Conversation

Speaking of escapism, Buck Rogers, who launched modern space fiction first appeared in 1929 at the start of the Great Depression, and Flash Gordon followed through the 30s. Unlike Jules Verne’s stuff which had a Victorian gentleman-adventurer thing going, it was modernist.
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Took over a hundred years to go from Verne’s 1865 From the Earth to the Moon, to Apollo 11 in 1969. Along the way, the speculative tech went from Newtonian to post-relativistic and the culture went from Victorian academic to modern military/cowboy. Buck Rogers appears at year 64
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It is fascinating that space fiction was inspiring the technological progress narrative for ~90y before Sputnik, and really boomed during a severe depression.
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Right now feels like 1929 in a few ways. Great Weirding instead of Great Depression. So for a naive extrapolation we should look ~64y back for inspiring visions ~36y out (so 1956 ideas about 2056 reality, but wildly extrapolated to 2200 imagining weird science)
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Conveniently, 1957 was Sputnik translating space from fantasy to reality. So we need an unrealistic and primitive (socially, technically) fantasy from 1956 or so. Hmm.
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Hmm. Science fiction was already a mature genre by then, with all modern subgenres already in place. Probably need to look elsewhere 🤔
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Though... you could argue that sociological science fiction began with Asimov’s foundation. It’s set in space and grows out of a robotics-and-longevity world that abandons robots and longevity, but is a speculative temporality technology thats *not* time travel.
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So let’s say Foundation is to social engineering fiction as Verne is to space fiction. Verne’s Impey Barbicane (who conceives the moonshot gun) is like Hari Seldon. Psychohistory is pre-chaos theory the way gun-launched space missions are pre-rocketry.
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Notably both are academic/professor/nerd types. So to do a Buck Rogers style reboot of social engineering temporality fiction, with a real post-chaos-theory psychohistory, we need a different kind of protagonist. And a different milieu, not a pair of foundations. 🤔
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This story I wrote in 2016 was me throwing my hat in the ring, and the stake in the ground for my temporality fiction extended universe (currently at 3 novel length outlines). I have a few more parts kinda almost written and ready to go.
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I’m considering starting a new paid email newsletter to serialize it and the rest of my temporality fiction extended universe. Ribbonfarm is not quite right for it. Asimov wrote most of his stuff in the golden age of serialized fiction in magazines likes Amazing/Astounding.
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Serialization is a really underrated way to do fiction. For some reason modern publishing has convinced us novels should be written in private and then released all at once to be binge read. Dunno why. Marketing simplicity?
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Dickens serialized, Asimov serialized... good enough precedents for me. I doubt we’ll get back an era of golden age style magazines. That energy has moved to TV. But email newsletters. Hmm. Really tempting place to experiment with serialization again.
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I find I really can’t do more than about 15,000 words without a publishing feedback loop and I’ve decided not to fight it. The one long book I wrote without such a loop (Tempo) was based on earlier “serialized” academic work produced as talks/papers so doesn’t count.
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