Frederik Pohl
See first quotes from Frederik Pohl
58 Quotations from Frederik Pohl
| aircar n. | 1952 Gravy Planet in Galaxy Science Fiction June 8/1 ‘They listened to the safety cranks and stopped us from projecting our messages on aircar windows, but Lab tells me—’ he nodded to our director of research across the table—‘that soon we’ll be testing a system that projects direct [sic] on the retina of the eye.’ |
| alien n. | 1965 in Worlds of If Dec. 4/2 Every science-fiction magazine contains stories about visiting other stars and the confrontations between Earthmen and aliens. |
| alternative future n. | 1988 Waiting for the Olympians in Asimov’s Science Fiction Aug. 157 I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean. |
| areologist n. | 1976 Man Plus in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Apr. 53/2 Don Kayman was a complex man who never let go of a problem. It was why we wanted him on the project as areologist, but it extended to the religious part of his life too. |
| areology n. | 1976 Man Plus in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Apr. 27/1 Don Kayman was…the world’s most authoritative Areologist—which is to say, specialist in the planet Mars…. He was also a Jesuit priest. He did not think of himself as being one thing first and the other with what part of him was left over; his work was Areology, his person was priesthood. |
| automatics n. | 1954 Search the Sky iii. 33 It is conceivable, of course, that a planet might be asleep at the switch. We could believe it, I suppose, if it seemed that the first-choice planet somehow didn’t pick the ship up when this longliner came into radar range. In that event, of course, it would orbit once or twice on automatics, and then select for its first alternate target—which it did. |
| battleship n. | 1951 Danger Moon in Science Fiction Quarterly Aug. 46/1 He really wanted to blast us. And he had the stuff to do it with, too, with that baby battleship he was flying. It wasn’t his fault that we ducked and only got a little dose of the tail end of his rocket blast. |
| Callistan adj. | 1941 Callistan Tomb in Science Fiction Quarterly Spring 111/1 The prop was shoved against the ceiling, and they swung their bodies against it to batten it into place. Then they waited to see. Slowly the beam arced under a pressure greater than the soft Callistan timber was cut to resist; as the men stood aside it snapped with the noise of a gunshot. |
| corpsicle n. | 1969 Age of Pussyfoot 210 It is true, however, that no corpsicle has yet been thawed and returned to life, and there’s no firm estimate of when one will be. |
| corpsicle n. | 1990 World at End of Time (1993) 53 It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in New Mayflower to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome’s surface. |
| doppel n. | 1987 Annals of Heechee i. 5 Cassata was not only a soldier, he was still meat. That was an interesting fact in itself, because meat people don’t make doppels of themselves lightly. |
| earthgirl n. | 1947 Donovan Had a Dream in Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct. 27/1 ‘Earthgirl?’ the guard repeated. ‘She didn’t look like an Earthie.’ |
| Earth-normal n. | 1972 Merchants of Venus in Worlds of If Aug. 92/1 The interior of a Heechee tunnel that has remained inviolate is at a pressure only slightly above Earth-normal. |
| Earth-normal adj. | 1963 Reefs of Space in Worlds of If Nov. 84/1 They were at the center, and as the air reached earth-normal density the invisible small creatures that gave it light and life were thickly packed about them. |
| Earthside adj. | 1988 Land’s End (1989) 196 We are the only remaining earthside contingent of General Marcus McKen’s space forces. |
| Earthward adj. | 1983 Lord of the Skies in Amazing Stories July 137 Michael swore unbelievingly…. They never went on the Earthward side of the power satellites! Their propulsive systems were to weak to risk in a closer orbit. |
| esp v. | 1956 Slave Ship in Galaxy Science Fiction Mar. vi. 129/2 ‘If you’re sorry now, what will you be when a court-martial gets hold of you?’ ‘But I—I didn’t say anything, sir. I just sort of, well, wanted to know how my wife was. You don’t talk when you esp. You just—’ ‘Knock it off,’ ordered Kedrick explosively. ‘You can tell all that to Commander Lineback. I can assure you, though, that he takes a dim view of you right at the moment.’ |
| first contact n. | 1974 in E. L. Ferman & B. N. Malzberg Final Stage (1975) 28 H. G. Wells told us that the essence of first contact might be invasion and exploitation (in The War of the Worlds ) on the highly defensible assumption that since that had been the way it had usually been in earthly affairs, interplanetary affairs would likely be the same. |
