SOURCE: "Frederik Pohl," in Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews, Luna Publications, 1978, pp. 129-43.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in September-October 1970 and first published in Moebius Trip in 1971, Pohl discusses such topics as his writing and editing careers, his collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth, and the effects of technology on literature and society. ]

[Walker]: On your Grand Tour of 2527, in The Age of the Pussyfoot, you suggest (if I understand you correctly) that for the future we may expect even more of today. Capitalism moves ever onward in its ever-changing guises, motivated by man's desire for material goods. Socialist idealism gives way to the "corporate state, " and the wonders of a Gernsbacchanalian technology are bent to the frivolous demands of a middle-class society. Is this to be, sir?

[Pohl]: First off, Paul, we're not going to get along very well if you ask me to defend my stories as predictions of "the" future. That's not what they're meant to be. For one thing, there is no single future. By the time our possible options are reduced to one, it isn't the future any more, it's the present. While it is the future, it is plural.

My stories are not predictions at all, they are cautionary tales (or else, rarely, they are Utopian tales), describing one possible set of future events.

I don't feel any obligation to answer questions of the form: "do you really think this is what's going to happen?"; or to defend myself against charges of inconsistency between stories. Of course, each story has an internal logic, and I must defend that if pressed.

Do you think our current trend toward socialism will be eclipsed?

I don't think so on the grounds that there isn't any such trend visible, so how can it be eclipsed? I see no evidence for increasing degrees of socialism, whether Marxist or otherwise, anywhere in the world. I do see, of course, an increasing trend toward statism and toward the concentration of power in semi-public institutions, but I don't think this is socialism.

Some partisans on either side of the state-power issue refer to this trend as socialism, and if that's what you mean, then I must give a different answer. But it still won't be a good one, because I don't think this trend will either continue or be reversed. I simply think it will be outmoded. This is, after all, what happens to all large-scale competitions; they are hardly ever resolved, they are simply replaced by different dichotomies.

(Some people think that these competitions get resolved because they often develop into wars, and wars usually have one side labelled "winner" and the other side labelled "loser." But this is nonsense, of course. The South "lost" the Civil War, but obviously the Confederacy now owns the rest of the country in fee simple. The Germans and Japanese "lost" WWII, but what are now the two fastest-growing economies on the earth?)

What about technology? Can it—has it—altered the basic life styles, the basic elements of human nature: the physical and emotional content of love and hate, aggression and passivity? Do you see any basic changes in human nature that you would ascribe to technology?

Certainly technology can basically alter our life styles. It is doing so at a headlong pace right now: the computer, the automobile, antibiotics, TV have made 1970 more different from 1870 than 1870 was from the Middle Ages. The problem with using those things as illustrations is that we haven't the perspective to see clearly what is happening to us, so let me go to the past for an example.

If there is one "moral dogma" that is universally agreed to it is the stricture against "cruel and unusual punishment"—i.e., torture. Everybody says that is evil. It is still practiced, to be sure, quite universally, including all parts of the United States; but no public figure anywhere defends it on principle.

When we read in the history books of gladiatorial games and examinations "under duress"—that is, with rack and thumbscrews—we think how much life styles have changed. But the change is technology. Until about the middle of the last century, pain was a part of every human being's life. He expected it as a matter of course, and he got it. About the only difference between being flayed alive and a normal everyday toothache was that you could survive the second, but not the first; the degree of agony was quite close. Then along came anesthesia and analgesia, etc., and pain became remediable.

So what does one say about this particular change? That it is an improvement in morality; that we are kinder now, because we don't hurt people? That it is a matter of technology? Actually, I think the explanation is that morality follows technology; what is "good" and "right" is always limited to what is possible.

People change all the time. They are changed the most when they think themselves unchanged at all. (See "Day Million" on this point.) What I do think is that this change does not always involve the same parameters and that it is not always in the same direction.

