A Quote by Frederik Pohl

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

Frederik Pohl

Quote Topics

About Catholic Fiction Pretty Science Science Fiction

Quote Author

Frederik Pohl
American - Writer
November 26, 1919 - September 2, 2013

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

William Gibson

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

Richard Dawkins

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

Jean M. Auel

Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."

Donald E. Westlake

Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations.

Raymond E. Feist

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Marvin Minsky

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.

Joanna Russ

The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

I had decided after 'Hollow Man' to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even 'Basic Instinct' is kind of science fiction.

Paul Verhoeven

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

William Gibson

I think the media in America have been absolutely fantastic about the rise of Trump, they've kept a firm eye on the ball: this constitutes democracy, this constitutes transparency, this constitutes fairness, this constitutes the way to behave in a civic society, this constitutes fascism, this constitutes authoritarianism. They're drawing that line, and they're calling him out every time. That's really what needs to happen, and you just have to do that.

Irvine Welsh

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.

Ray Bradbury

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.

Michio Kaku

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Frederik Pohl

I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's [World Of Tomorrow] sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.