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hyperpallium

> someone studying the history of scifi literature

would be an academic.

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No, could just as well be a sci-fi fan/reader.

I certainly did dug back for most genres I follow to earlier history of the genre.

I enjoy reading older SF too. A lot of SF is responding to older works, expanding or critiquing on their ideas.

Without the Foundation series, I doubt there'd be the Culture novels - or at least not in that form.

You can study things and not be called an academic. For instance if you enter a genre by force, you usually read some sort of chronology of best hits by the decades -- because there are many more books published to discover beyond this year.

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