Star Wars and Star Trek and those heinous others have revitalized the field. Go back and look at how many SF books were being published before Star Trek and Star Wars, and what kind of advances the writers of those books were making, then look at the boom that Gene and George helped usher in, and the numbers that followed. Not everybody who knows the Vulcan hand salute, or believes in the Force, will go on to marvel at the witches of Dune , but some of them will - and a lot of them already have. Everybody has to start somewhere, and our field would not have blossomed as it did without the visual media s help. And probably read Conan or Tarzan or Flash Gordon.
Nothing is what.
Not a thing. They sneer at anybody who not one of the Chosen. They spit at writers who stoop to produce popular fiction, and that includes anybody who sells more than four copies of his or her latest, from Stephen King on down. It doesn t help that some of these fans are also writers, and get their opinions into print. At the World Science Fiction Convention in Miami, back in the late 70s, I sat and listened as an auditorium full of fans booed the producer of Star Wars when he came to collect an award they d voted to his movie.