BUCK ROGERS STUFF

from Fancyclopedia 2

What you are asked about when you mention stf to non-fans. "What, you read that crazy Buck Rogers stuff?" Crazy is not used in the bopster connotation. When Philip Nowlan wrote (in the August '28 and March '29 issues of Amazing) about the adventures of Anthony Rogers, an American World War I pilot transferred to the XXV Century (via a mine cave-in followed by suspended animation), neither he nor editor Gernsback dreamed of the frightful curse they were releasing on the stfnal world's public relations. Nowlan merely developed the idea that rocket guns (like the bazooka of 14 years later) and guerilla tactics would be hard for an enemy to handle with nothing but atomic weapons and aircraft, a thought which has occurred to modern military theorists too. Unhappily Captain Rogers lost his original Christianame and acquired the better-known one in a comic strip which was both the eponym and epitome of all the thud-and-blunder stf that ever poured from hackish typers, which is why you're still likely to find people, sufficiently shocked, expressing their horror in the sentence quasi-quoted above.