Frederik Pohl Quotes

Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.

Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

The thing that's interesting about science fiction is that it is always, when it is done well, a lens on our world. And yet it is a metaphor.

Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.

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

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.

I think the best SF writers are very aware of what we, in the scientific community, are doing, thinking, and discovering.

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

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.

With correction, and given the chance, 'Terra Nova' can and will deliver seasons of transcendent images and story-telling. 'Terra Nova' is the Hubble Telescope of television.

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.

I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb.

Science Fiction has always been and will always be a fable teacher of morality.

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.