Apex Book Company

I still think it’s an April Fools joke that was released into the wild too early: Sci Fi Channel Aims to Shed Geeky Image With New Name.

And the new name is? Syfy. Syfy. As award-winning science fiction author John Scalzi has pointed out, this term is used in Poland to refer to crusty, scabby venereal diseases. The singular form, syf, is also used to refer to mess, junk, crap, filth, etc. Sure, you can copyright it, but would you really want to?

And the new tag line? “Imagine Greater.” Imagine Greater. That makes the grammarian in me want to curl up like the entomologist in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon. Think fingernails on a chalkboard and you’ve got something close to what this phrase does to my brain every time I read it.

For me, even worse than the change itself was the reason behind the change. In the article above, the spokesperson offhandedly insults fans of science fiction (isn’t this their target market?) by categorizing them as dysfunctional and antisocial, stating that the channel has been trying to distance itself from “science fiction” because it’s too limiting and turns too many people off. There’s also a bizarre claim that “Syfy” is how the 18-to-34 demographic would text the name of the channel or the words “science fiction,” somehow ignoring that “SF” requires typing two fewer characters.

Now, I know that the science fiction genre has a history of being a ghetto. Many authors (Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale among other science fiction-y yarns, always comes to mind) claim that they’re not writing science fiction in order to avoid being stigmatized as being part of the rockets-and-aliens crowd. It’s true that books with science fiction elements (The Time Traveler’s Wife, anyone?) that are marketed as fiction tend to have better sales. This is why many such books (think Jurassic Park and its myriad sequels) are marketed as “thrillers” rather than straight-up science fiction. Wandering through the fiction section of a bookstore these days, you can pick up books about vampires, demons, cloning, time travel, angels, people with super powers, and futuristic technology (which may or may not have been reverse engineered from crashed alien spacecrafts). It’s not clear that there’s much difference between these books and those shelved in the science fiction/fantasy section beyond how they’re marketed.

This change from “Sci Fi” to “Syfy” is also a marketing decision. But for a channel that is (supposedly) already targeted toward the rockets-and-aliens crowd, it seems to alienate the very demographic they serve. Then again, I hear the Sci Fi channel shows wrestling, now. Hm.

So: April Fools joke or sad failure of marketing? Or is this change something you could live with? Sound off!