[SFRA-L] the new SF Encyclopedia

[pierceqfpl at ewwpi.com]

One of my Facebook friends is David Gerrold. He wasn't too happy with his entry:

<<Some of the various SF "encyclopedias" are more about the author of the encyclopedia than they are about the authors who actually sit down and write books. 

 Over here, at my keyboard, I watch myself fight my way through a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a story--with the intention of keeping the language so clear and so readable that it looks effortless. It isn't. Making it look easy is a lot of hard work. 

 Here's what some of those academics miss. I really do know what I'm doing. I'm taking on different challenges. Challenges of voice, challenges of material, challenges of theme. Just like the Beatles vowed never to write the same song twice, I'm never going to write the same story twice. That's why Martian Child and thirteen o'clock are so different, why Digging In Gehenna is diffferent than Franz Kafka, Superhero. 

 But more than that, some of these academics don't dig very deep. Yes, the Chtorr series is evocative of Heinlein, but where Heinlein always stacked the deck in favor of his hero, I'm stacking the deck against mine. The Dingilliad is a Heinlein juvenile trilogy -- but again, it's a deconstruction of Heinlein and a reassembly in a new context. It's my comment on how I think these things could have and should have been done. And a sharp-eyed critic would have figured it out by now that there's a lot of meta- in my work.>>

--J.J.

-----Original Message-----
From: Easterbrook, Neil [mailto:n.easterbrook at tcu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 09:42 AM
To: sfra-l at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: [SFRA-L] the new SF Encyclopedia


Now launched in the beta version:http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

Hurrah!

--Neil


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