Science & Tech Quote by Frederik Pohl

Pohl delivers the line the way an old pro tosses a dart: friendly, almost offhand, and sharp enough to stick. The setup flatters Hawking with a disarming detail - the future icon of cosmology as a kid burning time on science fiction - then punctures the reverence with a parenthetical jab about mediocre grades. It reads like gossip, but it functions like critique: genius is not a straight line, and academia is a poor early-warning system for the kind of mind that later rearranges the furniture of the universe.

The intent isn’t to diminish Hawking so much as to dethrone the sanctimony around “brilliance.” Pohl, a science fiction writer who spent his life watching the genre treated as both imaginative engine and cultural junk food, knows exactly what he’s doing. By linking Hawking’s youthful appetite for sci-fi to academic underperformance, he reverses the usual hierarchy: the supposedly unserious reading becomes the plausible source of serious thought, while Cambridge’s measurements look cramped and a little ridiculous.

The subtext is also tribal. Pohl is defending his turf with a wink, smuggling in the argument that science fiction isn’t escapism so much as rehearsal space for big conceptual leaps. The joke lands because it’s two-directional: it needles Hawking’s early record, and it needles the institutions that fetishize grades as destiny. Coming from Pohl, it’s not bitterness; it’s the veteran’s reminder that imagination often arrives before credentials catch up.