The underlying theme of space and the military was not one that I set out to highlight in Debarkle. However, it runs through this story from the early chapters onwards. In Chapter 4, I discussed Sam Moskowitz’s 1954 history of fandom The Immortal Storm. In discussing international fandom, one of the groups Moskowitz highlighted was […]
In the last weeks of 2021 I attempted to write just one more chapter of the Debarkle series. It was poor timing and that additional chapter quickly spun out of control. So I put it aside and decided to return to it later on. The reason for the chapter was twofold. The initiating issue was […]
Mentally that is. Wright had been running Chris Chan’s 8 part set of essays on the Sad Puppy campaign (entitled “No Award”). At the end of the last post Wright added a comment on how the conflict could be encapsulated by two stories: “As a useful appendix to this series of columns, in this space […]
This is an automated post because I’m actually fast asleep. If my timing is correct then Chicon should have announced the Hugo finalists for 2021, so this is a post for initial reactions. Of course, I don’t know who the finalists are and I’m asleep but if you are reading this then you do know […]
Soft launches are trendy in marketing circles (or was that long lunches?). This time, this is more out of a vow to have this project all done before 2021 ends rather than cunning marketing. Currently, the final ebook version has hit a snag with Draft2Digital because their bots are picking up the shared content with […]
Through this saga, several key figures have been highlighted during the narrative. In this final chapter, we will see where each of them landed at the end of 2021. People and organisations are presented in the order that they appeared in the text. Worldcon and the Hugo Awards: The famous convention was scheduled to be […]
Worldbuilding is an important part of all fiction, the creation of imagined reality within which characters can interact and a plot unfold. While worldbuilding has a role in all genres, it is of particular importance within science fiction and fantasy where the departure from genuine reality is expected to be more profound and overt. If […]
[content warning: discussion of violence and murder] Robert Heinlein’s “crazy years” were a period in his extrapolation of history into the future where rapid technological change would accompany a period of cultural and social decline. The idea resembles aspects of accelerationism[1] and the sense of galloping technological change and social unrest is one the world […]
The exact start of the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t known. At the time of writing this chapter (November 2021), it is believed that via some means a variant of a coronavirus found in other mammals made its way into the human population[1]. A less likely possibility (on current evidence) is that the virus outbreak was due […]
In the previous parts of this story, we traced the precursors to a culture war within (primarily US) science-fiction fandom, the eruption of that culture war into a specific dispute over the Hugo Awards and then the aftermath of that dispute during the years of the Donald Trump Presidency. Historical stories do not have neat […]