Science & Tech Quote by Frederik Pohl

Pohl slips a joke inside what looks like a dry taxonomy lesson, and the joke is the argument. “Science fiction is written according to the science fiction method” is a deliberately circular definition, the kind of wink that tells you the genre can’t be pinned down by costumes (ray guns, rockets) or shelving categories. It’s a methodology: a way of thinking that happens to take the form of stories.

The intent is partly defensive. Pohl came up in an era when science fiction was dismissed as pulp escapism, tolerated at best as juvenile fantasy with rivets. By framing SF as a “method,” he smuggles in a claim to seriousness: the genre runs on an internal discipline. You start with a premise that could be true (or might become true), push it through its consequences, and let the world change in ways that feel legible rather than magical. The pleasure isn’t just wonder; it’s the audit trail.

The subtext is also a gentle jab at gatekeeping. Instead of arguing about definitions the way literary culture loves to, Pohl points to practice: how writers build, test, extrapolate, and stress a society until it reveals its assumptions. The “English buddy” detail adds a note of clubby lineage, reminding us that SF is an international conversation with its own canon and jargon, a field that developed parallel to mainstream literature because it needed different tools.

In one compact loop, Pohl sketches SF as less a genre than a protocol: imaginative rigor with a lab coat hidden under the cape.