"Skiffy is for kids"

 Back in days of yore, science-fiction fans all agreed on one piece of terminology:  That the term "sci-fi" was childish and insulting.  As Wilson ("Bob") Tucker once said, "Sci-fi spells Skiffy and Skiffy is for kids."    In other words, "Sci-Fi" used to mean this guy:


While the term "sci-fi" has long since won the war, the problem is that it did so by infantilizing the genre.  In the 1960s, the "New Wave" forced science fiction to grow up, to become a genre for adults and adult literature and film.  "Sci-Fi" incorporated the more childish, reactionary stuff-- you know, where men were men, women were helpless and sex didn't really exist.

Let's be honest and admit that the best known science fiction out there really IS skiffy.  But the best actual science fiction is not.

Recognize these books?  These are real science fiction:



The one on the left may be more familiar to you in the watered-down film version: Blade Runner.  The one on the right is about death, identity and reality. As in "how can you tell what's real?"  

Then there's the books that are actually taught at university level, but not as science fiction.  Because they're whatchacall "literature," ergo they can't be science fiction, right?



Just to take the one in the middle, it's the story of a man who underwent Pavlovian conditioning as an infant, and whose erections, as a result, predict where future V-2 rockets will strike during World War II.  

Yeah, what's science-fictional about that, right?

Then there's the books about gender-shifting people and "ordinary" humans having to figure out how to live with them.  Very topical for today, yes? 





Now here's the kicker:   These books are all forty or fifty years old.  Some are near sixty. This is not new.  This has been the case for science fiction your entire lives.

My point here is that this stuff is not for kids.  Good science fiction rarely is.  But all the stuff that people label "sci-fi?"  That usually is for kids.  Slow kids at that.  And people have been indoctrinated --mostly by bad television and films-- that that's all there is.

So share your choices for the good stuff!

--AlextheKay






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