Science Fiction Culture

Science Fiction Culture is the 2000 Camille Bacon-Smith ethnographic study of contemporary SF fandom, the follow-up volume to her foundational Enterprising Women (1992) that mapped the women's media-fandom communities. The new book widens the lens to cover SF fandom more broadly: the convention-circuit economy, the publishing-and-fandom relationship, the way certain books and authors get embedded in fan-community memory and others do not.

Bacon-Smith's strength in Science Fiction Culture is the same as in Enterprising Women: the participant-observation rigor. She has been a member of the communities she studies for decades and her methodological commitment is at the level of the academic anthropology and sociology traditions she draws on. The chapters on convention culture, on the politics of fan-pro relationships, and on the ways fan-history gets transmitted across generations are some of the strongest writing on the form. Fans of Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers or Constance Penley's NASA/Trek will recognize the careful media-studies tradition.

The book is now more than two decades old and the platforms have shifted entirely. The methodological foundation has aged remarkably well.

Four stars. A serious academic-popular hybrid book on a community most academic publishing ignored at the time. Recommended to anyone interested in media studies, fan culture, or SF community history. The Science Fiction Culture Camille Bacon-Smith volume is the companion to Enterprising Women; read both for the fullest sense of her project.