I’m with this. Regardless of Ellison’s talents at his job, which is writing stories, his opinions on anything need be taken with a grain of salt.
Plus …
The larger issue is that there’s no good reason to have a separate genre name for what boils down to “badly written or conceived science fiction.” You just call it “bad” if that’s what you think. And that’s a critique or opinion. It’s not a genre. The idea that “sci-fi” refers to bad stuff and “SF” refers to good stuff is the cheesiest kind of insider bullcrap.
It’s the same with the distinction between “Trekkie” and “Trekker.” I proudly wear the “Trekkie” badge. The “Trekkers” who look down their noses at the use of the Trekkie word are just trying to create their own class system within the fan group.
Doesn’t matter. He’s still pissed off, and letting whatever deity in whatever plane he landed on (Chaotic Good?) have it in both/all ears/auditory receivers.
Oh, VIEWS. The SF vs Sci Fi thing is high schooler crap still argued by adults. It’s embarrassing.
As for Ellison’s titles, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was an awesome title until I read the story and found that it basically is the story.
“Y’know, We could just send this guy to Hell, to be in an infinite loop as a Production Manager for a TV Show whose scripts are commercially-friendly rewrites of his stuff – but he’d only feel that it merely proves he was right all along…”
But what about the much-repeated concept that using the term that a group or individual prefers is the polite thing to do, and inversley not doing it is rude?
Those laughing at you were just being twits. People attached far too much importance to minor labels. The Trekkie vs. Trekker thing mentioned above was another bit of silliness. You have Science Fiction, Space Opera, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction (which fully includes the Fantasy Genre) and thus Spec Fiction.
Hard Sci-Fi or Hard Science Fiction was best represented in the earlier days by the big 3 of Heinlein, Clark and Asimov.
Trekkie came first. My understand is that s subset of ST fans invented Trekker because they were embarrassed by another set. The way I’ve heard it is the divide was “ST says interesting things about society and the future” on one hand and “Mr. Spock is so dreamy” on the other.
But I may be wrong.
Your list is confusing. Space opera is a sub genre. So is fantasy. Science fiction, sci-fi and speculative fiction (or speculative fabulation which Merril used) are all names for more or less the same thing, with different baggage.
SF today has a lot better reputation than it used to. Here is a poem by Kingsley Amis:
SF’s no good
They say until we’re deaf.
But this is good!
So it’s not SF.
I don’t think that the feeling among mainstream fiction readers and writers that science fiction can’t be good literature and any counterexamples must not be science fiction has entirely disappeared. There’s a long-running occasional section in the newsletter Ansible that David Langford puts out every month called “How Others See Us” in which he quotes things he sees in print which speak of science fiction in this way. Here’s a previous SDMB thread about the same subject as this:
If Harlan Ellison is in hell, he’s being forced to critique the boss’s story writing, but has to be careful never to give negative feedback about anything.
I mentioned Ellison mainly because the earliest printed distaste for the word (that I know of) was in a story he wrote in 1975, “The New York Review of Cordwainer Bird.” (Weird Heroes vol 2, Byron Preiss, ed.) I’m sure there are earlier references, but I’m offering this as the earliest until someone can find an earlier one.
Except the group of readers of science fiction is not uniform. You can have hard-core readers of Asimov, Clark and Heinlein who use the term sci-fi. It turns into a “no true Scotsman” thing.
