Science & Tech Quote by Jerry Pournelle

Pournelle’s line lands like a deadpan status update from the inside of a subculture that’s always been half-proud, half-paranoid about being ignored. The joke is simple: he climbed to the top of the Science Fiction Writers of America and discovered that the top, culturally speaking, was still underground. Calling it a “racket” does double work. It’s affectionate insider slang for a trade, but it also hints at the hustle and politics of professional writing: the committees, the elections, the small-city power games that thrive in any niche.

The “sixth president” detail is a sly flex and a deflation at once. Early leadership implies proximity to the founding myth of modern American sci-fi’s professionalization, yet “the first one nobody ever heard of” punctures the romance. He’s pointing at the gap between internal prestige and external recognition: you can be influential in the machinery of a genre and still invisible to the wider public. That’s a particularly ’70s truth, when science fiction was becoming more institutionally organized (awards, associations, conventions) while still fighting for mainstream legitimacy.

Subtext: this isn’t just self-deprecation; it’s a critique of how cultural memory works. Communities remember icons, not administrators, even when administrators build the scaffolding that lets icons shine. Pournelle frames obscurity as both absurd and inevitable, a wink from someone who knows the game well enough to laugh at his own résumé.