Science & Tech Quote by Frederik Pohl

Pohl is taking a scalpel to a certain kind of sci-fi cred: the cosplay of expertise. The target isn’t research itself, but the substitute-research that lets a writer sound competent without ever developing a felt relationship to the material. “Run a computer program” is the tell. It’s not just a dated jab at early worldbuilding software; it’s a warning about outsourcing imagination to a tool that can generate parameters but not meaning. A planet assembled from inputs may be plausible, but plausibility isn’t the same as lived texture, moral pressure, or human consequence.

The bluntness (“really suck”) matters, too. Pohl isn’t performing genteel literary critique; he’s policing craft from inside the genre, where “hard” details can become a fetish and where technical accuracy gets mistaken for depth. His subtext: readers can smell when the author is hiding behind specs. Rocketry facts and geologic tables don’t automatically produce story; they can become an elaborate screen for not knowing what you want to say about people.

Contextually, this lands as a mid-to-late 20th-century anxiety that looks even sharper now: as tools make it easier to generate convincing surfaces, the temptation grows to confuse production with understanding. Pohl is defending the older, messier virtue of science fiction at its best: not the spreadsheet universe, but the invented world that feels argued for - shaped by curiosity, judgment, and the writer’s hard-won sense of what matters.