Book description
Machine Major Boysie Gann had been assigned to duty far beyond Pluto,
on Polaris Station, one of the artificial sun-satellites protecting the
inner planets - and Earth - from the Reefs of Space. For the Starchild
had sent an ultimatum to Earth, calling on the Plan of Man to relinquish
its total control over humanity under threat of frightful
reprisals...and as proof of his powers, the Starchild had threatened to
extinguish the sun and a dozen near stars for a period of time.
But Boysie didn't know anything about the Starchild. All he knew was
his job - to find out who on Polaris Station was violating the Plan of
Man. He found out - and before he could do anything about it, he was
captured, marooned on a Reef, and accused of being the Starchild
himself! To survive, Boysie had to find out who, or what, the Starchild
might be.
And all he knew for sure was that the Starchild did in fact have the
power to stop the sun if he wanted to! Frederik Pohl (1919 - )
Frederik Pohl has an extensive career as both a writer and editor
spanning over seventy years. Using various pseudonyms, Pohl began
writing in the late 1930s, his first published work being a poem titled
“Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna”, which appeared in the October 1937 issue
of Amazing Stories. Pohl edited both Astonishing Stories and Super
Science Stories between 1939 and 1943 and whilst many of his own stories
appeared in these two pulp magazines they were never under his own name.
After this period, from 1943 to 1945, Pohl served in the U. S. Army,
rising to the rank of sergeant as an air corps weatherman. He also spent
time working as a literary agent, representing many successful writers
of the genre including Isaac Asimov, although his agency didn't succeed
financially and had to be closed down in the early 1950s. The winner of
multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, Pohl became the SFWA Grand Master in
1993 and was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998. He
currently lives in Illinois. Jack Williamson (1908 - 2006)
John Stewart 'Jack' Williamson was born in Arizona in 1908 and raised
in an isolated New Mexico farmstead. After the Second World War, he
acquired degrees in English at the Eastern New Mexico University,
joining the faculty there in 1960 and remaining affiliated with the
school for the rest of his life. Williamson sold his first story at the
age of 20 - the beginning of a long, productive and successful career,
which started in the pulps, took in the Golden Age and extended right
into his nineties. He was the second author, after Robert A. Heinlein,
to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA, and by far the
oldest recipient of the Hugo (2001, aged 93) and Nebula (2002, aged 94)
awards. A significant voice in SF for over six decades, Jack Williamson
is credited with inventing the terms 'terraforming' and 'genetic
engineering'. He died in 2006.
