SF: A Point Of Initials : an article by: GF Willmetts

Back in 2014 and a couple times since, I’ve discussed the 17 sub-genres of Science Fiction and it even included Science Fiction Romance, although I only saw it as a small blip failure because it failed to get an audience. I hadn’t even thought of gay or WOKE versions and still not sure if they should exist, simply because it’s a general thing with no SF associated with it. After all, its not like there haven’t been mixed culture people in SF stories without it really becoming an issue. When Samuel Delany included a black character in one of his short stories, I think it was supposed to surprise the reader. Mind you, at the time pre-Internet, I didn’t even know Delany was even black.

Science Fiction is flexible enough to be a hybrid with any of the general story genres although I doubt if gay or WOKE have their own separate genres because its not really an SF story orientation. If anything, they are likely to belong to the romance genre. You don’t see proclamations of this in other genres as a selling point.

Anyway, the discussion point for this article is in how we abbreviate Science Fiction. We’ll forget calling Science Fiction ‘Sci-Fi’ because it was a Forrest Ackerman pun to rhyme with wi-fi which is to do with stereo systems to play music on. Besides, in my guide, it’s also used to identify rubbish or low class Science Fiction to give it category we diehards delegate it to and mostly associated with rubbish SF TV series. https://sfcrowsnest.info/which-of-the-sf-sub-genres-is-safe-or-unsafe-and-why-an-examination-by-gf-willmetts-article/

In genre terms, Science Fiction is unique because the initials tend to be capped, hence always written as ‘SF’. There was an attempt back in the 1960s to identify it lowercased as ‘sf’. If I wrote: Our genre is sf which stands out better written as SF, don’t you think? Exactly. Even a hybrid like ‘Sf’ doesn’t feel right and no one has attempted, as far as I can see, calling it ‘sF’ because it just looks weird and who can type it easily like that.

Convention acronyms are supposed to be capped although in recent years, the British press takes the likes of NASA as ‘Nasa’ as if it’s a word ignoring conventional grammar. Acronyms, even if they look like a conventional word, need to be capped to avoid confusion with the word’s normal use. So, you would have SHIELD for Marvel’s security organisation than lower case shield, the sort of thing Captain America throws around. Once upon a time, it would have been written as S.H.I.E.L.D., like a lot of acronyms to distinguish it but the dots have gone over the years. Being capped automatically means its an acronym. Mostly because so many more people type now because of the Internet and it can look like a slow process to include the dots, although all you have to do is press the Caps Lock key and then type ergo U.N.C.L.E. and their like. It then become acceptable to ignore the dots but just plain sloppy to lower case the rest of the letters. A lot of bad grammar mistakes have popped up over the years. Look at how people confuse ‘either’ and ‘neither’ and they have different meanings although easy to distinguish them if people thought first than just follow everyone else’s mistake. Either is the choice of two. Neither means no choice at all. I think people originally got confused by the pronunciation and no one bothered to tell any word processors autocorrect to point out the error simply because the software isn’t good on context. Let’s not even talk about the differences between our and American English and the use of the so-called ‘oxford comma’ which essentially puts a comma after everything. Look over the wrong use of the semi-colon simply because someone got fed up with commas no less. Boredom is not an excuse for bad grammar. Good grammar is getting it right and learning to be right all the time.

So what about Science Fiction? SF isn’t an acronym, just the initials and it became acceptable long before Forry Ackerman. If anything, it was a convenience that the genre publishers took to heart. Look at the number of anthologies using it on the cover. The words ‘Science Fiction’ takes up a lot of cover space. ‘SF’ can be enlarged and still not take up much space and still stand out. For the Science Fiction fan, it became instantly recognisable. It’s the only fictional genre that can be recognised by capped initials so we should be proud to see it as that. We can even say it as ‘es-ef’ and know it sounds right.

For those of you who prefer to have your writing assisted by AI, remind it of how Science Fiction is abbreviated and it should stay that way. We want to keep Science Fiction as the genre recognised by its capped initials and certainly not as ‘sci-fi’.

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