The remarkable Fred Pohl is still looking for new challenges at age 89. His latest project is writing The Way the Future Blogs.

One of Pohl’s first posts explains how he started collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on The Last Theorem:

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather off-handedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

That sounded like a hint, and I took it. I wrote back, “If you really need a collaborator for that unfinished novel, Barkis is probably willin’. I like collaborating and sadly seem to be running out of collaborators.”

[Via Andrew Porter and Steven Silver.]