A Life and a Half

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Frederik Pohl is an ironist: by no means exclusively that-he has many other substantial claims to consideration; but in this story, at any rate, the ironist part of him is in charge. As with A Work of Art (and as so often in science fiction), the apparent subject-matter of A Life and a Half turns out on scrutiny not to be its true subject-matter at all. (For a story in which the population explosion genuinely is the subject-matter, see Billennium.) No: what is here being lightly outlined is a sort of incurable preposterousness in human affairs, a tropism towards self-defeat which can confidently be expected to be still fully in operation when the very last man confronts his very last crisis. Poor Saul, joyously incapacitating himself with the germ of the universal impulse whose consequences only he can alleviate! And poor us, too: for we, after all, are at one and the same time Saul and Saul's fellow-creatures, whom his innocent diversions left so dismally in the lurch.

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