Flying Cars and Food Pills

[Steve...@cs.com]

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

[Alicia Henn]

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

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[Pat Rapp]

This is way cool.  I'm looking forward to exploring this, as well. 

You rock, Steve.
:)

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[Steve...@cs.com]

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.