Hello and welcome to Science Fiction University.

Hello and welcome to Science Fiction University.

We're your fan and writer hosts. I'm Blue Gow.

And I'm Drift Class, and you can visit Science Fiction University at We're your fan and writer hosts. I'm Blue Gow. And I'm Drift Class,

and you can visit Science Fiction University at our website, sciencefictionuniversity.com,

where you can also contribute to this podcast. There is a Patreon button at our website,

or you can mail as a letter and or contribution to Science Fiction University, P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

Warning, this episode contains spoilers for a 60-year-old story called The Day the Icicle Works Closed by Frederick Pohl.

And if you haven't read it by now.

Go read it. It's a good story.

It's a good.

In our last episode, Too Much of a Good Thing,

we talked about one of the grandmasters of the Golden Age of Science fiction, Frederick Poell, and his story The Midas Plague, which was published in 1954 in Galaxy magazine.

We also gave you a sneak peek at the Frederick Pole story we're talking about today.

The day the icicle works closed.

And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about fiction writing, Blue Gale, that you already know.

Most fiction writing does not age very well.

And that's probably more true for science fiction writing than any other genre.

Because when you think about it, Westerns, for example, good or bad, all deal with a specific

time and place that once existed more or less.

The genre we think of as detective fiction began in, believe it or not,

1841. That's 182 years ago this year and 20 years before the U.S. Civil War. That's a long time ago.

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