The SF/SciFi Generation Gap
29. Aug, 2009 
40 Comments
Seems I have some folks encouraging me to be crotchety. (And I shall oblige.) They’re sending me links to blogs and other things wherein misguided (read – young) individuals not only misuse SciFi – the epithet – but do so gleefully, deliberately and with intent to CHANGE its common usage.
Repeat after me: Change is bad and therefore we must fear it!
The other day I posted a small thing about the history of the etymology of the various terms used to describe that which can only be defined by pointing to it and declaiming “This is what I’m talking about”
By this I (using the royal ‘I)’ mean the literature and other media tie-in abominations* that are variously referred to as: scienctifiction/science fiction/SF/Speculative Fiction/SpecFic and NOT as SciFi.
Yech.
K. Tempest Bradford offers the latest in this sad and sadly ill-informed lexicographal terrorism, (responding to Jason Sanford’s screed) offering this opening salvo:
Apparently there are still people deeply scarred by the term SciFi and will jump on any poor soul who dares to ask: is this term really still derogatory? Jump on him and whip out the claws, apparently. Wow.
Scarred? No. Mildly offended?. Yes. Deeply concerned for your soul? Certainly. More than happy to offer correction and guidance? Absolutely.
K. Temptest has sadly mistaken kind and gentle editing with jumping and whipping. Not surprising. Very few of us really enjoy being informed that our worldview is wrong. This not a-typical response includes the usual kicking and screaming, followed by denial.
I have never really understood the vehement hate this term generates in people. SciFi or Sci-Fi (sometimes pronounced skiffy) has certainly been used by those who look down on our genre.
Here we begin to see the evidence for the generational divide referred to in my title. Like a game of postman or telephone, information gets garbled as it is passed down the line.
That such has happened here is revealed by the conflation of SciFi, Sci-Fi and skiffy.
Sci-Fi is the original term coined by Forrest J. Ackerman – the world’s Number 1 Fan and is, therefore, sacrosanct. If you insist on following the Ackerman school of usage, at least get it right. SciFi was no doubt coined by mundanes who wanted to lessen their exposure to all that Buck Rogers stuff. Eliminating the hyphen shortened the footprint and saved them a keystroke.
Despite the high fidelity he enjoyed amongst fen, the Ackermonster’s coinage was largely rejected by the community and became seen and used as a pejorative by most.
Skiffy, on the other hand, has NEVER been anything BUT an epithet. The deliberate mispronunciation – hardening the silent C, reducing the long I to a dimunitive e (like referring to the Dean of Science Fiction as Bobbie Heinlein) was meant to reflect the obvious ignorance and immaturity of the item or person in question.
If you are so inexperienced with the genre that you would mistakenly pronounce a pejorative – well then, you are in need of some correction.
But shortening it to SF and calling that more acceptable merely injects a rather nasty and unnecessary layer to the issue. With SF, you’re kind of hiding what you’re talking about except for those in the know.
OF COURSE we’re deliberately hiding IT. But whom are we hiding IT from? Not from fans who want to become FANS. Shhhh. Soto voce. We’re hiding it from mundanes, from those who have not yet been blessed with admittance to the inner circle. Secret societies do not remain secret for long if they open their arms and just let anyone off the street in through the door. There’s ritual that’s needed. Handshakes to learn. Passwords to pass on. Hazing and paddlings to deliver.
The first test to pass is to ASK.
“Hey guys – what’s up with this EssEff, SciFi, Skiffy thing? I really want to learn the proper usage, so in future I can abuse it properly.”
“Come with me, my dear youngling. You have many wonderful people to meet and many wonderful wonders to learn.”
Does SF stand for San Francisco? (Don’t think people would be so silly as to assume? You’d be wrong.) Or, more importantly to us, does it stand for speculative fiction or science fiction? At least with Sci-Fi you know what one is talking about, as Jason said in his post.
