Preferred Risk - Pohl, Frederik

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Résumé :
Preferred Risk is a sharp mid-century science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey, writing together as Edson McCann. First published in 1955, the novel imagines a world dominated by a vast insurance corporation whose calculations of danger, health, war, reproduction, and social order have become the hidden machinery of civilisation. What begins as corporate risk management has hardened into a system of control, where the language of safety conceals power, coercion, and the quiet management of human life. Project Gutenberg identifies the work as by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey writing as Edson McCann, and notes its original magazine serialisation in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1955. The result is both classic science fiction and pointed social satire: a novel about bureaucracy, medicine, fear, corporate authority, nuclear anxiety, and the uneasy bargain between security and freedom. Pohl's gift for institutional critique and del Rey's strong narrative drive make Preferred Risk a strong fit for readers of Golden Age science fiction, dystopian fiction, corporate dystopia, Cold War speculative fiction, and rediscovered magazine-era SF. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery....

Biographie:
Frederik George Pohl Jr. (1919 - 2013) was an American science-fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than 75 years-from his first published work, the 1937 poem Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna, to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year's best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four year's best novel awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science-fiction writers and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first 40 years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction. It was a finalist for three other year's best novel awards. He won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards.

Sommaire:
Frederik Pohl was one of the major figures of twentieth-century American science fiction: a writer, editor, agent, anthologist, and critic whose career helped shape the field from the magazine era through the modern period. Born in 1919, Pohl was closely associated with the Futurians and with the development of socially aware, idea-driven science fiction. His later novels, including The Space Merchants, Man Plus, and Gateway, made him especially known for fiction that examined commerce, advertising, bureaucracy, technology, and the systems that shape human choice. His work often treated the future not as distant machinery but as an extension of existing social and economic pressures....