Showing posts with label Pohl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pohl. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Tunnel Under the World

Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World” is a beautiful, Philip K. Dick-like story about paranoia and underlying questions of reality. (Actually, it reminds me of Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint- which was also about a thoroughly-normal suburban world that turned out to be completely artificial and false.)

The ending makes the story; and my biggest regret is that, with the advance of computers, the ending is no longer really plausible to modern readers. They could update it, I suppose; but virtual-reality simulations just aren’t the same.