The Okal Rel Universe in evolution and in the world.
Archives
The Okal Rel Universe
Lynda Williams Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing Sumptuosity The Alien Next Door
|
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Cory Doctorow Featured by Locus
Reproducing, below, a message sent out on Cory Doctorow's mailing list about his appearance in Locus. I like the man's style. Particularly like the bit about "A lot of things that look like fringe activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor to mainstream activity." This is an all together happier and more me-compatible message about the future of reading than the "Walmart Mafia" or "Poor Man's Movie" one. Locus Magazine has posted an excerpt from the interview they've run with me as their cover story for January: "My dad is a mathematician and teacher and my mom is a teacher, and I grew up in a political household: my folks are Trotskyists. My dad used to change 'Conan' stories into socialist parables. He would change Conan into this gender- and racially-balanced threesome called Harry, Larry, and Mary, and on long car trips he would retell these half-remembered 'Conan' stories but they would all turn into the proletariat casting off their shackles, killing the king, and forming soviets! These days, I like to think that I haven't moved to the right but at right angles to left-wing politics. But listening to his stories probably had something to do with my becoming a speculative fiction writer. "The world changes completely every five or six years, but most people don't notice. A lot of things that look like fringe activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor to mainstream activity. While we weren't looking, e-books have become the dominant form of text on the planet. What we haven't done is create a class of writers who identify what they're doing when they produce the text as book writing. How do we create a class of well-paid, professional Web writers? Even if we can't, there may be a way to create hobby income and continue this really amazing Cambrian Explosion of new documents, information, articles, and stories that are published on the Web. "People today spend as much time as they can possibly drag themselves away from the real world to sit in front of the screen reading text, and I would argue that the text they are reading, the thing they are treating like a book, is a book. Our definition of the term has gone through radical shifts over the years. Dickens's were originally newspaper serials, thousand-word chunks.
Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post: |