Transcribe
Translate
Acolyte, v. 4, issue 1, whole no. 13, Winter 1946
More information
digital collection
archival collection guide
transcription tips
Then the functions for wich such a system should be suitable are these (nach Don Bratton): 1. As brief descriptive labels for astories. 2. As keys whereby a story, whose title and author and source have been forgotten, can be found thru memory of the principal ideas or theme of the story. 3. To group stories so that readers are led to related stories which might interest them. All very well, but when you start trying to make such a system, it improves very difficult. The linear arrangement of numbers means that each heading can only be continuous to two others, though some, such as extra-sensory perception, are closely related to several more. Yet somehow, the field of fantasy fits itself into such structure remarkably well. One soon finds that many of the traditional headings are useless. In the realm of the supernatural (which has always been the hardest field of fantasy to reduce to orderly array), the terms we inherit from medieval writers show that, whatever the virtues of the primitive mind in imagination, analysis was not their forte. Necromancy, witchcraft, divination; powers of good and evil; Mephistopheles, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer; they are hopelessly confused, overlapping, inclusive of each other, and sometimes over-precise. Moreover, the dualistic bias of the human mind has given us, in commentaries on science-fiction, too many categories with only two subdivisions instead of nearly nine. Locale: terrestrial, extra-terrestrial; space flight: interplanetary, interstelar. Such commentaries, too, have given us over-refined categories. Our friend who is groping for a yarn he vaguely remembers is not likely to recall whether it was on a merely invisibility by chemical means and invisibility by electrical means are not noticeably different. One is forced back on practical considerations. It is not a matter of drawing up a philosophically ideal system, but of finding categories which will break stories (written and soon to be written) into groups small enough to be searched through and large enough that one needn't be a medieval scholar and Doctor of Science in half-a-dozen fields to find the exact pigeonhole for an off-trail novel. That classification system is best which best meets the test of use. Make that test, and I believe you'll find decimal classification a great improvement over the traditional system--or lack of it. ----oOo---- A DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION OF FANTASY, by Samuel D. Russell -oOo- This is a proposed final version of a decimal system for classifying and describing the elements of fantasy in any novel, story, poem, or drama in the fields of scientific fiction, weird fiction, and pure fantasy. It is intended for use in bibliographies and story-indexes as shorthand method of describing subject-matters in fantastic fiction. When more than one classification-number is needed to describe a story fully, they may be separated by obliques (or if the initial digits are the same, they may be omitted in the second number and a hyphen substituted). Preceding the first number in the series comes the lower-case letter indicating the time-period(s) in which precedes the decimal system below; and after the final number, if necessary, will come the appropriate capital letter indicating humor, juvenile, etc. Example: Things to Come would be j23/24/25/33/11.1. TEMPRAL CLASSIFICATION a - Early life on earth (through amphibians) b - The dinosaur period -- 4 --
Saving...
prev
next
Then the functions for wich such a system should be suitable are these (nach Don Bratton): 1. As brief descriptive labels for astories. 2. As keys whereby a story, whose title and author and source have been forgotten, can be found thru memory of the principal ideas or theme of the story. 3. To group stories so that readers are led to related stories which might interest them. All very well, but when you start trying to make such a system, it improves very difficult. The linear arrangement of numbers means that each heading can only be continuous to two others, though some, such as extra-sensory perception, are closely related to several more. Yet somehow, the field of fantasy fits itself into such structure remarkably well. One soon finds that many of the traditional headings are useless. In the realm of the supernatural (which has always been the hardest field of fantasy to reduce to orderly array), the terms we inherit from medieval writers show that, whatever the virtues of the primitive mind in imagination, analysis was not their forte. Necromancy, witchcraft, divination; powers of good and evil; Mephistopheles, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer; they are hopelessly confused, overlapping, inclusive of each other, and sometimes over-precise. Moreover, the dualistic bias of the human mind has given us, in commentaries on science-fiction, too many categories with only two subdivisions instead of nearly nine. Locale: terrestrial, extra-terrestrial; space flight: interplanetary, interstelar. Such commentaries, too, have given us over-refined categories. Our friend who is groping for a yarn he vaguely remembers is not likely to recall whether it was on a merely invisibility by chemical means and invisibility by electrical means are not noticeably different. One is forced back on practical considerations. It is not a matter of drawing up a philosophically ideal system, but of finding categories which will break stories (written and soon to be written) into groups small enough to be searched through and large enough that one needn't be a medieval scholar and Doctor of Science in half-a-dozen fields to find the exact pigeonhole for an off-trail novel. That classification system is best which best meets the test of use. Make that test, and I believe you'll find decimal classification a great improvement over the traditional system--or lack of it. ----oOo---- A DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION OF FANTASY, by Samuel D. Russell -oOo- This is a proposed final version of a decimal system for classifying and describing the elements of fantasy in any novel, story, poem, or drama in the fields of scientific fiction, weird fiction, and pure fantasy. It is intended for use in bibliographies and story-indexes as shorthand method of describing subject-matters in fantastic fiction. When more than one classification-number is needed to describe a story fully, they may be separated by obliques (or if the initial digits are the same, they may be omitted in the second number and a hyphen substituted). Preceding the first number in the series comes the lower-case letter indicating the time-period(s) in which precedes the decimal system below; and after the final number, if necessary, will come the appropriate capital letter indicating humor, juvenile, etc. Example: Things to Come would be j23/24/25/33/11.1. TEMPRAL CLASSIFICATION a - Early life on earth (through amphibians) b - The dinosaur period -- 4 --
Hevelin Fanzines
sidebar