I don't want to talk about my work because that sort of naked vanity is embarrassing to me, so let me give you some illustrations from the real world. Compare Communist and Capitalist. Is there a difference between a Communist apparatnik and an American management man?

They think so. If you ask them what they believe in, they would even make you think so; for one would relate his life to the solidarity of the working class and the quest for world peace, while the other would refer to God and the therapeutic effects of free markets.

In practice, however, you can't tell them apart. The Communist who occupies a middle-management position in the Soviet structure (a member of the municipal party secretariat, for instance) is identical with the GM or the National City Bank $40,000-a-year man in his terror of saying the non-conforming thing or losing sight of the organization goal. To each the central fact of the world is that he is better off than 99% of the people around him, and he owes it to the apparatus; and he is scared witless of jeopardizing the apparatus itself or his position within it.

So from this, class, we see that where human nature appears to be most changed it may well be exactly the same. Now let us prove that where it seems to be exactly the same it may well be wholly changed. Let us consider love.

If we see romantic drama, perhaps Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Anthony and Cleopatra, we nod and say, ah, yes, to be sure, I saw that in an old MGM movie on TV last night; love was exactly the same to Hermia and Cleopatra as it was a few thousand years later to Bette Davis and Toby Wing. Well, it wasn't. Classic Greece and Rome had no tradition of sentimental love at all. Their man-woman couples did not practice tender courtship or suffer agonies at separation. When, very rarely, some couple showed what we would now consider a normal man-woman infatuation, their contemporaries thought they had gone crazy. It wasn't until Eleanor of Aquitaine that mooning over a desired lover came to seem standard behavior even in the western world; and of course, it is only since MGM that it has come to seem so in most of the rest of the planet.

Well, Paul, I didn't mean to belabor the point, but what the point is is that I don't think there is a specific direction or kind of change in human behavior for the future any more than I think there is a specific single future. Under certain conditions there will be change of a certain kind, and when I write about those conditions I talk about that kind of change. Under other conditions, I don't think there will be any change at all; perhaps only a relabelling as between Socialist and Organization Man, and when I write about those conditions that is what I show. And then, of course, sometimes I goof.

In my last letter, I said I thought you were less interested in the future of man than in man as he is today; is that true or not? What does a white, middle-aged, middle-class man of these 1970's, with a respect for good English and academic pursuite, have to say to, and about, these whippersnappers of the "Age of Aquarius"?

The reason I didn't say I was less interested in the future of man than in man today is that it isn't true. Nor do I think those whippersnappers are as disrespectful of my long gray beard and glittering eye as you appear to be.

The long answer is that I don't think there is an Age of Aquarius, except for a tiny few people in a very limited part of the earth. In some moods, I think it is too bad. How nice it would be if we could greet strangers in love and joy instead of looking at their hands to see if they're holding a knife. In other moods I think that even violence, repression, and industrial filth are not too high a price to pay for the rapid increase in knowledge and power the human race has experienced in the past few decades.

But when forced to think about everything together, I come back to the short answer. The Age of Aquarius is a function of surplus production, and there is little reason to think that the human race can sustain the creation of even local and temporary surpluses.

That is a most provocative response, sir. Without quibbling over any inconsistency in your remarks, I think it should be asked: What good are knowledge and power to man if they do not eradicate violence, repression, and industrial filth? In fact, are they not inimical to man if they encourage violence, repression, and industrial filth? Some suggest man would be wiser to settle for less knowledge and power.

But then, what do you mean by "knowledge"? What do you mean by "power"?

Certainly technology is a force for good. Equally certainly it produces side effects which are bad. The big job for all of us is to try to retain the good parts while suppressing the evil side effects.

Of course, there are those modern Luddites who want to give up technology completely and go on to a life of tilling the soil, sitar music, and macrobiotic wheat germ bread. God bless. I don't object to any person feeling this way, although I do object to having any person try to impose this feeling on my life; I don't want to give up technology.

