Frederik Pohl

American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

Frederik George Pohl Jr.was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years–from his first published work, the 1937 poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna”, to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led.

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About the Frederik Pohl

Frederik George Pohl Jr.was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years–from his first published work, the 1937 poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna”, to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led.

From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year’s best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four “year’s best novel” awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science-fiction writers, and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas The Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first 40 years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction, and it was a finalist for three other year’s best novel awards. He won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards, including receiving both for the 1977 novel Gateway.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers.

Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, “The Way the Future Blogs”.

20 Quotes by Frederik Pohl

  1. 1.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  2. 2.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  3. 3.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  4. 4.

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

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  5. 5.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  6. 6.

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

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  7. 7.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  8. 8.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  9. 9.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  10. 10.

    I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  11. 11.

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

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  12. 12.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  13. 13.

    The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  14. 14.

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

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  15. 15.

    A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  16. 16.

    It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  17. 17.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  18. 18.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  19. 19.

    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 science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)

  20. 20.

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

    Frederik Pohl

    American science fiction writer and editor (1919-2013)