stef n.

Stef Gets in Your Eyes (Weaver Wright). [This spelling appears in the Table of Contents; on page 4 it is ‘Stf Gets in Your Eyes’.]

Now I certanly [sic] won’t deny that Campbell is a pretty sharp editor & has given us not only the most consistently good stef on the market but also a good deal of variety. [Ibid. 14] My gosh, what is this magazine coming to? I’v [sic] spent the last 3½ pp. talking about stef, of all things.

There is reason to believe that if the questionees had been allowed to name fifteen or twenty, there would be much solider agreement on the outstanding stef stories of all time.

I noticed a lot of fen wondering what happened to Kennedy. Apparently you fellers haven’t heard Joe has quit acti[-]fanning. His reasons seem to be college, and that too much of one thing (stef, in this instance) is bad for a person. It’s really a loss to Fandom.

HELLFLOWER falls into the right, exactly the right, category. The people who call stefpulps childish should read this—it’s a type of realistic stef that I think is perfect for the mature reader of fiction, not to the childish, inane person who drivels ‘I read science fiction because it improves my mind’—or ‘stef is tomorrow’s world today’—or ‘let’s keep science fiction nice and clean’. [Ibid. 137/2] Someday, Sam, will you tell these kids that no advice on ‘how to write a stef story’ from either a fan, or from a professional writer, is any good at all? [...] THE ONLY WAY TO WRITE A STEF STORY IS TO WRITE IT—and damn the torpedoes. Torpedoes, in this case, being the salable tricks of other writers.

Twitchy laughed sarcastically. ‘Look, Joe, if you’re going to bring up that cockeyed contraption of yours again, I’ll crown you with a complete file of Galaxy. If you’d quit readin’ that stuff, as you call it, and do a little figuring on paper, maybe we’d do better in the numbers.’ ‘It ain’t stuff,’ said Joe petulantly, ‘it’s stf... stef... s-t-f.’ ‘I kin spell!’ said Twitchy bel ligerantly. ‘It’s the numbers that don’t come out right . . .’

[Parody of West Side Story] When you’re in stef, you’re in stef all the way / From the Big Little Books to a pad in L.A.— / When you’re in stef you’re incurably in— / You’ve got stef in your blood, you can’t quit, it’s a sin. [...] When you’re in stef you stay in stef!

And then, consider scientifiction. That got trimmed down to stf. In conversation, pronounced ‘stef’—and sometimes spelled that way.

American genre writers have kept whatever thoughts they were having on the Revolutions (Youth, Sexual, Black, Psychedelic, et al.) pretty much to themselves [...] [T]he publishers have clearly been convinced that Hip is Hip and Stef is Stef, and never the twain. But the category gap is closing: one of the four crossover novels on hand today was published by Pyramid as part of their regular s-f line.

The year in which the University of Stef was founded is unknown, but many reliable authorities give it as April, 1926. Its primary campus is located in the Everglades Swamp (or Fen). [...] The University is governed by a Board of Trustees, who are subject in their actions to the veto of the President Emeritus—Hugo Gernsback[.] Current Trustees are John W. Campbell, Jr., Frederik Pohl., Edward L. Ferman, Michael Moorcock, and other notables.

The cover of Planets Three inexplicably shows Lester del Rey attempting to fend off an advancing tentacular robot with a dish of catfood, but the stories are by Frederik Pohl. [...] They are pretty good thud-and-blunder stef, nevertheless, and if you’re in the right mood, they will Do the Job.