Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl, Jr.was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than seventy-five years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 November 1919
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
heart light-years break
What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?
long-ago reason profession
You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.
cheating firsts cigarette
My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.
mean looks stories
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.
catholic fiction science-fiction
I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
stories magazines might
In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
fiction dissection method
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
writing thinking people
I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.
new-day development four
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.
people fantasy advertising
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.
taken appearance valuable
For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.
real fiction literature
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.
morning block typewriters
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.
science thinking curves
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.