Time & Perspective Quote by Frederik Pohl

Pohl is doing something slyly self-justifying here: he’s laundering science fiction’s “mere entertainment” status through the prestige of the lab coat, then doubling back to claim SF as a legitimate engine of intellectual life. The phrasing is careful. “A large fraction” sounds empirical without pretending to be a study; it’s the voice of a writer who knows that cultural arguments often need a whiff of data to be taken seriously. And “most interesting scientists” is the real tell: he’s not praising science in bulk, he’s curating a type. Interesting equals imaginative, risk-tolerant, conceptually playful - the ones who don’t just solve problems but choose new ones.

The subtext is a defense of speculative thinking as a training ground, not an escape hatch. Pohl suggests two pathways: SF as origin story (“played a part in their becoming scientists”) and SF as parallel pleasure (“later date just because they liked the ideas”). That second clause matters because it denies the condescending narrative that people outgrow SF. Even after credentialing, the best minds keep returning to idea-driven fiction the way athletes return to drills: not because it’s childish, but because it sharpens certain muscles.

Contextually, Pohl sits in a 20th-century continuum where SF writers were both cheerleaders and skeptics of modernity, publishing futures that science might deliver and politics might botch. His claim isn’t that SF predicts inventions; it’s that it normalizes the habit of living in hypotheticals. The quote works because it reframes fandom as a quiet credential: if you want to find the scientists worth listening to, check their bookshelf.