Yes, we do know what you’re talking about when you say “sci-fi”. You’re talking about what the mundanes mean when they use that word. Lucasfied fantasy, Allenized tropes, SYFYried rubbersuited monsters.**
Also, I have noticed that the majority of people who raise hell about Sci-Fi vs. SF tend to be folks who are older or have been in the community for a while. Snobbery and disdain…
Well duh! We’re older = know better. How tough is that to figure out? And as for the snobbery and disdain? Honey – there ain’t much else to do but shuffleboard and dominoes at the old folks home, and those get boring mighty fast! Besides, everyone here cheats!
The misguided and youthful can be found HERE and HERE.
*I must remain consistent – at least for this post. Change is bad. Science Fiction originated as literature (elsewhere we can discuss that contention) and therefore and ipso facto, any version of SF that is not found on the written, non-electronic page, is an abomination.
**In point of fact and in all seriousness, the current and common media-used divide between sci-fi/scifi and SF/science fiction is apparently and almost entirely along delivery-medium lines. I have been gathering and saving Google news alterts for “scifi” and “science fiction” for well over a year now and that dataset reveals that scifi is used almost exclusively for movies/television and the web, while science fiction is mostly used to refer to printed works.
Please excuse the typos in that last one, I’m suffering from lack of coffee, and I’m late for an appointment. Forgive.
There must be some over-the-counter medication we can take to get over this.
When I was getting into reading this stuff, it was spelled out: science fiction. But I picked up on sci-fi (cribbed from “hi-fi”, as I understand it) and I guess I got stuck there.
Meanwhile, I may just use “rocket-alien (ro-al). No, that won’t work, it sound to much like a monarchy. Okay (or is that okay, or OK, or O-K? Heh.
So “sf” (or SF if I happen to have pressed the Caps Lock key) it is.
“SF and Science Fiction.”
What’s wrong here is the pointless capitalization.
It’s “science fiction” and “sf.” No capitalization.
Seriously, there are (plenty of) real, authoritative, usage guides and there’s no rationale whatever under any to capitalize either “science fiction” or “sf.”
And if you disobey, the hit team from The Chicago Manual of Style, and other elite squads, will be paying you a visit.
Which is not a Visit. This is not the eighteenth century.
Your blog is inspiring me to write cro-nofi.
“Crotchety nonfiction” responses. Cro-nofi. Or “c-nf.”
Later generations will call this “cee-nif.”
Gary – don’t know what’s up with the comments issues – working very hard right now on something else but I’ll check into it.
And btw – there IS a Central Authority. The appropriate and legal usages are:
SF and Science Fiction. Hate SciFi/Sci-Fi/SyFy/PsyPhy, can’t abide by Speculative Fiction/SpecFic/Spec-Fic.
Skiffy is appropriately used in the pejorative.
Will tolerate ess eff when used to explain pronunciation.
Unfortunately, when the Bureau of Proper Usage was created, they neglected to fund the enforcement end of things…
As a benchmark, I’d say that through, oh, 1980, the percentage of users of “sf” versus “sci-fi” within the community of people actively going to sf cons, writing in sf fanzines and apas, writing sf professional, working in the field, going to the Worldcon, and otherwise being in “traditional” active sf fandom was about 98/98% to 1.
The number of readers, and book-sellers, and people outside these “inner” circles, who were by that point using “sci-fi,” though, was probably somewhere around 60%. (I’m just pulling numbers out of my rear end, as estimates.)
I’d say that it was between 1980 and 1990 that the battle of usage in the general public was conclusively lost, but the trends had been heading that way for the decade before that, when a lot of conversations were held between active sf people, and others, “correcting” their usage of “sci-fi” to “sf.”
It was, as I said, a shibboleth that once marked whether you were actually an sf reader or not — but that started to really change by 1970, with, of course, some readers, following the general press, having picked up “sci-fi” even earlier, and later it became a shibboleth marker between people active in the sf community and people who were simply enthusiasts of reading science fiction, and probably people who were enthusiastic viewers of what they’d always thought was called “sci-fi,” but now it’s just a generation gap.
The origins of this largely came from the fact that Forry was known to the larger world through Famous Monsters of Filmland, and not for much of anything else.