| force field n. | 1990 World at End of Time (1993) 334 To land, their little ship had to slide through an opening that appeared magically in the atmosphere-holding, radiation-shielding forcefield that kept the people who lived on Moon Mary safe. |
| ftl adj. | 1964 Father of the Stars in Worlds of If Nov. 115/2 Until some frabjous super-Batman invented the mythical FTL drive it would always be so. At possible speeds…it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile planet. |
| gravitied adj. 1 | 1951 Danger Moon in Science Fiction Quarterly 61/2 A good three-day hike on Earth, it was only about an hour’s time away on foot, on the light-gravitied surface of the Moon. |
| graviton n. | 1990 World at End of Time (1993) 48 For lesser tasks he had the whole spectrum of photons at his disposal, too—radio, heat, visible light, gamma rays, X-rays, even gravitons. |
| hard science fiction n. | 1991 (back cover quote) in L. Niven Ringworld (back cover) ‘Ringworld’ is the best of the newest wave, the return to classical hard-science fiction of the kind popular in the Golden Age. Niven’s imagination is 3-D and detailed, and his style is lucid and appealing. |
| hypospray n. | 1963 Five Hells of Orion in Worlds of If Jan. 29/1 An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon’s hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the captain’s cabin. |
| light sail n. | 1990 World at End of Time (1993) 11 The unanticipated flare would be pouring our wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower’s long, slow deceleration, the fare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly. |
| Loonie n. | 1951 Danger Moon in Science Fiction Quarterly Aug. 47/2 It’s an old Loonie city. |
| Luna n. | 1937 in Amazing Stories Oct. 136 (heading) Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna. |
| Luna City n. | 1952 in Galaxy Science Fiction July 156/1 They pooh-poohed that possibility and set me to wait on a bench while queries were sent to the Schocken branch in Luna City. |
| marsquake n. | 1941 Mars-Tube in Astonishing Stories Sept. 17/1 Bombs and guns and force beams and Earth—Marsquakes, too. |
| off-planet n. | [1960 in Galaxy Feb. 79/1 They all had lost their jobs, most of them at the Icicle Works; they saw no future, and wanted off-planet. ] |
| orbital tower n. | 1992 Mining Oort (1993) 6 It was Artsutanov who proposed that if one were to position a satellite in geostationary orbit right over a planet’s equator, and hang a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long from it, the whole lash-up would amount to an ‘orbital tower’. |
| rocketport n. | 1943 Earth, Farewell! in Early Pohl (1976) 88 In the tube to the rocketport I was accosted by a man, shabby and furtive, who seemed to know by my appearance and possibly by secret, underground ways, that I had been chosen. |
| sailship n. | 1984 Heechee Rendezvous xii. 125 ‘Yes. A sailship,’ Albert agreed. ‘A photonic spacecraft. Its only propulsion is from light pressure against the array of sails.’ |
| science fantasy n. 1 | 1974 in R. Bretnor Science Fiction, Today & Tomorrow 22 Science fiction.…published in book form…was almost never labeled science fiction. That term was reserved to the pulp magazines and, in fact, most of them even called it by other names—‘science fantasy’, or ‘stories of superscience’. |
| science fictiony adj. | 1959 Book Reviews in Worlds of If Sept. 100/2 They are packed with gadgets, invented on the fly for purely cosmetic purposes; opium isn’t ‘science-fictiony’ enough so the writer snaps his fingers twice and comes up with a word: ‘hypnojewels’. |
| shipmind n. | 2004 Boy Who Would Live Forever vii. 101 I wouldn’t have even noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is programmed to notice things that I don’t, if she thinks they might interest me. |
| Sirian n. 2 | 1965 Age of Pussyfoot in Galaxy Dec. x. 170/2 ‘Just call him “the Sirian”, will you? Anyway, he has a funny way of talking.’ ‘Perhaps that lies in my computation, Man Forrester. The Sirian language is tenseless and quasi-Boolean. I have taken the liberty of translating it into approximately 20th-century English modes of speech, but if you wish I can give you a more liberal rendering, or—’ ‘No, it’s not that. He seems to have something on his mind.’ |
| skyhook n. 4 | 2008 Last Theorem vii. 50 That tough first step of getting from Earth’s surface to LEO? With an Artsutanov skyhook it was no problem at all! |
| slidewalk n. | 1952 Gravy Planet in Galaxy Science Fiction July 139/2 I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked ‘Mail Room’, to the corridor juncture where my slidewalk dipped down around its roller. |
| solar sailing n. | 2008 Last Theorem xxxvii. 237 Natasha’s smile persisted as she thought of all the attempts she had made to explain solar sailing to audiences of potential backers and the merely curious on Earth. |
