I’m currently reading Frederick Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was. Mr. Pohl is a remarkable man, not least because he’s 91 years old and won the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer for his work on his blog.

But he’s much more than that. He’s won Hugo awards for editing, he’s won Nebula awards for writing, he’s been the President of the Science Fiction Writers Association, and he was a literary agent for many of the most successful SF writers of the 20th century.

The fascinating part of this book to me, though, is his description of the publishing world, particularly the pulps, in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. It was cutthroat, it was penny-pinching, and it really flourished only during the early part of the century before World War II when paper shortages drastically limited it, but it was, as Pohl tells it, a springboard for many authors who went on to best-seller status in the post-war period when the paperback book was introduced.

It’s cultural history as well as personal memoir, and if you’re interested in that period, it’s well worth getting it from the library if you can (the price and availability at Amazon is ridiculous).