So from 1958 on, Forry used “sci-fi,” and from that point on, all the kids who enthusiastically read his kinda childish magazine about monsters and, well, awful “science fiction,” got the idea that there was this “sci-fi” thing. Meaning all those bad movies.
To the rest of the sf world, it meant the same thing: awful, horrible, bad movies, but the difference is that that we knew this didn’t represent genuine science fiction at all, but that it simply lumped all that crap in with the handful of decent science fiction movies that existed up to that point (a list that doesn’t go much further than Forbidden Planet and Day The Earth Stood Still, and a handful of others).
And those young readers of Famous Monsters grew up, and kept believing in this “sci-fi” stuff. And journalists picked it up, and it all grew out of that, during the Sixties.
At first it was just an easy way to distinguish someone familiar with actual written science fiction from someone who didn’t know from it. But evolution happens, and the jargon of cognoscenti is always going to lose to the masses if there’s a clash.
“I gather there is no CORRECT, most widely accepted abbreviation these days? I can get used to anything”
There’s no Central Authority in science fiction, or, as you know, an Academy of English enforcing rules with Language Police.
Use what you like. People who have been around the sf community for decades still use “sf” and wince at “sci-fi,” but we lost that battle with the general population a couple of decades ago, and so to the younger generation and the larger world, i.e., to all but a few tens of thousands of people, “sci-fi” is the word that is short for “science fiction.”
That’s the general rule of thumb. I haven’t heard of anyone actually beating anyone because someone used the alternative to their preference.
You can see the debate repeated again at the link Steve started with, above, to Tempest Bradford’s blog thread, if you can make your way through the (to me) annoying threading. And, as I wrote above, see discussion at Steve’s earlier post.
Me, I’ll always say “sf,” or occasionally, as discussed, the ironic pronunication “skiffy,” and never “sci-fi,” but that’s me. If someone else says “sci-fi,” well, that’s all I’d expect from someone who doesn’t go back in the field some thirty years or so.
Personally, I think anyone who gets seriously worked up about the issue is being kinda silly.
But in larger terms, we’re talking about the use of words as shibboleths.
Oops. That should have been “I have some discomfort with SciFi”
Frank retired from DAPA a year ago or more, though he’s still active in OTR.
Still in DAPA: Crider, Scott, me, Moffats, Kelley, Lachman, Meyerson, Bradley, Albert, Hertel, Lewis, Napier…27 total.
Now I’d like to ask a question: this whole discussion about terminology has made me hesitate to use anything other than a fully spelled out name. I always used the hyphenated verson “sci-fi” a devolution from scienti-fiction, and what Forry (and Wendy) came up with those many years ago.
SF is okay with me, I have some discomfort with SfiFi, though I can’t say why. I gather there is no CORRECT, most widely accepted abbreviation these days? I can get used to anything, I guess, but I won’t use something silly or foolish just because it’s the “latest”.
And, double-crap, a part disappeared in the middle.
Note to self: never try posting here with multiple links until Steve can fix this problem.
What got eaten: and long before Don Wollheim and John Michel were born, started out as an association of amateur printing, after all.
DAPA-Em, and BoucherCon, of course, being outgrowths of sf fandom, and both having some overlap, as witness Len, Stu Shiffman, and, well, I have no idea who is in DAPA-Em these days. Is Frank Denton still there?
Pt. III: I see he started blogging some years ago, which I’d noticed before, and then forgotten.
(I lived in Seattle from 1978-86, although I know Frank from fanzines before that.)
Last I looked, Andi Shechter was still working on Bouchercons, but it’s been quite a while since I looked.
FWIW, back when I was working in various capacities in publishing, I worked on a variety of mysteries, as well as sf and in other areas, although skiffy was always my primary work, and primary fiction-reading genre.
But I love tons of the classic works of the mystery field, myself. Back when I was at Avon Books in the mid-Eighties, I worked in a junior capacity with the then-starting Judy Jance, and not-exactly-a-mystery-writer James Ellroy, whom I saw a lot of in person, and did caretaking work on reprints of such greats as Tony Hillerman and Elmore Leonard, although I hasten to add that I had no personal contact with the latter two.
Well, that was tedious.
