Word: fictional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Scifipedia, an online biographical dictionary, defines Ackerman first as "American fan." That's good enough. As much as almost any writer in the field, he created a devoted, informed audience for speculative fiction. If he didn't coin the term "sci-fi" - Robert Heinlein used it first - then by using the phrase in public in 1954 he instantly popularized it (to the lasting chagrin of purists, who preferred "SF"). Forry, as everyone called him, was the genre's foremost advocate, missionary and ballyhooer. His love for the form, stretching back more than 80 years, godfathered and legitimized the obsessions...
...contest in the San Francisco Chronicle with a story about a voyage to Mars; and founded The Boys Scientifiction Club ("I would have included girls but at that time female fans were as rare as unicorns' horns."). His dream of bringing together the writers and readers of science fiction was starting to bloom. He brought his young friend Ray Bradbury to the Clifton's Cafeteria Science Fiction Club, hangout of Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, Fredric Brown and other future giants of the genre. He bankrolled Bradbury's own fan magazine, Futuria Fantasia...
...That was 1939, when Ackerman and his friend Myrtle R. Douglas attended the first World Science Fiction Convention in Manhattan - both dressed in space suits. (Trekkies, now you know who originated that imaginative eccentricity.) In a 1996 interview with Ed Grant of the New York City cable access show Media Funhouse, Ackerman recalled that 165 people attended the confab. "We had a banquet so expensive that only 29 of us could afford it," he told Ed. "I couldn't even afford to lend the money to Ray Bradbury, 'cause it was one dollar a plate. Of course no food...
...many fan-dults of a certain age, Forry is revered for Famous Monsters. Its first issue came out in February 1958; it lasted nearly 30 years. The first serious (but never solemn) magazine devoted to horror and science fiction movies, FM included appreciations of old and new films, interviews with the genre's actors, directors, writers and special-effects men, all informed by the ripe musings and unabashed enthusiasm of its editor. The photos often came from Ackerman's archive; his collection was likely the world's largest in its category...
...fandroids, Ackerman actually got married. His wife Wendayne, four years older than Forry, translated SF novels by the German authors Karl Herbert Scheer, Kurt Mahr and Walter Ernsting. She died in 1990 and is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, Calif., under the marker "Wife of Mr. Science Fiction." On his MySpace page, Forry wrote: "My life companion, Wendayne (the only one in the world) Ackerman, as the aftermath of a mugging in Italy, died some years ago, but not before translating 150 sci-fi novels from French & German, moonlighting while teaching for 20 years at university...