What I want to do is separate the automobile from its exhaust and traffic jams, the air conditioner from power blackouts, nuclear power from nuclear fallout; so that we can keep the first and avoid the second, in each case. If my stories show the undesirable effects of technology, and of course they do, it is because they are of concern to me. But I have never believed in throwing the baby out with the bath.

What I mean by "power" is the ability to change the environment, and in general, to do whatever the hell one wants to do. Some environmental changes are of course lousy: the Sahara, the outskirts of any American city, Lake Erie. But most are good. We can live in deserts, at the South Pole, or on the Moon, because we can change the environment or bring a new environment with us. Even our scenic changes are often good: anyone who likes England or the Mediterranean coast of France or the Bay of Naples must agree to this, because they are all artifacts; the "natural" state of them is gone.

What I mean by "knowledge" is all kinds of knowledge—you never know what particular bit of information is going to be useful. But the particular kind of knowledge that I think is urgently required is that kind which helps predict future events. You learn to drive a car. You learn right away that if you step down on the accelerator you go faster. You learn a little bit later, and maybe only after a disastrous experience, that the other thing you accomplish when you step down on the accelerator is to increase your chances of wiping out yourself and sixteen other people in a crash.

That, too, is a matter of side effects, of course.

A couple of years ago I was asked to keynote what is called the "Goddard Memorial Conference" for the American Astronautical Society. The subject of the conference was the relationship between progress and technology. For the purpose I invented a quantum unit of progress, on the principle that you couldn't relate the two concepts unless they had a measuring unit in common. The quantum unit I used was the "option." I defined as "progressive" that kind of technological change which increased the number of options available to human beings and societies; as "anti-progressive" that which reduced them.

Knowledge and power, in any sense, but particularly in the senses above, increase options.

What about the "New Wave"?

Behavioristically, what is true of the New Wave in general is that they are deeply given to discussing their work. I' m not, or at least not in the same way. The Milford sort of thing seems to me fraught with dangers. Its attraction, to the extent that I perceive any attraction in it at all, appears to lie more in the direction of personal group therapy than in improving the individual literary skills of the participants.

I think it damages more writers than it helps, all in all, but principally I am convinced that it damages me when I engage in this sort of thing, whether in the form of physical presence in a group or sitting in my own little room and engaging in literary debates about my own work. So for a long time, Paul, I have schooled myself to disregard criticism, or at least to discount maybe nine-tenths of it. This is true whether the criticism is favorable or hostile, and it isn't so much because I consider myself stronger or above it because I am certain that I am weak. I am by nature deeply susceptible to praise or blame. Flattery turns my head. Scorn makes me angry and upset. In order to be able to function at what seems to me my best attainable level of competence, I try to exclude both from my central nervous system, or anyway admit them only in filtered and tenuous form.

What is wrong with that practice is that it is possible I miss a lot of intelligent, valuable, even helpful comment, thus failing to learn things I should know and thereby damaging myself and my work. I know this is a danger, but I have no good way to avoid it.

However, I am quite sure it is not much of a danger. Let me give you an illustration. One of the most complete and perceptive studies ever made of me and my work was Kingsley Amis's. When he said in New Maps of Hell that I was the best SF writer around, I wrestled with an overpowering urge to vanity for some time. After some traumatic spasms I came to the conclusion that he didn't know what he was talking about. The most he should properly have said was that I happened to be the one writer who was consistently performing well in one particular area of SF, the SF of social comment, and he happened to be interested in only that area. A few years later, Kingsley changed his wife and his politics and came to the conclusion that I was no damn good at all.

Well, he was wrong both times, you see. And, in general, SF critics are as likely to be wrong as they are to be right.

I have spent most of my life in SF, one way or another, so you are entitled to ask what I think I'm doing in it. I am trying as best I can to learn everything I can about everything there is; to assemble the information thus acquired into patterns of relevance; and to display these patterns as entertainingly as I can, to anyone who cares to read them in the form of science-fiction stories.

