Frederik Pohl

“The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.”

“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.”

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

“I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring.”

“Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.”

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

“My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.”

“It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.”