The Amazing Stories of Corky Taylor

I interpret the story as being real. I mean, I just accept, for the story purposes, that everything is true.

-Stanley Kubrick

scientifiction (uncountable)

  1. (dated) science fiction. Early item of Terminology coined by Hugo Gernsback as a contraction of "scientific fiction" and thus defined by him in the first issue of Amazing Stories in April 1926 (see Definitions of SF). Gernsback dated his original coinage of the word to 1915, most probably referring to its appearance (in italics) in the opening paragraph of "Thought Transmission on Mars" (January 1916 Electrical Experimenter), the eighth episode of his Baron Muenchhausen's Scientific Adventures sequence. In 1924 he had solicited manuscripts for a proposed sf magazine to be titled Scientifiction, but this never appeared.

"Scientifiction" – variously abbreviated as stf or stef – never became a very popular term, and within a decade of its 1926 relaunch was largely replaced by "science fiction". If used at all by later commentators, it generally refers to the awkward, Technology-oriented fiction published by Gernsback or, disparagingly, to modern equivalents. However, in his preface to The Great Divorce: A Dream (1945 chap) C S Lewis cites – without disparagement – a story "read several years ago in a highly coloured American magazine of what they call 'Scientifiction'." Later attempts to re-establish the term in a positive sense have failed. [DRL/PN]

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Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˌsaɪ.ən.tɪˈfɪk.ʃən/

Don't forget, you don't know I'm here at all. No word of that fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell they did with me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this army. I'm not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamned Germans. Some day, I want them to rise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl 'Ach! It's the goddamned Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!'

Then there's one thing you men will be able to say when this war is over and you get back home. Thirty years from now when you're sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the great World War Two?' You won't have to cough and say, 'Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.' No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say 'Son, your granddaddy rode with the great Third Army and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named George Patton!'

— Gen. George S. Patton