How well have I succeeded? About this I am both humble and vain. My humility lies in the awareness that, at the age of fifty, I still have managed to learn only very imperfectly the merest surface glimmering of the enormous variety of human knowledge. I have only partially and inadequately been able to form what I have learned into larger schemes; and I have failed almost wholly to convey them in stories. My vanity, on the other hand, lies in the perception that, inadequate as I am, I can't think of very many others who have done even as well, much less better.

Apropos of nothing, I remember the poverty so vividly described in Gladiator-at-Law, and now here in The Age of the Pussyfoot; your protagonists' terror of it and their eventual realization that life goes on, regardless. I'm curious to know if this is based on personal experience.

Have I had a personal experience of poverty? Sure. As a kid I swung with the pendulum of my father's fortunes, and he was a plunger. One week we lived in a suite in a luxury hotel, the next we were looking for a rooming house to take us in on credit. I don't think it scared me, exactly, but it did affect my attitudes, although by the time I was twelve or thirteen the swings had pretty much leveled out.

I no longer worry much about poverty, partly because I've made a reasonable amount of money and partly because money isn't what I want anyway. (The one great good thing about my life is that I don't have to do anything just for money, because it has turned out that people will give me money for doing things I would gladly have done for nothing anyway.) If I became poor I would be seriously annoyed, at least temporarily, because it would mean that I couldn't take the kids to Europe or fly the whole family to Bermuda to get out of the cold weather or keep three cars and six TV sets any more; but in the long run what it would probably mean would be that we'd sell out and move to some cheaper, but quite likely pleasanter and more interesting, place.

It is not uncommon for a writer to say he writes to clarify his thoughts to himself as well as to stimulate and entertain. On the other hand, we have D.H. Lawrence's perspective that his thoughts arose from the material at hand. Do you think of yourself as a social observer utilizing the medium to express your opinions or would you write if you had no opinions whatever?

And, speaking of media, what is your apparent fondness for the short story?

I can't imagine what I would be like if I had no opinions. (I can't believe that a person with no opinions is even human.) Someone once said that the proper title for any literary work is "How to Be More Like Me." I agree that this is so; I write for the same reason that any other writer writes: because I feel that I have something to say that should be said.

The material shapes my thoughts as much as my thoughts shape the material. I can distinguish between the two in other people's work sometimes, I think. I am sure I can't very well in my own.

In the same way, the decision to write a novel, a novelette, or a short story is in part because of the material and in part my own. I can't give a general rule, because each case is different. Let me go back a little bit behind your question and talk about how writers write.

A professional writer seldom sits down to write because he is inspired to say one particular thing at that particular time. His head is always abuzz with bits and pieces of things he sort of wants to think out and put down, and what makes him write one thing rather than another is ordinarily an external force such as an editor or publisher: he is asked to contribute a short story to a magazine or a book, or he has to fulfill a book contract, or he sees a market and tries to find something to sell to it.

The advantages of this are two: first, financial; he stands to make more money by producing something someone is known to want to buy than by producing something that he thinks is worthwhile but that has to sell itself to a customer. Second, it causes him to write in the first place.

The disadvantages, however, are severe. I have a stack of about twenty SF novels that I've read waiting to be reviewed, and frankly I haven't the heart to review them because they are so uniformly lousy. If they have one thing in common it is that none of them, not even one of them, is quite worth the space it takes up. Most of them are worth very little because of incompetence on the part of the writers; it appears that anything that is called SF and comes out to at least 50,000 words will get published by somebody, sooner or later. But even the ones which have some good qualities are fat, bloated, stretched out, milked. The reason for this is the pressure of the market; there is little market for short stories and novelettes, an insatiable market for novels.

So if you are a writer of moderate talent and standing, what do you do with your short story ideas? Why, you do what everybody else does: you pad them out to 60,000 words, whether they can stand it or not.

