20 Things You Didn’t Know About... Science Fiction

Discover Magazine

6. Serious science-fiction heads say sci-fi carries schlocky, B-movie connotations. Many prefer the abbreviation SF.

From there a link to a marvelous NPR write-up of James Triptree Jr.'s secret real life.

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing." - Robert Silverberg

Somehow I had also missed this, important black science fiction writer Octavia Butler died in 2006 - audio. She was the first and only SF writer to receive a MacArther Foundation genius grant. She left a never finished novel Parable of the Trickster she had worked on off-and-on for years. Very surprising for me her last novel was a vampire science fiction tale - what would vampires try to genetically engineer?

The final transmission from Moonbase Alpha. Space: 1999 was an incredibly bad "science" fantasy series in the 70's. The science was so bad starting with the premise and with the bloopers on most shows... that words fail me. In 1999 some people connected with the show did a final wrap-up after twenty plus years for a convention on the date of the Moon explosion that started the series.

Some links from SF Signal.