Life & Wisdom Quote by Frederik Pohl

Power, in Pohl's telling, begins as a kid sneaking a pulp magazine. The line lands like a tossed-off anecdote, but it’s a scalpel aimed at the prestige economy that polices what counts as “serious” culture. By naming Fermilab - a temple of late-20th-century Big Science - and pairing it with Astonishing Stories, a famously gaudy corner of early sci-fi, Pohl collapses a hierarchy: the future was incubated in cheap paper and lurid covers, not just in classrooms and grant committees.

The intent is quietly polemical. Pohl, a writer who lived through sci-fi’s journey from disreputable fandom to intellectual respectability, is arguing that imagination is not a frill bolted onto real knowledge. It’s one of its upstream sources. The subtext is a rebuke to gatekeepers who treat genre as juvenile contamination: if the director of a premier physics lab once fed on pulp, then the boundary between “high” scientific thinking and “low” speculative entertainment is less a fact than a snobbery.

Context matters: midcentury American science and science fiction grew in a feedback loop - rockets, atoms, space programs, and the stories that made them thinkable. Pohl’s dry specificity (“when he was ten”) does extra work, too. It frames visionary institutions as the long tail of childhood enthusiasms, suggesting that innovation is often just early wonder allowed to harden into expertise.