Frederik Pohl Quotes

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.

Science fiction is an extension of science.

I'm a science-fiction fan. All science fiction ends up being reality.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

The possibilities in sci-fi are wonderful. The subject is bigger than everything we know.

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.

Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.

While I can't tell you what people are going to do for work 100 years from now, the future doesn't hinge on my imagination.

When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.