| space biology n. | 1963 Reefs of Space in Worlds of If July 35/1 Colonel Lescure, he discovered, was Director of the Plan of Space Biology, for example. A major named Max Lunggren was an astrophysicist. |
| space dog n. | 1960 Worlds of If in Worlds of If Jan. 83/1 (review) Arthur C. Clarke has a sharp mind and a disciplined typewriter and his stories of space exploration have that rare and satisfying quality, the feel of being the authentic reminiscences of an Old Space Dog. In The Challenge of the Space Ship (Harper), he is permitted to cast off the fiction format and present some two hundred pages of pure fact and speculation. |
| space elevator n. | 1992 Mining Oort (1993) 6 The man who devised the first ‘space elevator’ was an engineer from Leningrad named Yuri Artsutanov, and he had done it way back in 1960. |
| star lane n. | 1943 Conspiracy on Callisto in Planet Stories Winter 46/2 They were fighting ships, small, speedy ones, in Callisto for refueling before returnng to the League’s ceaseless patrol of the System’s starlanes. |
| Tau Cetan adj. | 1959 I Plinglot—Who You? in Galaxy Magazine Feb. vi. 91 They paled, they trembled, but they stayed. Well, I would have paled and trembled myself if it had been a Tau Cetan trait. Instead, I merely went limp. Terror was not only on one side in that room, I confess it. |
| telempathic adj. | 2005 Boy Who Would Live Forever 205 This thing is a version of what you called a dream machine, technically known as a ‘telempathic psychokinetic transceiver’… If the two of you were to get into the two sides of it and it were properly activated, each of you would at once feel everything the other was feeling. |
| telempathic adj. | 1984 Beyond the Gate in Amazing Stories 74 No one knew anything about a ‘telempathic psychokinetic receiver’ at that time. What it looked like, and was, was periodic, world-wide epidemics of insanity. |
| telescanner n. | 1965 Starchild in Worlds of If Jan. i. 7/1 A silvered dome pushed out of the pit, out of the ragged shadow, into the white blaze of the near sun. The barrels of a dozen optical and radio telescopes, pyrometers, telescanners and cameras thrust out at the great orb, under the blazoned slogan that the dome displayed to the universe in letters of cast bronze: THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS THE MOST FAITHFUL. And inside the insulated, refrigerated observatory, three astronomers watched a thousand boards and gauges and dials. They were waiting. For they had been warned. |
| telescreen n. | 2008 Last Theorem xxxii. 209 Like everybody else in the world who owned a telescreen—which, to a close approximation, was pretty much everybody in the world—they had seen the rapturous news stories that had accompanied the Skyhook’s evolution to passenger-carrying. |
| terraform v. | 1992 Mining the Oort (1993) 69 I studied engineering at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and I thought terraforming Mars from the Oort was the biggest, most wonderful idea anybody ever had. |
| thruster n. | 1966 Relativistic Dilemma in Worlds of If June 4/2 The more massive our Gemini capsule becomes the more difficult to accelerate; and you can’t really push it up to the infinite-mass stage without infinite force in the thrusters to do the job. |
| tri-D n. | 1954 in Galaxy Science Fiction Apr. 49/1 It was an enormous glaringly new mansion, bigger even than Morey’s former house, stuffed to bursting with bulging sofas and pianos and massive mahogany chairs and tri-D sets and bedrooms and drawing rooms and breakfast rooms and nurseries. |
| tri-v n. | 1964 in Galaxy Magazine Oct. 161/1 From the integration room the readout operator could construct a speech, a 3-V commercial, a space ad or anything else…and test its appeal on his subjects. |
| tri-v n. | 1964 in Galaxy Magazine Oct. 178/2 ‘You know, honey,’ I said as she clicked off the 3-V, ‘there isn’t any sense in this.’ |
| Venusian n. 1 | 1958 Gentlest Unpeople in Galaxy Science Fiction June i. 68/1 Popagator merely smiled—well, no. He didn’t smile. He couldn’t; he had no lips to smile with, being only a Venusian and a scrawny, shrunken one at that. But he indicated polite amusement. |
| viewphone n. | 1964 Children of Night in Galaxy Magazine Oct. 187/2 And I turned off the viewphone, got up and walked out, leaving the others gobbling into emptiness behind me. |
| viewplate n. | 1956 Head Hunters in Fantastic Universe Jan. 48/1 He could see Drake’s looming ugly helmet over the control board, through the forward view plate. |
| xenoanthropologist n. | 1987 Adeste Fidelis in Omni Dec. 68 He was neither a xenoanthropologist nor a xenobiologist, nor did he have any of the special skills that made the lives of the survivors fairly tolerable. |