Thanks for the encouragement. I've been working on this months waiting for it to feel done enough to let others in. This is worse than fiction. This is a tiny fraction of the whole and the whole is going to be a complement to a book, so it's not ever going to be whole in itself but every portion of it has to be complete and perfect. But I had to release it at some point because it'll be ongoing forever. And I couldn't figure out a way to download myself with it so I can could take people aside and say, "what this really is all about..."
One of the things I hope to do is revise the placement of SF in culture. I want to show that it's not a lot of crazy Buck Rogers stuff that writers made up totally outside of reality, but a reflection of ideas and notions existing in newspapers, magazines, books, and visual media and presented by the most mainstream thinkers of their day. In that light, SF is just as much mimetic fiction as, say, Sinclair Lewis in the U.S. or Harold Nicolson in the U.K. The SF community isn't very helpful in this because they insist on saying, really boasting, that we did, really, make up this stuff up and where's our credit? Telling SF people that every one of their cherished ideas appeared in mainstream nonfiction before it did in fiction is going to be as hard as telling the mainstream world that SF is as intertwined with culture as with technology because American culture is always forward-looking. Anyway, have fun exploring. I'm working on more all the time. -- 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.
