Science fiction Grand Masters Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl collaborated for the first time on "The Last Theorem". The novel initially was Clarke's, and he began working on it in early 2004. But in 2006, at the age of 88, ill health brought on by complications from post-polio syndrome, and writer's block, impeded his progress, and he asked Pohl for help. Pohl explained: "Arthur said to me that he woke up one morning and didn't know how to write any of the books he had contracted. The stories had just gone out of his head." Clarke gave Pohl a 40–50 page manuscript plus roughly 50 pages of notes, and over the next two years, Pohl wrote the book. Pohl said that "Everything in the novel is something he either suggested or wrote or I discussed with him." Some of Clarke's notes were so obscure that even Clarke himself could not understand them. Pohl, only two years younger than Clarke, had health problems of his own: he could no longer type and wrote the book out in longhand, leaving it up to his wife to translate his "indecipherable scribbles". Clarke reviewed and approved the final manuscript of "The Last Theorem" in early March 2008, just days before he died. Pohl died five years later in September 2013.