The Day of the Boomer Dukes

By Frederik Pohl

Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an art—a device, practised in a scientific manner, in its best manifestations—time-travel stories are not science fiction. Time-travel, however, has become acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perennial Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781531263690

Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was one of science fiction's most important authors. Among his many novels are Gateway, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, the Locus SF Award, and the Nebula Award, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, which was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and Jem, which won the 1980 National Book Award in Science Fiction. He also collaborated on classic science fiction novels including The Space Merchants with Cyril M. Kornbluth. Pohl was an award-winning editor of Galaxy and If, a book editor at Bantam, and served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA in 1993, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Book preview

THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES

Frederik Pohl

PERENNIAL PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Frederik Pohl

Published by Perennial Press

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ISBN: 9781531263690

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foraminifera 9

Shield 8805

Cow

Sandy Van Pelt

Priam’s Maw

FORAMINIFERA 9

~

PAPTASTE UDDERLY, SEMPED SEMPSEMP DEZHAVOO, qued schmerz—Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious....

No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.

First you must know how I am called. My name is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the—the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.

Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.

---

I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told