The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word: call it Pop!

Once upon a time, Pop was the complement, or maybe supplement, of Mom. Today it is simply the opposite: any opposite, (Anything Mom doesn't like can't be all bad.) Since it sometimes needs Susan Sontag to explain it, Pop does not always mean 'popular'. Possibly the etymology is the third term of Snap! Crackle ! Pop! characteristics are: colourfulness (visual or audible); an illusion of unpredictability achieved by the quantification of the commonplace (multiply the Campbell Soup can — amplify the 4/4 march beat — divide Batman into his component dots — ); and ideally, a certain glossiness typical of the classical (pre-TV, or "Gutenberg') decades of magazine and cereal-box advertising.

Neither technical nor contextual quality are significant Pop criteria. Content (or innate message) is permissible if it did not originate with the designer, producer, or arranger, and does not distract attention from the arrangement, display, or happening.

Much of it is ingenious: almost all of it is cheerful.