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.
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