Right, Steve’s commenting system is now allowing only one link per comment, with no warning or explanation, just a vanishing of attempts to post. Sigh.
Pt. II of what’s actually a trivial comment:
The very first amateur press association, after all, the National Amateur Press Association, founded in 1876, long before the first sf apa,
Though there are still a fair number of physically published-on-paper apas going, the advent of the internet, and mailing lists, and the web, has tended — slowly, slowly, given the conservative resistance of many who started with mimeos — to lead to the — dare I say it? — obsolescence of apas.
Though in the ess-eff community, there are zines that publish in both media, and still some hold-outs as print-only.
Okay, Steve’s commenting system is vanishing my attempt to respond, so I’ll see if breaking it up into a couple of comments, with fewer links per comment, will work.
Yes, Gary, I’m in DAPA-Em. Membership is sliding a little, Art has announced his retirement as OE and no one seems ready to take the spot. It’s why I decided to come to the ‘net, to have a platform when my apazine Lethal Interjection ends it’s run there.
“He’s a long time member of the mystery apa I’m in.”
I’m assuming DAPA-Em is still going — I well remember when it was founded, as well as Bouchercon, but I’ve never been a member — but perhaps you mean another mystery apa.
“mys-fys may not be punny enough, but it’s funny.”
Actually, I’m not sure why I dismissed “mi-fi,” the first thought that sprang to my mind when I considered Alternate History Mystery Fan Forry. Or “my-fi,” or “my-fy.”
FJA made horrible puns from his very first days in fandom. Some found it endearing, others tended to want to brain him. Some preferred Walt Willis and Chuck Harris form of punning, but I digress.
Thanks for your kind comment over at my blog, and thanks for checking with Len (and June)!
“…only recently decided to observe and occasionally participate on-line.”
Always room for one more.
No, wait, I’m wrong, the internet is full. Sorry!
Gary: Thanks for the comment, and for catching my error. I had it backwards (and shame on me for not checking before commenting here from memory).
Yes, indeed Len is still around in fandom: science fiction, Sherlockian and mystery. He’s a long time member of the mystery apa I’m in.
I just talked with Len (and June) on the phone, and he confirmed that S-F or s-f, with a hyphen is his preferred shortening of “science fiction”. He said he used to be okay with sci-fi (Forry Ackerman’s term, originally), but it has been used other than it’s original meaning by Hollywood and elsewhere so much he doesn’t like it now. He also said he uses skiffy, but only when referring specifically to the convention group, since they use it themselves.
As for my bona fides, all I have is about 50 years of reading science fiction and whatever I’ve picked up along the way. It’s no surprise you’ve not heard of me, I don’t write except in my apazine, rarely attend cons and only recently decided to observe and occasionally participate on-line.
As to that alternate world, I guess there would have been ForryCon too, but then that could as easily have happened in science fiction fandom, I suppose.
“mys-fys may not be punny enough, but it’s funny.
“Also the opposite for others, and I’m talking about people who have been fans for decades. like Len Moffatt.”
Len Moffat preferred “sci-fi” to “sf”? Are you sure?
I used to have hundreds of his apazines, from his first contributions to Apa-L (which I had a complete run of the first couple of hundred and some more, plus a complete run of the NYC apa that inspired it, Apa-F, lots and lots of Shaggies from the Forties through Seventies, Len’s contributions to other zines in the Fifties, various mentions of him in Fanac in the Fifties, and so on and so forth, and I don’t remember that Len Moffat preferred “sci-fi” at any time.
It’s certainly possible my memory is failing, to be sure, given that it’s been something like twenty years since I last read any of those zines.
Of course, so far as I know, Len Moffat is still around LA fandom, at the age of 85, so someone can always just ask him.
Not that I mean to doubt your word, Richard Robinson; it’s just that I don’t know you, or your background, just as you almost surely don’t know mine, so I’m clueless — and please forgive my ignorance — about your background and experience, and it’s certainly almost surely the case that your experience with Len and June is vastly more recent than mine. (Through Bouchercon, I’m guessing?)
I’d be curious what, say, Don Fitch and Mike Glyer had to say on Len’s usage, though.