For various reasons I've been under less pressure than many writers in this way, so I've been able to resist the temptation at least part of the time. I'm not really particularly fond of the short story qua short story, but I've been able to avoid the necessity of turning all my short story ideas into jumped-up novels.

Tell me about your collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth.

Cyril and I started working together in the Futurian days, along about 1940, when I was first editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and all of us were first trying to write for money. Collaboration was the way of life. I suppose we all wanted support. The way we first worked together, Cyril and I, was that I would write a synopsis of the story, Cyril would rough out a draft, and I would revise it for publication. We wrote a dozen or so stories that way, most of them not very good.

About 1950, Cyril moved into my house in New Jersey, having quit his job with a news-wire service, and we began collaborating again. I had written about a third of The Space Merchants, and offered it to Cyril as a collaboration venture. He wrote the next third from my verbal description of where it was going, and the final third we wrote a few pages at a time, by turns. After that, we wrote almost entirely by turns. We would discuss a story idea for a few hours, just talking over situation and characters and general considerations, not putting anything on paper. Then one of us would go up to the third floor where the typewriters were and write the first five pages, stopping at the bottom of the fifth page. The other would write the next five, und so weiter; and ultimately we would have a book. I then did the final pulling-together and polishing myself (on all except Wolflane, which Cyril polished and expanded to book length just before he died).

He was one of the most rewarding people I have ever known. He was an angry man, and his own impression of himself was that he was a cruel one; certainly he missed few opportunities of shafting a friend conversationally. But he was also enormously well informed and enormously creative. We quarreled often and vigorously, but having cleared the air we were friends again. I suppose I was too close to Cyril to evaluate him in any objective way, but if I could spend an hour with anyone I've ever known I think I would want that person to be Cyril.

Aside from short stories, you write novels, essays; you edit magazines and attend fan functions; you lecture and do stints as a panelist on radio shows: do you feel at home in any one of these activities more than the others? Or do you feel that familiar restlessness when doing one thing to be doing another?

Well, first and foremost, I consider myself a writer. Anything else I do has to accommodate itself to that fact. When occasion permits, I enjoy lecturing. I'm ham enough to get a charge out of making 1800 people laugh or think about something they've never troubled to consider before. I find a hell of a lot of useful feedback from lecturing, too; the questions from the floor, the casual comments afterwards, the opportunity to interact with non-literary types—all this is good stuff for me, and probably would be for any writer. But if lecturing interferes with writing, I lay off lecturing. In fact, I have done so for most of this year. Apart from teaching a couple of college courses and one or two previous engagements that I couldn't get out of, I've accepted only about half a dozen lecture invitations in calendar 1970, and each of them for a particular reason. It had simply reached the point where I couldn't do some of the writing I wanted. (Currently there are three books and two magazine projects, including a series of interviews for Playboy.)

Editing is another matter. If I had to choose between editing and writing, either one to the exclusion of the other, I would have to think a little harder. I probably would still choose writing as a general principle, but with more regret. However, I don't have that freedom of choice in any realistic sense. I gave up editing not because it was interfering with writing but because editing itself became unattractive under the conditions currently open to me.

An editor is a middleman between various pairs of imperatives. Between the publisher and the writer; between the writer and the reader; between art and the marketplace; I could go on multiplying yins and yangs indefinitely. The interests of the opposite pairs are often incompatible, so the editor has to work out the least damaging compromise.

This is pretty abrasive on him. John Campbell once lumbered over to me at a dinner party, grabbed me by the lapel and said, "Fred, do you realize that every editor who doesn't work at science with his own hands goes crazy in three years?" Well, I had several answers to make to that, of course. But editors, particularly SF editors, do operate under a witch of a strain. Half a dozen of them have cracked up one way or another, and a lot of others would have if only they had had the perception and the diligence to accept their responsibilities.

