[j. d. worthington]

Well, the reason I brought Ellison up on this is that he made the point rather well; at least for a very long time, "sci-fi" was the idiot brother in the field. Though it's fading slowly, there's still quite a bit of truth to that generalization. (Not all generalizations are to automatically dismissed. The reason some of them stick around is because they do have a fair amount of validity.)

And I don't think we're talking adolescents here, but permanent adolescents... those who don't mature emotionally; the sorts who really don't see anything wrong with the misogynistic nature of so much of the slasher genre, but who simply love the gory effects; and the ones who don't just enjoy Star Trek (or Star Wars), but who make it a permanent way of life rather than becoming involved in the real thing make changes in what they don't like.

Unfortunately, "sci-fi" still tends to attract huge numbers of such (which is why sf, horror, fantasy, and splatter films all get lumped together so often, in my opinion); more so than any other branch of literature or the visual media. So I'll stick with using "sf" for science fiction, to stress the encouragement of critical thinking, use of science, and questioning nature of the field and differentiate between that and the often "bubble-gum" mentality that, sadly, remains not only the general public's view of the whole thing, but is all-too-often well-merited.