unconventional means. He ends up the material loser but the moral winner.

This is another liberal intellectual fantasy - that you can be a person of total integrity while playing your assigned role in a system that operates without integrity and come up with the right progressive result through your superior cleverness.

Nevertheless, what usually does not often work or can be seen through too easily, works here because the plotting is clever, the cliches enhanced into novelty and the theme a genuine one - essentially, how do you get a population to forget your enemy were Nazis when conditions change.

Pohl does not evade the evil done in the past by the alien Nazis [Arcturans] with some very moving sections on children experimented on by the Arcturans and yet the Arcturan who turns up to negotiate a base near a small American town with government backing is sympathetically drawn.

Another minor masterpiece is 'The Mapmakers'. It is interesting as space opera for entirely different reasons. We are in the territory to be held later by 'Star Trek' with a highly imaginative attempt to imagine the strains, pressures and fears of 'hyperspatial' travel.

The science is now absurd but we have to accept this from science fiction trying to look forward from what was known at the time. It really does not matter. Given what was known then, it is radically imaginative and even plausible, albeit in an alternative physical universe.

There is no need for aliens in this story. It is the story of exploration by a crew that is believable and stressed with a genuinely unnerving account of a closed box of humans subject to slow heat death if they fail to solve a complex navigation problem.

Not only does Pohl invent a 'plausible' means of propulsion but he adopts, from the interest he takes in psychological manipulation, an interesting solution to the problem of navigation when hyperspatial travel means that all electrical current has to be turned off during 'jumps'.

It is all absurd perhaps but it is also a hard science short story that works despite this, especially as the hard science is just the framework for a story about shipboard discipline and endurance. Once again, the war of only a decade before casts a long shadow over American science fiction.

Other stories pass muster as entertainments - the wry account of an academic trying to demonstrate the science of magic and creating ghosts and a sticky situation for himself in 'The Ghost Maker' sits on the very fringe of science fiction with its 'Weird Tales' aspect.

Many of the others are less interesting with a Hitchockian twist that is very much of its period but which perhaps impresses us less today. The themes of averting nuclear war but creating a worse situation and so on and so on are often of their time and forgettable.

The final story ['What To Do Until The Analyst Comes'] is a precursor to the Galaxy stories. It holds to the interest in psychological manipulation. Yet again an advertising agency turns up but so does that damned jocularity that will come to prove a bit of a curse in the second half of the decade.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of 1950s speculative stories by Pohl.

"Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus": A department store manager falls for an unusual employee and is taught the real meaning of Christmas.

"The Ghost-Maker": A disgraced academic seeks out a magician for revenge.

"Let the Ants Try": In a war-torn America, a time travel experiment works all too well.

"Pythias": A man reveals to a friend the secrets of his psychokinetic powers.

"The Mapmakers": After a hyperspace jump, a star-ship is lost in space with no records of how to return home.

"Rafferty's Reasons": In a work-obsessed culture, a man fantasizes about killing his cruel boss.

"Target One": In another post-war future, a group of men plot to kill the man who made the atomic bomb possible.

"Grandy Devil": Odd little story about a family of immortals.

"The Tunnel Under the World": A man realizes he's been waking up on the same morning, after the same dream, day after day.

"What To Do Until the Analyst Comes": A tobacco company searches for healthier, less addictive alternative.

[Timday · Rating 4 out of 5]

best short stories i have read think pohl was one of the better thinkers will look into more

[Janne Wass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Double Hugo Award winner for best novel, Frederik Pohl was still perhaps best as a short story writer, as demonstrated by this 1956 compilation. The 10 stories within are of varying length, but most are between 10 and 20 pages long, with the exception of the longer “The Mapmakers” and the 5-page “Pythias”. Advertised as “stories of the future”, this book does what it says on the cover, although a couple of the stories seem like they are set in Pohl’s contemporary USA.

Several of the stories in this compilation are satirical stabs at one of Pohl’s pet peeves: consumerism and advertisement. In “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus”, a department store middle-manager is confronted by a family that doesn’t understand that Christmas starts in September and is all about presents, not Jesus. In “Tunnel Under the World”, the protagonist slowly realises that his entire town and all its people are in fact a test laboratory for the advertising industry, and “What To Do Till the Analyst Comes” sees a tobacco company create a new happiness drug when cigarettes are deemed unhealthy, and face the unexpected complications.

There’s a dry, witty humor to many of these stories, which are often written in the kind of “hard-boiled” style popular in the 40’s and 50’s. Pohl is, however, a very good writer and also shows that he is capable of more than just being witty and biting – there are moments of tenderness, high drama and hints of horror in the many of the stories. Pohl also has an extremely persuasive way of writing. Sometimes I don’t think much of the beginning of a story (they often start out rather mundanely), but somewhere along the way they always manage to grab me, and I find myself compelled to go back to the beginning in order to re-read what I skimmed over.

My favourite, though, is the longer, almost novella-like “The Mapmakers” about a spaceship out to map the galaxy through hyperspace jumps, who, in the middle of a jump, damage their Atlas and can’t retrace their steps back home.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag. I enjoyed "Let the Ants Try" and "The Tunnel Under the World." Some of the other stories were pretty forgettable.

[Kevin McDonagh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traditional sci-fi shorts. Pohl is a master, never short on big ideas. He never needlessly nurses a storyline some of the stories are just 3-4 pages long with a compelling story arc!

[Kevin Sedota]

Not one of my favorites

[William Pugsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories ought to be made into a limited TV series. Above average.

[Ximena]

“The tunnel under the world” slappzzz

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes I forget that women didn’t exist in the 1950’s

A neat little collection, glad I found a (slightly disintegrating) copy at a used bookstore.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories, most dealing with alternate histories or futures. The author seems preoccupied with the idea that the recently discovered atomic bombs would yield a very bleak future. Fortunately none of his imagined events have yet taken place. The best story in this collection is "The Tunnel Under The World" which deals with a community devoted solely to testing advertisements, but with a quite unexpected twist. The worst (although still not terrible, and with another pretty great twist ending) is "The Mapmakers," a tale about hyperspace travel. Most of the reason I didn't like this story is that I was halfway done with it before I figured out the jargon enough to understand it, and I never really did fully understand most of the technical stuff. In fact, a lot of these stories were kind of hard to get into and would probably bear a second reading, as it's not generally readily apparent what is taking place and where (or when). It's good to keep in mind throughout that these stories are all written in the 1950's and that mindset (especially in science fiction) is rather different than today's.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

free book from shop near work. July '10

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro tiene, por lo menos, cuatro cuentos brillantes. Del resto algunos son excelentes y los otros muy buenos. Todos de pie, Frederik Pohl.