Most things worth doing include strain; but it seems to me of late the job of SF editor, at least of magazines, has become increasingly stressful and less rewarding. I may be wrong. It may be just that I'm getting older. But thirty years ago the only difficult part of the job as editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories was getting writers to give me stories I liked. Two years ago that was only one difficult task out of many. I also had, as editor of Galaxy and If, to try and get distributors to put the magazines out where people could find them, printers to set type with only a few errors and print pages without getting very many of them upside down, advertisers to kick in a few bucks for space, and so on. All of these tasks were just as difficult as dealing with writers, and an awful lot less fun.

The way around those particular tasks is to work for a large publishing house that maintains a staff of specialists to do all that miserable stuff; John has that going for him at Conde Nast, for instance. That option was not open to me, at least not without a lot of other disagreeable involvements, because I also happen to feel that there's no point being an editor unless you can make all the editorial decisions yourself. Few large publishing companies allow their editors this freedom.

At some future date I may find the right combination to edit SF, either in book or magazine form, again. When I'm not doing it, I miss it; I love the creative parts of it, the finding a format in which to publish a story for maximum effect (cf. The Dragon Masters), the bringing along a writer who makes it (cf. Larry Niven, R.A. Lafferty), the providing a showplace for kinds of stories that haven't been available before (cf. International Science Fiction), and so on.

But most of it, I don't miss at all.

While editor of If-Galaxy you are reputed to have said that your readership consisted of fourteen-year-olds and their parents, and that you would print nothing that would offend the parents. Is this true or false?

Frankly, Paul, it's a damn silly question. I mean, you've seen copies of If and Galaxy. If it were true that I tried to keep out of them any matter which might be offensive to fourteen-year-olds and their parents, it is quite clear that I didn't succeed very well. I don't know of any "sensitive" subject that was not dealt with in numerous stories in Galaxy and If during my tenure. Sex, race, religion, politics—if there is something I prevented people from writing about, could you possibly tell me what it is?

I did, of course, from time to time, cut out certain specific words which seemed to be offensive. There was no hard and fast rule about this; a word that might be undesirable in one context would be obviously necessary, and therefore left in, in another. And we are talking about a time several years past now. I'm not sure I would feel as strongly today. But I'm not sure I wouldn't, either. I would have to judge each story on its own merits.

The principal reason for making editorial changes is to please readers—or to avoid displeasing readers, which comes to much the same thing. On the record, I was pretty good at that. When I took the magazines over they were bi-monthlies running in the red. When I left them, they were both monthlies running in the black. I won the editing Hugo for three years straight. Every year there were more stories from my magazines winning Hugos and Nebulas than from any other. So as far as these things can be measured, I think I did about as much as I could at pleasing readers.

As far as avoiding displeasing readers is concerned, there aren't as good measures to be made. The only way you can tell when you've really displeased readers is when they take the trouble to write you about it, perhaps cancelling subscriptions. That didn't happen often. The only story that produced any sizeable number of complaints was Brian Aldiss's "The Dark Light Years," dealing with aliens who regarded moving their bowels as a sacramental act, and the complaints were not particularly violent.

The most violent complaints we ever got were not for a story: they were about Lester del Rey's highly unfavorable review of 2001. One of the reasons why I am not over-fond of New Wavers is the organized lynch mob that sprang up among their hangers-on at that point; we were threatened with all sorts of retribution, in violent and stupid terms. But that's a separate problem. I often disagreed with what Lester, A.J. (Budrys), and other columnists had to say; but I never censored their saying it. One columnist kept making gross factual errors until I dropped him; I seldom even changed them. I never once rejected a story because it was "too daring." Not once. Not ever.

I do feel the current emphasis on sex, for instance, in SF is a retrograde movement; damn few writers have anything original to say on the subject, and most stories in that area are pretty poor stuff. But when a writer did have anything interesting to say about sex, I think he was more likely to be able to say it in Galaxy and If than in any other professional SF magazine. When they were good, I printed them, even if they were dirty. When they were bad, I bounced them, even if they were clean. Or anyway I came as close as I could.