May 12, 2007
Perhaps pounding my head against the wall will make the pain go away.
Some of you may know that Claudia, the missing third of Halfway Down the Danube, once met British humorist Terry Pratchett at one of these convention things. (Thanks to Carrie for the link.) I couldn't believe the article -- literally, I couldn't believe in its existence. Now con-going has made the New York Times Travel section? Because really, once you've seen all the covered bridges in New England, what's left. I look forward to science fiction fandom's infiltration into the Times's Vows section, The Ethicist, and especially Modern Love. "Hi, I'm a 56-year-old fan and numismatic expert who was recently ordained in the Chaldean Orthodox church. Lately I've been experiencing an irresistible compulsion to..."
But that's not the funny part. (Well, it is funny, in a Shakes the Clown sort of way.) This is the funny part:
But on Saturday afternoon, after lecturing on deep-space colonization, Les Johnson, the manager of NASA’s science programs and projects at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., lamented what he saw as a generational shift in fans’ interests. "I see a lot of young people here gaming, but I don’t see a lot of the younger folks here for the science fiction," said Mr. Johnson, who has been attending conventions since his own adolescence in the 1970s. "That bothers me, because the dreaming is what interested me in getting into physics. If they aren’t reading the stuff, where are our next-generation physicists and NASA engineers going to come from?"You know, I have a sister with a degree in aerospace engineering. She designed space missions for her senior thesis. Do you know how much interest she has in science fiction? Take a guess. The answer is below the fold.
Update: two trolls in twelve hours over the weekend! now deleted. People are dumb.
Posted by coyu at May 12, 2007 04:03 AMI would go to a convention thingy right now if I could. I wouldn't even have to wash the blood out of my hair, am I right? You know, 48 hours of excellent schedule II drugs is quite a bit of a thing. I feel like I am at one of those silent retreat thingies. Oh, thingy. Oh, I am so high.
Posted by: lalaloca at May 12, 2007 05:55 AMDon't you know there's pre-cyclamate-ban Tab in the con-suite? You know, next to the chips and the dips. And there are *plenty* of streamlined prophylactics for all those interstellar satyrs!
Oy vey iz mir.
Posted by: The New York City Math Teacher at May 12, 2007 03:28 PMI'd actually pay to watch someone drink forty-year-old diet cola.
Posted by: Carlos at May 13, 2007 02:50 AMThis generated two trolls? Somebody must be keeping tabs on you, if you'll pardon the pun.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 13, 2007 04:48 PMBernard, no kidding. But they're the same goobers from Usenet.
Posted by: Carlos at May 13, 2007 07:10 PMI'll take this as empirical proof that U.S. unemployment benefits are too generous. Either that or the Census is seriously undercounting the "living in the basement at 40" crowd.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 14, 2007 05:44 PMYou know, once you remove the fallacy and the exaggeration for rhetorical effect, the man might have a slight glimmering of a point. Is it not innately ridiculous that there may be small to medium sized relationship between entertainment media and peoples choice of careers, or am I missing something?
Posted by: king-walters at May 21, 2007 11:06 PMThere are seven million scientists in the United States, eighty percent of whom became so within the last twenty years.
There are perhaps one hundred thousand core readers of science fiction in this country, most of whom are older than I am. I'd say twenty percent are younger than 40, and this might be very optimistic.
20K / 5.6M = 0.4%. That's not a relationship, it's an error bar.
In 1970, when there were a few hundred thousand scientists in the U.S., and a few hundred thousand core science fiction readers, Johnson might have had a point. I don't doubt there was significant overlap then.
But these days, you could drop the whole core SF readership into the scientific community -- many of whom are as suited for scientific enterprise as they would be for fighting oil well fires -- and it would be less than a year's worth of science graduates in the United States.
Two sets of demographics have changed, and both not in science fiction's favor.
Posted by: Carlos at May 21, 2007 11:41 PMI'm sorry, I really must be missing something. I can't see where in the article Sci-fi literature in particular was specified, as opposed to Sci-fi media in general. The comparison I was using was between the viewership of Star Trek and the total number of scientists in the USA, not the Sci-Fi readership.
Dude. It's right there in the pullout quote: "That bothers me, because the dreaming is what interested me in getting into physics. If they aren’t reading the stuff, where are our next-generation physicists and NASA engineers going to come from?"
Emphasis added.
Posted by: Carlos at May 22, 2007 02:21 AM...
How embarrassing. I must have mentally substituted "consuming" for "reading", or missed the second part of the quote entirely. This kind of thing always happens to me.
Having accounted for that, though, you can see where I was coming from, though, right? I mean, people's media exposure influencing their career choices isn't an entirely stupid idea, is it?
Posted by: king-walters at May 22, 2007 09:53 AM