Jargon and the Naming of Things (Editorial, NYRSF 308)

I’ve been thinking a lot about names and jargons of late, and how they shade into each other. Both are powerful tools, names more obviously. I’m thinking here of Brian Stableford’s “The French Origin of the Science Fiction Genre” (NYRSF #283, <www.nyrsf.com/2012/02/the-origins-of-the-science-fiction-genre-by-brian-stableford.html>), where Stableford described a Parisian literary community from the 1880s to the early 1900s that had enormous congruities to the American science fiction community that formed in the 1920s. The French futurist fiction had a fan population, letter column debates, anthologies—but it never cohered, possibly because it never had a label to serve as the fixed center point around which to wrap itself.

Often a bad name is better than none. Hugo Gernsback’s own “scientifiction” is exactly as mellifluous as a toolbox being dropped down an elevator shaft, but it did what Hugo wanted it to do: it raised a motte within which the category of stf could grow. Maybe it was just electric-engine-magazine time, but Gernsback’s Amazing succeeded where Louis Figuier had failed a generation earlier, creating a self-sustaining genre of works and an eager, self-recruiting community of readers.

Communities develop their own jargons almost as a law of information science. Repeated, common experiences drive a need for communal terminology, and the fandom that sprung up around the science fiction magazines, being (to indulge in some stereotyping) bright, hyperlexic, and insular, was more jargon-prone than anyone except perhaps sports enthusiasts. Terms related to the work (BEM, Bat Durston, continuity, eyekicks, sensawunda) and to the community and its activities (ego-boo, SMOF). Jargon did within the sf community what it always does: streamlined conversation; deepened the communal bonds through shared knowledge; and created a semantic (and sometimes syntactic) barrier between those within the community and those outside it.

Possibly the single most powerful piece of jargon created by the sf community was the term “science fiction fandom.” It’s also a term that has caused a lot of friction as it escaped into the larger world. When I first got involved in sf fandom, there was an evergreen faux-funny conversation: “You’re a fan of science fiction, but you’re not a science-fiction fan.” The tension between “one who reads and enjoys science fiction and fantasy” and “a participant in the semi-organized community of ‘science fiction fandom’” is a real one. There is a dividing line between the two groups, even if it is as faint as a shadow, a gate with no gatekeeper. Anyone can cross the line into sf fandom simply by wanting to cross it, but they have to know the line is there to cross it.

The problem with the term “science fiction fandom” becomes even worse when, as it often is, it is shortened to simply “fandom.” And that term has not only fled the barn, it has largely forgotten it was ever a part of the barn. It came as an actual linguistic shock to me the first time that I encountered fanfic writers using the term “fandom” to mean, solely and completely, the community of fanficcers. Obviously, sf fandom doesn’t own the word fandom, which originated in sports fandom. But fanfic in its modern form began within sf fandom (championed by obscure sf fans such as Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Joanna Russ), and to see the term pulled free of its roots, claimed in whole by a community that was once a subculture—it took me some time to reorient, is all.

SF fandom has no one to blame but itself for the confusion caused as “fandom” escapes into broader meaning. SF fandom, the community that has apostolic succession from the first letter-writing communities from Amazing, has existed as a recognizable entity for four-score and seven years now and the time is long since passed for sf fandom to come up with a term that can be used to distinguish itself from all of the other senses of “science fiction fandom.” And precisely because sometimes a bad name is better than no name at all, I’m going to propose “Gernsbackian fandom.” Gernsback didn’t invent sf fandom, any more than he invented science fiction; fans did. But Gernsback championed it, nurtured it, and helped it find its own voice. And sometimes that’s worth remembering.

Well. Now that I’ve sorted that out, on to filioque and the distinctions among geeks, nerds, and dweebs. Stay tuned!

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors