Frank Kogan

Might "spillover" be a better term, for not implying a particular direction? According to Wikip the term originates as a typo in the title of Lee Jacobs' early '50s unpublished article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music." My objection to "influence" in this title isn't our usual one but that it implies that the direction is from sf to folk. Whereas, if in the '50s and '60s a lot of sf fans are folkies and a lot of sf writers listen to folk, similar themes and references are likely to show up in both, e.g. gibes at conformity taking the form in each of a depiction of a conformist, dystopian near future.

But I wasn't knowledgeable or perceptive enough back then to identify actual spillover,* if there was any, and I surely don't know if there's now interplay and spillover between filk and folk and indie and fandom. There obviously are fans of sf who are fans of "folk" in its modern, quasi-"indie" form (Paul Krugman sometimes mentions sf on his blog, citing Asimov's Foundation trilogy as one of his original inspirations for going into social science and also giving kudos and references to Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks; meanwhile, on Fridays he posts Friday Night Music videos which lean towards fun but staid indie folk of the Civil Wars ilk). I wouldn't be utterly surprised were there folkies who participate in fandom who participate in filk who participate in indie who participate in folk, but I don't know this.

(Unfortunately, I sometimes forget to save my comments to my clipboard before hitting submit, and lj has been sabotaging me a lot in the last few days — though perhaps the sabotage has been to my benefit, by forcing me to continually rewrite.)

*Or maybe I was informed and perceptive enough and the reason I didn't identify it was that it wasn't there in a very big way: my peak of listening to folk and my peak of reading sf were more or less at the same time, ages 8 to 12, 1962 to 1966. Fwiw I think the Kingston Trio hold up better than do Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, who at my age 13 began to seem psychologically too shallow for me. I should reread John Wyndham; I'm one of the maybe-not-so-few who knows the passage in Wyndham's Chrysalids that Paul Kantner is quoting in "Crown Of Creation." (A favorite Jefferson Airplane moment comes on 30 Seconds Over Winterland when, right after Paul Kantner and Grace Slick intone "In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds," a (possibly sotted) Grace interrupts herself to say, "I can't either.") —My mentioning the Jefferson Airplane here is something of a tangent, since I wouldn't say that they were ever folk-rock, even though I've read some people claiming that that's a reasonable assessment of their starting point. Kantner was obviously into sf, and I wonder if he's subsequently participated at all in fandom.