You will either love this or you won’t.
Strong language warning.
…on the heels of the previous post about what does or does not rep Nerddom.
The (other) funny thing about this is that when I was in SF Fandom, the hard core raged about the use of the term sci-fi. The correct term is SF, supposedly.
One acquaintance said that using the term sci-fi was tantamount to using the “N” word about black people. The comment is burned on my eardrum as the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
I’m one of the old school folks who dislike the term “sci-fi”. but I realized more than a decade ago that it was a losing battle and decided to save my energy for something else.
This song is OK- I don’t know that Bradbury is the “greatest science fiction writer ever”, though I do hold him in high regard. I prefer Sturgeon and Bester, but hey, people get to like who they like.
It was pretty funny, though Bradbury himself would bristle at his work being categorized as sci-fi (he only considers Fahrenheit 451 to be Science Fiction, umm, hello? The Martian Chronicles? Any number of short stories? Anyway…). The was an article on the LA Times ‘Hero Complex’ blog yesterday where he railed against his work being boxed that way, and also complained about too much big government while in the same breath chastising them for cutting the space program. I love his writing and his imagination, and I suppose he’s earned the right to be curmudgeonly, but it was a little odd and contradictory.
And I agree, that was probably the dumbest thing you ever heard about the sci-fi comparison.
Personally, I’m not fond of sci-fi, but I recognize the silliness of taking it too seriously. A while back, when I still worked there, Google decided to co-sponsor and have a booth at the big Creation Star Trek convention in Vegas. I got brought onto the organizing team by someone who figured I was the Googler most connected to Trek/fandom in general (i.e. Ghu help me, I was effectively Google’s Official Trek Geek….somewhat made up for by getting to say “My job is sending me to Las Vegas to attend a Star Trek Convention. I love my job”).
You haven’t lived until you’ve started a business meeting with “About our use of the word “Trekkie” in our materials. This’ll sound stupid, well, because it is stupid, but there’s a controversy between people who call themselves “Trekkies” and those who call themselves “Trekkers”. We should avoid any problems by using “Trek fans”"
I thought it was very very funny.
I used to be one of those “it’s SF not sci fi” and that “sci fi” is pronounced “skiffy”, but then again I was also from the “it’s SF, not Frisco” school when talking about the city of San Francisco. No one from SF calls it Frisco. No one. Not done. Ever. It’s not even SF anymore. It’s just The City.
I’m less adamant about correcting people saying sci fi, but I don’t use it personally. And after what the SyFy channel did with it, I’m not about to start, really
On terms: Yeah, not a big fan of “sci-fi” because I too went through the whole “It’s SF!” thing. Although I held to the letters because “speculative fiction” covers so much more than just “science fiction”. These days … I’ll actually say “science fiction” – although I think I do also still use “SF”. As for Star Trek — I have one friend who is a HUGE fan of the Original Series, and when I’m really teasing him I’ll call him a “Trekkie” because he’s of the tribe that prefers “Trekker”.
As for the music vid — amusing. I’ve been seeing it posted and reposted on FB yesterday and today. Gee, could his 90th Birthday have anything to do with that? (He showed up for a party at a bookstore in Burbank … on Saturday, I think.)
Well, Bradbury does write science fiction, but also lots of other stuff which might be considered fantasy, or horror, or magical realism, or Just Good. Same with Ellison.
Cinema, movies, motion pictures, films…
Nerds, geeks, fanboys, true fans…
It’s all a way to define one’s identity. It’s just a matter of who does the defining, and the tone used (as Dr. Laura Schlesinger learned the hard way).
As for what terms to use… well, the whole “comic books” vs. “graphic novels” debate simmers on, but nobody outside of the cognoscenti really cares too much. As for cities, I make a distinction between “Las Vegas” (city limits) and “Vegas” (the Strip in Clark County, formally known as Paradise, NV.)
Here in New York City, there’s The City (people usually infer Manhattan) and The Island (also Lawn Guy Land, the part of Long Island not containing Queens or Kings counties). Of course, it all gets muddled with those “I (heart) NY” t-shirts, which people assume means “NYC”, even though that iconic design is owned by the state tourism board, and refers to the entire state. But, hey, we put the Statue of Liberty on our statehood quarter, and the statue’s in New Jersey!
I used to live in The District, or DC, back during the golden age of the Clinton Administration. I grew up in Omaha, once known as the Gate City. When I left, they had branded it as “The Big O”.
It is funny, but bleah.
This past Comic-Con, Mr. Bradbury’s crew of helpers rolled to a halt just inside the door to take stock of what Ray wanted to see and where it all was. This just happened to be within a few feet of where I was sitting at my table. I considered tripping over my extra chair to tell him the usual blah-blah-blah fan stuff, which is very heartfelt and very well-meant, but, you know, he’s old. He’s not well. He’s in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tank big enough for deep-sea diving. If he was hale and hearty I’d gladly have gently shook his arthritic hand and blanted a little more “I luya suh much” into his airspace. But I considered it and decided it was rather selfish of me to do it just so I could say I said the same thing to Ray Bradbury that every other little snowflake has, when he’s so NOT hale and hearty.
Man wants to be buried at Comic-Con; let him. We were all there for him to see that day, not the other way round.
It’s kind of funny that “sci-fi” has outlived the phrase (“hi-fi”) that inspired it. But it could be worse… I think the other contender at the time was “scientifiction”. :/
These are fun comments. Very interesting!
@Carla: I’m with you, conventions just aren’t the place to go if you have health issues.
Hogarth got very ill at Angouleme one year. Jeff told me many of the pros picked up a terrible virus at the show. Hogarth died shortly after.
Awe, man someone beat me to the scy-fy mockery! Here in Japan, it’s still SF. As in “science fiction”. Sometimes after I’ve seen a movie, my students will ask me if it was SF, to which I usually reply “Rather more F than S.”
Ray Bradbury entered prodom from science fiction fandom. He published his own SF fanzine in the late 1930s, FUTURIA FANTASIA, which was reprinted in hardcover a few years ago. What is forgotten is that in the then very small field of science fiction fandom, Bradbury was a controversial figure in the 1950s because he didn’t write hard SF, but wrote something quite different, which was successfully imitated by Rod Serling when he created The Twilight Zone. Arguably Bradbury’s most famous story is “A Sound Of Thunder” which he sold and resold several times to different magazines in the 1950s, but one of the first places he submitted it, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, rejected it because they didn’t consider the science plausible and felt Ray should have explained things a lot more. A facsimile of that letter is reprinted in the 2004 limited edition book IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE. Various fanzines in the 1950s have letters and editorials complaining that Bradbury wasn’t writing real SF, even after THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES was published, but some of this seems to be resentment that Ray broke into mainstream magazines too, although Robert Heinlein had also written for upscale markets contemporary with Bradbury in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Great historical perspective! Thanks for this contribution.
my favorite Bradbury story is “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (which also made an awesome movie with Johnathan Pryce… I still have that on videocasette, makes a great double feature after “Nightmare Before Christmas”)
Arlene, that’s my favorite as well. I found it in junior high and fell in love with the music of the prose.
“The Sound of Thunder” was eventually bought by Colliers, but I remember seeing it in Playboy. The Richard Corben version from Byron Preiss is quite good, and Al Williamson did it first back in Weird Science-Fantasy. “The Ray Bradbury Chronicles” volumes published by Byron Preiss are highly recommended, as they publish class EC adaptations along with contemporary comics artists, many whom are now quite famous.