Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry Pournelle

Recessions, Pournelle suggests, are the cruel but effective editor the science fiction field never quite hires. When money tightens, the market stops subsidizing prestige projects that exist to signal taste rather than deliver pleasure or genuine artistic risk. His jab at work “bought for literary reasons” isn’t anti-literary so much as anti-alibi: books acquired because they look respectable on a list, satisfy a committee, or flatter an editor’s self-image. The punchline is the double failure he diagnoses: these titles are “neither entertaining nor great literature,” missing both of the only two defenses SF can plausibly claim in the culture wars - fun or brilliance.

The line works because it’s built like a gatekeeper’s shrug. “Bad SF” is blunt, almost hygienic, as if the genre periodically needs a market detox. “Shakes…out” turns economic hardship into a sorting mechanism, implying that scarcity restores honest selection: readers become less tolerant of status games; publishers become less willing to bankroll middlebrow earnestness dressed up as importance.

Context matters. Pournelle came up during the era when SF was fighting for legitimacy and simultaneously policing its own borders: hard SF vs. “literary” experimentation, readership pleasure vs. critical approval. His cynicism cuts both ways. He’s defending a populist contract - entertain me, or astonish me - while warning that “literary” can become a marketing costume. The subtext is an industry critique: when times are good, plenty of people get paid to confuse virtue-signaling with vision; when times are bad, the mask slips.