“…but S-F was okay.”
Not “S-F”; nobody ever uses that. It’s “sf.” No hyphen, no capitalization. Two letters.
It occurs to me that if there were an alternate world where Forrest J. Ackerman had been a mystery fan, instead of an sf fan, and there’d been an organized mystery fandom pre-Bouchercon, we might have wound up with Forry coining “mys-fys” as a usage….
Nah, not punny enough.
Well, let’s see. Back to the original (in a sense) topic. Science fiction is undoubtedly always correct, but it’s a lot of letters to type. I’ve known lots of people who felt sci-fi was breaking a rule, somehow, but S-F was okay. Also the opposite for others, and I’m talking about people who have been fans for decades. like Len Moffatt.
I’m okay with either, because we all know what we mean with them, but SciFi (no hyphen) is only a lazy abbreviation, nothing more.
A safe home for crotchitiness… hmm – I like that
Gary – OCD away!
Fred: OW! UH! EEEEEEE!
Nope, sorry, darn thing refuses to so much as scratch. Must be its steel constitution…
“involuntarily unable”
Ooh, department of redundancy department!
That was, of course, merely my deliberately demonstrating I fail to take perfect care at all times.
Dull kitchen knife. Bonus points if it is rusty and you haven’t had a tetanus shot…
“Sorry, can’t help myself.”
This is what anyone who has ever copyedited or proofread will tell you, Steve.
Though whether people are take up that line of work because they are involuntarily unable to read any other way, and find it useful to turn their OCD into
underwear-stealingprofit!, or it’s taking up that line of work that causes you to involuntarily read that way, I’m not prepared to fully take a stance on. I lean towards the former, and the view that the latter only worsens one’s native OCD as regard language.And, by the way, I like to think your blog is all about making a safe space for being crotchety.
There are a lot of us out There/Here who are crotchety about careful writing, even if we fail to take anything resembling perfect care at all times with our own words.
I felt a crotchety need to point this out; this is not an announcement that I will mercilessly insist on correcting or pointing out all of your
intolerable!infelicitations of language.Copyeditor here–”an science fiction” is probably the result of someone globally replacing “SF” with “science fiction” and failing to notice that the article needs to be changed as well.
Sorry, can’t help myself.
Gary – thanks for understanding and making fun of me…lol
I only use spellcheck for the first pass.
Then I blue pencil hard copy…
Spell-check, incidentally, is evil, and unless someone is dyslexic, or has some other similar excuse, should never be used, as it’s guaranteeded to lead to homophone errors.
There’s no software substitute for the human eye.
This is vastly more important than “sf” vs. “sci-fi.”
Let’s not even get started on the horror of “grammar software.”
Oh, heck, I ruined it anyway, speaking of errors.
“…unless, you know, I find a good opportunity to make fun
of youof a specifically hilarious error.”“Here’s a few more examples”
Incompetent copyediting for the first three. For “an sf,” it’s a phonetics-based choice.
To give an online cite, rather than a more authoritive one from a book, explanation here.
Steve, I don’t consciously choose to “proofread”; I just read.
But I’ll try to take your hint that you prefer your typos, etc., go unmentioned and uncorrected, and try to remember that that is your preference, unless, you know, I find a good opportunity to
make fun of youof a specifically hilarious error.(This is another case, however, where I’m taking a risk with a blog that doesn’t have a “preview” option.)
Gary – I appreciate the proofreading, I really do – but I don’t bother to run blog posts through an edit or even spellcheck. I suppose that makes me wrong or bad or something, but I just don’t. That’s reserved for stories/articles for submission.
Besides, I’m not paying you a flat fee nor by the word…
Paul – I sent you the correct answer via email (so far as grammarians are concerned). My personal answer is – whatever looks right to me when writing – unless it was a typo
Here’s a few more examples of “an” vs. “a”:
David Seed’s A Companion to Science Fiction (2005) has the phrase “an science fiction novel”.
Robin Anne Reed’s Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion (2000) has the phrase “Bradbury is an science fiction writer”.
