Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
I bet that our readers can come up with more interesting facts as than the article if there's interest. Steve started us out with the missing tie between Arthur C. Clarke and the communications satellite. Anyone here read enough SF to chip in, or as readers are we just as superficial as the article writers?
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#3 was a new one on me. Gernsback subtitled Amazing Stories "The magazine of Scientifiction", and his innovation was devoting a magazine to the genre and giving it a name. Stories that were SF had been published in the pulps for a while. Gernsbach was the first to devote a publication to them.
Calling the genre Sci-Fi can be blamed on Forrest J. Ackerman, who coined it as a contraction of Scientifiction. It's a touchy topic in SF fan circles (#5), who vastly prefer SF as the name, and consider Sci-Fi a term used by people who don't know anything about the genre and equate it with cheesy TV and grade B movie offerings.
Gernsbach's business practice of "payment upon presentation of lawsuit" has been well known in SF circles for years, and Uncle Hugo was hardly the only practitioner of that tactic.
#4: I wouldn't call it the rat's revenge. The folks who first created the Hugo were well aware of Gernsbach's flaws, but he
did effectively create the genre the award honors.
#5: The practice of multiple pseudonyms carried on well past the pulps. The late Randall Garrett a/k/a Walter Bupp, Darrell T. Langart, and (with Laurence M. Janifer) Mark Phillips is one example, and there are many others. I once spent several years looking for the novelette that was a prequel to the late Henry Kuttner's _Fury_. Turned out I had it all along: it was titled "Clash By Night", and had been published under the pseudonym Laurence O'Donnell.
#8 and #9: Well, Alice Sheldon
had been a government operative during WWII. Tragically, she took her own life in a murder/suicide when caring for her aged and invalid husband became too much.
#18: Dick had bouts with mental illness all along. Most of his work concerned the boundary between reality and fantasy, and how you knew which side you were on. No surprise, since Phil often didn't know. Should you get a chance, ask David Hartwell, currently a Senior Editor at Tor Books, about Dick. He'd been Dick's editor at another house, and still expresses bemusement about the experience.
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Dennis