Sci-Fi

Jeff Wilson · 15 Dec 2010, 23:34 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:34:17 -0600 (CST)
Subject: (urth) Sci-Fi
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=hhFz-_OeZeizNMNzFk+20F7G8n8Bzu5a50G3c at mail.gmail.com>
References: <B7D2542A-8A0E-4F19-BF81-F80EAFB9F571 at butcherbaker.org>
	<590010.75633.qm at web84108.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<AANLkTimcMTGQ5HM3o2b9_SyqzFD-T-gPdHk8bENwBaQx at mail.gmail.com>
	<2824B484-6B51-46ED-80B8-28C3F2DC2D2A at butcherbaker.org>
	<AANLkTi=hhFz-_OeZeizNMNzFk+20F7G8n8Bzu5a50G3c at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1fd11bfcb8cf17548db97110bed1176c.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

> "Sci-Fi" is the sound of two crickets screwing.
>
> More seriously: "Sci-Fi" is a term made up by a publicity hack, in
> analogy with the then-popular "Hi-Fi" for "high fidelity" stereo
> equipment.

Forry Ackerman might have been a publicity hack and a schlockmeister, but
that hardly sets him apart from early fandom, not to mention authordom.
Sci-Fi was and remians a popular self-adpoted term for fans of fantastic
non-book media. It's offense is more in the sense of not-Americans calling
Americans "yanks" or yankees, which aggravates southerners but is proudly
owned by plenty in the north.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net