And I am finding some absolute gems; fan work that probably should see wider circulation or maybe it does. It just doesn’t get to me.
You see I have lived in relative isolation my whole life. Growing up in Alice Springs I was well into my teens by the time we got commercial television.
I only have 3-4 early copies of Aurealis because newsagents seemed to get them in intermittently, and its always been too bloody expensive to go anywhere from Alice Springs – still is in fact.
The Internet coincided with the start of my university degree and here I am nearly 20 years later, in the middle of a wheat field in rural SA, having just finished an interview with an award winning novelist, in another country, via Skype( that cost me nothing).
The world is at my fingertips or it should be.
I am reading Issue 82 of SF Commentary, part of the 40th Anniversary Edition. Yep a fan mag that has been running 40 years. And I am blown away by the history, the quality of the writing and the contributors. Last year’s editions are available free of charge online here.
I can’t help thinking though that we should be paying for this stuff and that a blog web page with web 2.0 functionality advertising its existence, wouldn’t be too bad an idea either. Working out how to make it available in ebook formats might be worthwhile as well. Indeed perhaps this is a topic for a fan panel/workshop?
This sort of work deserves wider distribution.
I am not convinced that the internet necessarily expands the SF & F community, rather than just creating a community that just happens to exist in Cyberspace. Your thoughts?
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