It’s the birthday of Frederik Pohl (1919-2013, #nicelonglife), award-winning science fiction author whose work was often highly political and anti-utopian. One of his novels alone, Gateway (1977), won Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and his 1979 novel Jem: The Making of a Utopia won the only National Book Award for Science Fiction ever given. (They only offered it that one year.) But his best-known novel (co-written with C.M. Kornbluth) was probably The Space Merchants (1953), about evil advertisers in space. Sort of.

Pohl was born in New York City, grew up in Brooklyn reading Tolstoy and pulp science fiction magazines, and dropped out of high school to plunge into the world of science fiction as an agent and editor while still in his teens. He formed a science fiction group called the Futurians with the likes of Isaac Asimov and Kornbluth, with both of whom he also collaborated. Actually, Pohl collaborated with a number of hotshots throughout his life, including Arthur C. Clarke.

Pohl took a break to serve as a weatherman in Italy during WWII, then worked in advertising briefly but presumably long enough to figure out how evil advertisers are, then returned to science fiction during a time when the genre was becoming more mainstream. Pohl was the one who sold Asimov’s first novel, Pebble in the Sky, to Doubleday, and he edited the magazines Galaxy and If to great acclaim. He also began racking up his vast personal collection of Hugo and Nebula Awards (four and three, respectively) and marriages (five) and would eventually write more than 65 novels—roughly half collaborations—and more than 30 short story collections. He also wrote some nonfiction, including the biography Tiberius (1960), in which Pohl (writing under the pseudonym Ernst Mason) reveals what a majorly stand-up guy Tiberius was not.

Pohl was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982 and inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998. His final novel, All the Lives He Led, was published in 2011. Pohl died of respiratory failure at the age of 93 in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Have a fantastic Tuesday, be wary of any and all advertising except on the Internet because if it’s on the Internet it’s surely true, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.