Day million Book

Day Million was Pohl's eighth collection of short science fiction published by Ballantine. He was a -very- prolific writer! The cover of the first edition, by Ian Robertson, is worth noting because it's a Escher-esque piece that suggests serious mental speculation, as opposed to the ray-guns and bug-eyed-monsters more usually associated with sf books of the time; Ballantine was making an effort to appeal to a wider, more sophisticated readership. It's also noteworthy that only half of the ten stories originally appeared in the traditional genre magazines, up to that point just about the only market for such stories. The other half came from Rogue, Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, and three from Playboy, which surely paid more per story than Pohl was used to seeing as advances for his novels. There's one story from his old pulp days, an issue of Astonishing Stories edited by Pohl himself, that serves as an interesting comparison piece, It's a Young World. My favorites are the title story and The Day the Martians Came. Some of them have aged a bit due to the intervening societal changes, but Pohl, in his day, was at the top of the form and on the cutting edge.