“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
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Author detail
Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven. He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family. As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians. His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old. In 1936, he joined the Young Communist League and became President of the Brooklyn branch, but he left it in 1939 after Stalin-Hitler pact. In 1939, at the age of 21, he was editor of both Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, and regularly published his own stories in both of them. He married his first wife in 1940. In 1943 both the magazines he was editing folded, and he worked as a literary agent. During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps from 1945-1945. He divorced his first wife during this period and married his second wife in 1945. In 1948 he married his third wife, Judith Merril, who he divorced in 1953, the same year he married his fourth wife, Carol Metcal Ulf. In the early 1950s his literary agency business failed and he returned to editing as an assistant editor at Galaxy Science Fiction and later also if Magazine. In 1966, 1967, and 1968 his magazines won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Magazines. In the 1970s he acquired and edited novels for the "Frederik Pohl Selections" series of Bantam Books. He also began to emerge as a novel writer, and went on to win Nebula awards for fiction in 1976 and 1977 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978. He married his current wife, science fiction editor and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD, in 1984. He continues to write from his home in Palatine, Illinois.
Quotes
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“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
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“I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched,...”
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“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.”
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“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).”
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“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 w...”
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“That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.”
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“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 t...”
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