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Home
Authors
Frederik Pohl
American
Writer
About the author
My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Thought
#First
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Fiction
The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Reading
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Life
#Day
#Development
That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#World
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#People
#Science
#Research
#Fiction
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).
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Years
#Science
#First
#Reading
#Fiction
You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#World
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Old
#English
#Literature
#Fiction
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Time
#May
#Ideas
#Scientists
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Fiction
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Computer
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Reading
#Fiction
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Now
#Years
#Writer
#Computer
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Fact
I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Time
#People
#Thinking
#Saying
#History
#Writing
#Change
I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Pretty
#Fiction
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.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Want
#Science
#Fiction
#Care
In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
Frederik Pohl,
American
Writer
#Science
#Future
#Fiction