Sercon

Synonyms:
See also:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Sercon is a term in sf fandom that is short for "serious and constructive". It was initially a derogatory term, but later was used unironically. From Fancyclopedia:

"Sercon" was coined by insurgent Canadian fan Boyd Raeburn in the early 1950s as a put-down of overly serious fans (already being satirized by Los Angeles insurgents Charles Burbee and Francis T. Laney) because they tended to take not only science fiction but themselves and their involvement in fandom far too seriously – they valued making lists over genuine critical insight, would rather pontificate than tell a joke, looked askance at those whose approach was more lighthearted than their own and saw it as their scientifictionally patriotic duty to "promote" science fiction to the place where it belonged in mundane considerations, i.e., surely at the top of the pile of all Literature.... Beginning in some fan quarters as early as the 1960s and certainly by the time of the early 1970s, however, the term had lost much of its derisive clout, as newcomers misapplied it to straightforward works of serious and at least somewhat constructive criticism.