Frederik Pohl
In 1937, a poem appeared in the pages of Amazing Stories — the first published work of Frederik Pohl, who would go on to spend decades writing, editing, and working across nearly every corner of the science fiction world.
Pohl was born on November 26, 1919, in New York City, and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. His engagement with science fiction extended well beyond putting words on a page. As a young man, he founded The Futurians, a New York science fiction writers' group. Over the course of his career he worked as a writer, novelist, editor, literary agent, and journalist. His novel The Space Merchants and his later novel Gateway are among the notable works he produced across a writing life that ran from 1937 to 2011. That final stretch of productivity closed with All the Lives He Led, a novel published in 2011.
The awards Pohl collected over the decades reflect the range of his contributions. He won Nebula Awards for fiction in both 1976 and 1977, and he received the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Later in his career he was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. Taken together, those honors mark a body of work that earned consistent recognition from peers and readers alike across a career spanning nearly 75 years.
Pohl died on September 2, 2013, in Arlington Heights. The Nebula Awards he received in back-to-back years — 1976 and 1977 — remain a concrete measure of how his fiction was received at what many consider the height of his novelistic output.
Quotes by Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl's insights on:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws.’ The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-.
Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people’s lives. And you know, most people’s fantasies are pretty sad.
I’m so busy listening to the heart that I don’t even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.
The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison – provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.
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.
I’m doing a book, ‘Chasing Science,’ about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.
And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing.