Fantasy & SF
I've been a reader and writer of fantasy and SF
(that is, science fiction) since grade school, though you really
don't want to see the SF/mystery series I wrote back in fifth grade.
I discovered the Dungeons & Dragons games in junior high,
and have been an avid if irregular gamer ever since. I read
voraciously -- about which more elsewhere -- and have been at least
loosely involved in SF conventions for a number of years now.
I write SFnal (or "filk") song lyrics (and sing them, not very well,
at the aforementioned conventions).
If you're already familiar with the SF fan
community, the above will have made perfect sense. If, on the
other hand, the foregoing paragraph reads like a foreign language,
click on one or more of the links to the left for introductions to
some of SF's more entertaining subcultures.
First Contact (In Cyberspace)
I originally fell into cyberspace by way of the Genie computer
network -- then called GEnie, back when it was owned by General
Electric. This was back before AOL or even Prodigy (though not
quite before CompuServe) had been invented, and long before everyone
and his uncle had discovered the World Wide Web. At the
time, GEnie's text-based interface, though not exactly state of the
art, was right up there with the best in online communication, and
the management was recruiting SF writers with great enthusiasm.
GEnie finally bit the dust late in 1999; while it had spiraled into
a shadow of its best and most vibrant self, the SFRT (Science
Fiction RoundTable) was, right up to the end, one of the brightest
and best-focused SF-writing communities in all the wired worlds. Now
its former denizens prowl SFF Net,
LiveJournal, and other
online services, all convivial but none quite the equal of the
original.
One aspect of the GEnie community that I've never seen replicated
in any other on-line setting was its tendency to generate
interactive fiction --sometimes "fanfic", with characters borrowed
from TV and literary sources, and sometimes original material, with
online counterparts of the authors created for the occasion.
It's hard to describe how it worked, and in large part it worked
because of GEnie's unique bulletin-board structure. But it
produced epics and wonders, from baroque costume balls to extended
Tolkienesque parodies to hamster opera to some of the wildest
"crossover" stories you could possibly imagine. Imagine the
entire Warner Brothers stable of cartoon characters saving the
U.S.S. Enterprise from the Borg ("Carrot juice, Earl Grey.
Hot."), or nearly every spy and SF hero in the history of television
teaming up to save the multiverse from the combined evil of James
Moriarty and Morgan le Fay. Outrageous? Darn right.
Silly? Frequently. Brilliant? More often than you'd
expect. [The MUDs and MUCKs out there on the 'Net are probably
the closest parallel, but from what little I've absorbed about
those, they're still not quite the same order of creation.]