Author Robert J. Sawyer once used the phrase “I realized that if I was serious about becoming an science-fiction writer”
In a 1949 letter to the editor of Time magazine, Louis Garner, president of the Washington Science-Fiction Association used the phrase “an S-F book”.
“Here’s just one of many examples from Google: ‘The Blob is an sci-fi action adventure movie …’”
Because they don’t understand how to use “a” and “an.” Or just made a hasty error.
Now let’s argue linguistics, evolution of language, usefulness of usage rules, and prescriptiveness versus descriptiveness, virtues and vices thereof!
“Skiffy, on the other hand, has NEVER been anything BUT an epithet.”
I enjoyed your satirical screed, but on the off-chance anyone isn’t clear on it, I’m going to be incredibly lamely boring, since this is still a fairly obscure point, and note just to avoid any possible serious misreading of this in future:
“Skiffy” was a joke.
Your apt game-of-telephone metaphor reminds me greatly of the way that the term “political correctness” started out in Maoism, became a joking/ironic usage within the leftist/feminist communities in the Seventies, and then was taken as serious by conservatives in the Eighties, and has ever since tbeen used with equally mixed usages and confusion by various parties.
“The deliberate mispronunciation – hardening the silent C, reducing the long I to a dimunitive e (like referring to the Dean of Science Fiction as Bobbie Heinlein) was meant to reflect the obvious ignorance and immaturity of the item or person in question.”
The original usage was pure irony/humor, and merely used as a funny way to refer to any science fiction, when the user felt like being funny.
For ease of reference, since it’s moving down, and soon off, your front page, I suggest putting a link to your previous post somewhere within this post’s “The other day I posted a small thing….”
“Soto voce.”
Sotto voce.
Some of the other frequent confusions in adjacent discussions: conflation of the use of “fans” as a term of art within active sf fandom to mean to mean “people active in sf fandom,” i.e., a tautology, and the general usage of the word, to mean “an enthusiast for a particular thing,” and in the case of science fiction, someone who has been a lifelong reader.
Active fans have, since the Thirties and the creation of a network of in-contact-with-each-other-fans via the first fanzine in 1930 (and to limited extent, since 1926 and the first prozine lettercolumn and some correspondences that sprang from that, as well as the creation of the Science Fiction League and clubs), and then the first conventions (cue argument about 1936 Philadelphia versus 1937 Theosophical Hall in Leeds, England, UK), distinguished out of practical need between “fans-active-in-fandom” and readers. Not out of snobbishness, but because when you’re talking about one versus the other, you need to have a term for one versus the other.
Inevitably this led to eventual confusion of terms, though it didn’t really become a serious problem until the explosion in various kinds of “sf fan activities” post-1977 Star Wars, though one could just as well make a case for earlier and later points-of-departure.
Oh, and I belatedly realized you included a link to Jason Sanford’s specific post further down in your post; my apologies for overlooking that when I wrote my previous comment. Bad me.
Serious question for my own edification: Why do people sometimes us the word “an” instead of “a” before the term SciFi, Sci-Fi, or SF?
Here’s just one of many examples from Google: “The Blob is an sci-fi action adventure movie …”
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Ignoring everything else, I point out that the link to Jason Sanford’s site as a whole won’t be useful once his specific post moves down and off his front page; I recommend always linking to individual posts when one wishes to, er, link to individual posts.
Not all blogs provide permalinks to post, but most do; the relevant one is here.
Fred -
Didn’t you mean to say a DULL kitchen knife?
You know, there are several things I could take away from your statement of fact: Do you mean that thinking with one’s other head creates an affinity for Science Fiction? Or did you mean to imply cause and effect? That reading Science Fiction will generate a penis?
Moshe – I’m wearing the crotchety hat this morning. At other times I’m more reasonable.
Tempest, Jason – thanks but: Start using the proper terms, ok?
Steve: Thanks for making my morning with this post. I love it.
I’ve been commenting over at Tempest’s, and also on my LJ and FB pages. There’s a definite generational divide here, so I try to be broadminded.
You are obviously stuck on “SciFi” being bad because you have a penis. Embrace change. And a kitchen knife.