Science & Tech Quote by Fred Saberhagen

A throwaway line like this lands because it’s doing two jobs at once: mapping a social ecosystem and quietly puncturing the myths we tell about it. Saberhagen, a working genre novelist who came up in the thick of mid-century fandom, isn’t describing some quirky Venn diagram for trivia night. He’s pointing to a lived reality of conventions: the same faces, the same energy, the same intensely self-organized community, whether the banner reads “dragons” or “starships.”

The intent is observational, but the subtext carries a knowing wink. Fantasy and science fiction have long been marketed (and argued over) as rival kingdoms with different aesthetics and values: pastoral magic versus technological awe, myth versus modernity. Saberhagen shrugs at that border. At cons, the supposed divide collapses into what actually matters: shared habits of imagination, collecting, debating canon, and building identity around stories that take the real world and bend it.

Context matters here because conventions are not neutral marketplaces; they’re social infrastructure. They’re where readers become networks, where writers become accessible, where “genre” becomes less a shelf label than a form of belonging. By stressing overlap, Saberhagen also undercuts the status games that pop up inside fandom itself: the impulse to rank subgenres, to gatekeep legitimacy, to pretend one crowd is cooler or smarter. The line’s power is its casualness. It doesn’t argue. It reports. And in reporting, it reveals how artificial many of the cultural partitions are once you step into the room.