The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Craig Steffen:

And now for something completely different:

Teresa lists this link:
http://www.bookmillionaire.com/
in her particles sidebar as "An inventive but barfworthy new scam."

Looking at it, I suppose it could be purely a scam to get people to put in their e-mail addresses. However, I think it's just as likely to be a way to get people to audition for something that's the writing equivalent of "American Idol". You have an excuse to put people up in front of judges and rip them apart.

If that's the case, I wonder how they'd get judges that would possibly seem even slightly legit. Yeah, I suppose it's the scam thing. I guess we'll find out.

Jonathan,

Your
link lists lots of definitions of Science Fiction. No mention of sci-fi.

The vast majority of the Press and public think that "Hacker" = "Cracker." Hackers get VERY upset if you make that mistake. I've seen that at, for instance, the invitation-only Hacker cons.

Yeah, that's probably one that we've lost. I usually don't user "hacker" to describe myself, just "programmer" or "software engineer". "Coder" works pretty well too.

You said:

The problem is that there is a significant body of professional science fiction authors who vociferous reject your contention that sci-fi is an abbreviation of science fiction.

Who says this? Where are any examples? Can you come up with a science fiction author who has written something that mentions "sci-fi" and "science fiction" in one discussion, using them to mean distictly different things?

Jonathan,

The problem is that there is a significant body of professional science fiction authors who vociferous reject your contention that sci-fi is an abbreviation of science fiction.

Name one. Better yet, point out a place in their writing (on-line or not) where the use the two words as distict things.

I listed two common on-line dictionary-like web pages that list "sci-fi" as an abbreviation for "science fiction". I invite you to provide counter-arguments.

Or, rather, the problem is that the public at large seems to think the two terms are synonymous.

Here you're talking about distinctions between the genres, which I completely agree with you about. I'm arguing about the usages of the words.

Jonathan:

I completely agree with you that there should be a very strong distinction between "good, speculative literature that asks 'what if' to fundamental things in life" and "stuff with space ships, robots, and ray guns". My objection was that calling one "science fiction" and the other "sci-fi" is ridiculous because one is a commonly used abbreviation of the other.

Call one "speculative fiction" and the other "space opera" or "futurist fiction" or something. My objection was the words used, not the concepts.

Sci-fi vs. Science Fiction? Huh? This sounds about the level of people complaining that "Trekkie" doesn't sound cool enough so want to be called "Trekker". Whatever.

*** From Wikipedia:
Sci-fi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Scifi)

Sci-fi is an abbreviation for science fiction. It was coined in 1954 by Forrest J. Ackerman as a pun on the term "hi-fi". Many science fiction fans initially reacted negatively to the word.

*** From Dictionary.com:
sci-fi Audio pronunciation of "scifi" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (sf)
n. Informal pl. sci-·fis

Science fiction.


adj.

Of, relating to, being, or similar to science fiction: a sci-fi movie; a sci-fi weapons system.

*** From disemia.com
Sci-Fi
Futuristic (or at least an impression of the future) music creates a futuristic atmosphere, often lyrics about sci-fi topics. Not a commonly used term, and lacks common definition.

By the way, when I looked for a definition of "sci-fi", Google returned the disemia.com and the wikepedia one.

I completely agree with everyone that there is good science fiction (Blade Runner, 2001) and there are crappy stories in a science fiction setting. But differentiating them by trying to define one as "sci-fi" and one as "science fiction" is sort of silly. You could just as well call them "good science fiction" vs. "crappy science fiction" and then people would know what the heck you were talking about.

"It's just such a huge shame," he said. "Anyone who is a practitioner of science fiction is constantly dogged by the ghettoization of the genre. And a lot of that comes from the very simplistic, 2-D Lucasesque view of what science fiction has to offer."

Huh? Ghettoization? Yes, Star Wars popularized science fiction for an entire generation. Following on to that is that sci-fi-like stuff is now formulaic for summer blockbusters. However, that also means that lots more sci-fi is produced and release than would be the case otherwise.

You can't have it both ways. Either it's a little niche thing that people can play in and nobody cares and it's "pure", or it's popular and everybody digs it and some people buy it because it's the trendy thing.

Those effects were a double-edged light saber, however. The first "Star Wars" film helped usher in an era of highly technical filmmaking where character development sometimes took a back seat.

"We're still stuck with this legacy of - 'Oh yeah, sci-fi, that's when you have a big budget and lots of special effects,' " Mr. Morgan said.

That's true. Sci-fi to some people means movies with ray guns and space ships. However, I think that movies like Star Wars brought sci-fi films out of the ghetto. People thought of sci-fi as the old Flash Gordon, where the console was an old radio microphone. Stuff that was so cheesy that only serious, rabid fans could take seriously. However, Star Wars and its ilk allowed people who weren't cerebrally into scifi to appreciate the power of the genre, and opened the door for really interesting filmmaking, like Harry Potter, or Minority Report.

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