Frederik Pohl Quotes

Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.

Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that's as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren't a lot of crows in near-interstellar space.

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever ... and the other one scared me out of my mind.

I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison - provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.

There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.

I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

It isn't a matter of what's rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don't kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn't be any wolves left. For the same reason men don't usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can't. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first.

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty."
Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.

The only thing that went wrong was the human race itself.

Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

I was worried about sex," he went on. "But you know what, Sulie? It's like being told I can't have any caviar for the next couple years. I don't even like caviar. And when you come right down to it, I don't want sex right now. I supposed you punched that into the computer? 'Cut down sex drive, increase euphoria'? Anyway, it finally penetrated my little brain that I was just making trouble for myself, worrying about whether I could get along without something I really didn't want. It's a reflection of what I think other people think I should want.

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true ... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.

You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.

When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.

It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.

Science fiction is the very literature of change.