Wow Steve! This is what R-SPEC was origibally founded for - to bring respect to a oft-scoffed genre. You are inspiring me to get on my butt and get writing again. It will take me a little while to check all this out first, though. Amazing.
Alicia > On Jan 22, 2015, at 4:03 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > Hi guys, > > I know I seem to have dropped off the face of the world and there’s no good > excuse for that. All I can say is that I went into hermit mode immersed in > several semi-related projects. Finally, finally, finally, they’re ready to > show to people. Not complete, that’s a long way off, but the first bits are > past the draft stage. > > First is a website, Flying Cars and Food Pills. Yep, it’s about flying cars > and food pills. And robots, and rocketships, and ray guns. (Does it have a > pretentious subtitle? Of course it does: The Visionaries, Madmen, and > Tinkerers Who Created the Future That Never Was: A Celebration 1893-1962.) > It’s just what it says, glimpses of that cool and wonderful > future-that-should-have-been technology that is today inseparable from the > science fiction and science fiction writers who worshipped it. The Internet > doesn’t suffer from a lack of retrofuture sites but they mostly yank old > images out of context for you to laugh at. Our grandparents weren’t laughing. > They believed in marvels in a way we don’t. I’m trying to show the Future the > way they saw it, with fresh eyes and unjaded minds as the world was > re-created around them daily. > > That’s hard to do in slices online. What’s really needed is a book. I started > one. A sample chapter is available for download through Amazon. Flying > Cars:The Miracle of Flight - In Your Driveway! (Where else could I start?) > > All this made me read and think about SF and its history, which led me down > the rabbit hole to yet another huge time sink. Gnome Press was one of the > publishing houses that fans started after WWII to finally put SF into > hardcovers. Gnome had all the biggest of names – Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, > Williamson, Leinster, Pohl, van Vogt, Simak, Moore, Kuttner, Leiber, Norton, > Brackett, Doc Smith; its history is most of the history of the field. I have > all the books and a new bibliography was needed. So I started the Gnome > PressRelease to cover each title. There’s now tens of thousands of words > piled up there and I’m only 20% of the way through. > > I’d love to get feedback from any and all of you. Opinions on what works and > what doesn’t would be great. Does anyone care about the reprints of old SF > and early movies, e.g.? Thoughts about stuff you’d like to see in the future > would be helpful, too. I expect to be adding at least one page a week from > now on. I’ll take requests if they fit in at all. New sections will be added > as well. Atomic Energy. The House of the Future. World’s Fairs. The source > material is endless. > > And if you like it, please help me get the word out. > > Steve > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
