I’ve got another blog on an entirely different subject which has been getting decent and growing traffic. This one, although still new, is dead as a doornail. So, I started doing a little research and found some good, if obvious, advice.
One bit of obviousness is “post every day, two or three times a day and never, ever stop”. Well, lord knows I’ve got enough to say about everything, so that shouldn’t be too big a problem. I’m starting that now.
Another bit was ‘pick a subject you know and like’. Again, obvious, but true nonetheless. Well, SF is something I know and like. But there’s 50 gazillion SF oriented blogs, many of them with built-in name recognition, so I need to be a little more focused than the entirety of an as yet undefined genre.
In thinking about what ‘kind’ of science fiction I enjoy the most (on a visual scale the differences between enjoy the most and and simply enjoy is measured in nanometers), I’d have to come down on the side of dystopian futures. You know, the world is falling apart, or has fallen apart, either from ecological disaster, alien invasion, runaway technology, disease, famine, pestilence or war. Or, the survivors are barely eeking out a living in the ruins or hiding in the walls of a conquering alien species.
Just off the top of my head, examples of this you may recognize: The Sheep Look Up by Brunner, Armageddon 2419 by Nowlan, Farnham’s Freehold by Heinlein, Alas, Babylon by Frank, The Postman by Brin, etc., etc. Not to mention numerous short stories that have mostly been passed over for decades (Tumithak of the Corridors by Tanner, for one).
So I like apocolyptic, armageddon-inspired, dystopian science fiction. I can’t be the only one judging by the number of successful novels and movies that have shared these themes.
I’ll be sharing more thoughts on this subject. At least three times a day…
