Science fiction words
May. 5th, 2004 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinVia Gary Farber: It's the OED's online project for collecting citations of science-fiction-related words. It's clever that they're taking pains to distinguish words used in science fiction, words used in science-fiction criticism, and words used in fandom. You know, I never thought of "completist" as anything other than a general English word, which either indicates how steeped I am in this subculture (but I don't even go to cons!) or how mainstream it has become.
The historical graph of new citations is fascinating. The generation of new words for the genre itself peaked in the 1940s, as you'd probably have guessed; but the great decade for new fandom-words was the 1950s, and criticism exploded in the 1980s and '90s! I wonder if this last, somewhat surprising fact was the result of (a) the cyberpunks, (b) newfound respect for SF in the wider culture resulting from the post-Star Wars media SF explosion, (c) the burgeoning academic industry in critical theory in general, or all three. With a bigger data set it would be interesting to break down the years more finely.
Another thought: It also appears that many of these critical citations are from a small number of sources, particularly various writings of John Clute and Gardner Dozois. That might have a distorting effect on the statistics.
The historical graph of new citations is fascinating. The generation of new words for the genre itself peaked in the 1940s, as you'd probably have guessed; but the great decade for new fandom-words was the 1950s, and criticism exploded in the 1980s and '90s! I wonder if this last, somewhat surprising fact was the result of (a) the cyberpunks, (b) newfound respect for SF in the wider culture resulting from the post-Star Wars media SF explosion, (c) the burgeoning academic industry in critical theory in general, or all three. With a bigger data set it would be interesting to break down the years more finely.
Another thought: It also appears that many of these critical citations are from a small number of sources, particularly various writings of John Clute and Gardner Dozois. That might have a distorting effect on the statistics.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-05 07:12 pm (UTC)"....(b) newfound respect for SF in the wider culture resulting from the post-Star Wars media SF explosion...."
I think that there are aspects of all three in the right answer, but the above is rather off. I don't think the explosion of media sf particularly caused the explosion of academic attention. I think it came about more as the outgrowth of the academic seeds planted in the Sixties and early Seventies, and mostly as the outgrowth of the generational flowering in the late Seventies and Eighties of the folks who had grown up taking sf seriously, intellectually, in the baby boom.
I can't speak well to the ins and outs of the academic scene, but I did know many of the early sf academics, and they certainly didn't get into it because of the success of Star Wars or Trek or Tolkien, but because of their own formative interests in their own childhoods.
Non-anonymous-guy,
Gary Farber
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 05:10 am (UTC)That said, the current situation is somewhat unsatisfactory, and I'm glad to hear that the people who run LJ are thinking about addressing it somehow. It might be enough to have a level of free service that isn't called "getting a LiveJournal" so that it doesn't feel so much like viral marketing (though viral marketing it may well be).
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 05:57 am (UTC)On the other hand, media SF has resulted in a lot of mainstream-media discussion of basic science-fiction concepts, some of it sort of clueless when seen from inside the scene (e.g. the ahistoricism of a lot of the post-Matrix discussion of brain-in-a-jar scenarios).
Crit citations
Date: 2004-05-06 03:35 am (UTC)