Honor raised the point of the academic world establishing canons (which I
readily concede that academia tends to do), and thus distinguishing between
SF and sci-fi. However, since I was an active fan (albeit star trek fandom,
which brought a lot more women into fandom as far as I've known and heard)
before entering graduate school and becoming a professional academic (eek),
I became familiar with the distinction between SF and sci-fi in fandom. The
history of the terms is interesting: there was a lot of effort in the
earlier decades (30-50's) to develop a name for this genre of literature.
Let me see--I did research on this, but my mind is a bit fuzzy. Gernsback
wanted "scientifiction." Campbell had his term, I'm sure. "Science
fiction" eventually won out--but then they needed a shortened term. Forry
Ackerman is the one I've heard who coined "sci-fi" (modeling it on hi-fi"
and journalists today always tend to use that term (fits the headlines better?).
In my fandom days, "sci-fi" simply meant that the person using it was
totally clueless in terms of fan jargon; we fen (plural of fans) used SF
meaning science fiction. There was a similar distinction made between
"Trekkers" and "Trekkies" for that matter.
In my later academic years, I've argued (and not originally) for SF to mean
"Speculative Fiction" because it's true that "science fiction" (only clear
definition is as a marketing category) has been used to promiscuously to
include fantasy, horror, etc. Now I sometimes see people using SF to talk
about the stuff they like, while all that other stuff is sci-fi. Fen are
quite capable of making up their own canons -- it's not just adademics. The
field of SF is quite capable of doing it as well, through the awards,
critics and so on (and by critics here I mean the reviewers in the field,
not mainstream media or acadmiecs). I haven't noticed SF even paying much
attention to academics categories and vice versa. (Sidenote: when I check
the MLA bibliography, that is the index of work done by literature and
language professors in their professional journals, the SF writer with the
most entries is Ursula K. LeGuin. I have theories as to why academia likes
her work so much--all that Jungian stuff!--but that's another issue.)
But please believe me that OVERALL there is relatively little attention paid
to SF under any name by the academic world for some of the same reasons
mentioned here--many departments do not have an SF class of any sort--there
are changes these days, as someone noted, in terms of "popular culture" or
"cultural studies." But these aren't widespread, and there is a great deal
of indifference to or outright antagonist about doing any sort of SF,
especially, I'd imagine writing it. (It's better than it was--when Carolyn
Heilbrun began publishing mysteries under the name of Amanda Cross, she was
an untenured professor at Columbia and did not dare let anyone know A.C. was
C.H. or she'd end up NOT tenured. My department now, which is not Columbia,
encourates and rewards creative publication to the same extent that they
encourage/reward critical publication in department evaluations).
Other "literary" fields are marginalized in the same way: children's
literature, "ethnic" literature (meaning literature by other than dominant
ethnic groups, because all literature is 'ethnic'), "women's" literture,
etc. And I'm not sure that the standard literary/new criticial approach is
really a good way to approach SF, so maybe it's not a Bad Thing!
Robin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:33 PDT