ABSTRACT
In “Fermi and Frost” (1985), a Hugo Award-winning sci-fi story written during Perestroika, Frederik Pohl depicts the world after an unexpected and rapid nuclear war. A small group of people in Iceland have survived the blasts. They live deep underground and try to grow crops, something that is only possible thanks to geothermal energy. The world above is in the clutches of a nuclear winter—earth is polluted, dark, and frosty—and the survivors continuously ask themselves one burning question: whether the Sun will return soon enough for life to be rekindled and for humankind to rebuild their civilisation. During a short excursion to the permafrost-bound dark fields of the island, the protagonist—who used to be a professor of astrophysics—tells his small son about the so-called Fermi Paradox, which explains why the human race has neither encountered nor communicated with other intelligent beings. He explains that there are only three possible explanations of the paradox: there might be no intelligent life outside the solar system; the aliens might not want to contact us; or, lastly, as soon as any intelligent race gets smart enough to travel into space, they kill themselves off. The protagonist is aware that, at that very moment, human civilisation is trying to get through an evolutionary bottleneck: our own technological achievements are so immense that they may (or may not) be the death of us.
