Now it gets even more bizarre, because I was there too! Missed that panel, though.
Hieronymus on Campbell: "I appreciated Mr. Campbell’s interest in my work, but over the years since then, I have concluded that he set back the acceptance of my work at least a hundred years by his continual emphasis on what he termed the supernatural or ‘magic’ aspects of a mind-controlled device he built by drawing the schematic of my patented instrument with India ink. The energy flowed over the lines of this drawing because India ink is conducting, but it isn’t worth a tinker’s damn for serious research or actual treating."
Damn. Excellent example of why crossing the woo streams can be BAD.
It’s* just* possible that the Hieronymus Machine is like the Dean Drive- it may generate a interesting but useless phenomena. Like the aeolipile. It’s also possible it’s all woo.
Since we’re far from the topic, and I don’t know where else to put this, I’ll just throw this in here.
Brave New Words, The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, gives Heinlein the credit for coining the term “sci-fi.” The cite is to an October 1, 1949 letter to his agent, Lurton Blassingame.
The typewritten original is in the Heinlein archives. It clearly shows that Heinlein used “sci-fic” and not “sci-fi.” It got truncated in transition.
So does sci-fi revert back to Forey Ackerman, who isn’t mentioned at all in Brave New Words? Wikipedia cites his using it “at UCLA in 1954,” with a footnote going to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000. That’s probably not right either.
The online OED commentary for sci-fi bypasses SF for the coinage:
Frustratingly, the actual text and date of this Variety cite is nowhere to be found on that page. You have to go elsewhere to find:
Junior Science was a TV show for kids so obscure IMDb has no information on it. It was a 15-minute public service educational series, hosted by Dr. Gerald Louis Wendt, director of science for UNESCO.
Gold was big on taking conventional ideas and situations and reversing them in which society is based on , so I can see him pushing Pohl to reverse economics for The Midas Plague, without actually believing in the idea. Other examples of Gold’s fondness for this strategy are “Beyond Bedlam” (https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1951-08/Galaxy_1951_08#page/n3/mode/2up) which Gold published in Galaxy - it’s about a society in which everyone has two personalities which take turns occupying the body that is shared, and the only taboo is one personality sleeping with the other personality’s wife, and Asimov’s "The Deep where a mother’s love is an abomination.
Heinlein and Oscar Wilde share the trait of being the go-to assumption for everything in their respective (and large) spheres. This famous quip from Dorothy Parker needs no recasting to be understood in that context:
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
:rolleyes:
Rather than continue to hijack* this thread to argue about dolphins, I started a new one. Carry on.
- Can we really hijack this thread, given how far afield the discussion is ranging? Oh well.
Will you be attending WorldCon 2015? Be sure to come on by the dealer’s room and introduce yourself at Lookout Mountain Bookstore.
Ithkuil looks like a (somewhat) reasonable attempt at that. It’s a constructed language designed to be efficient and logically unambiguous. Not sure if there’s anyone who actually converses in it.