Reprint: Language

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Alfred Bester, Arthur C Clarke, Christopher Evans, Gardner Dozois, Gary Westfahl, Gene Wolfe, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harold Bloom, Russell Hoban, Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, William Shakespeare

Time for another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one was first published in Vector 187, February 1996.

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Histories

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Adam Roberts, Algis Budrys, Brian Aldiss, Donald Sassoon, Gary Westfahl, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester Del Rey, Mark Bould, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Sherryl Vint

I seem to have been immersed in various histories of science fiction lately. Or rather, since I still have my mind on the project I started but sort-of abandoned many years ago but can never quite bring myself to forget, I’ve found myself hyper-aware of historical perspectives on sf.

For a start, I have been working my way through Donald Sassoon’s monumental work, The Culture of the Europeans, a book that is so heavy it is almost impossible to carry, but that is unfailingly fascinating to read. And as I read through it, I keep being startled by ideas or bits of information that would belong in my own history of British science fiction. So I start to jot down notes. Unfortunately, my notes for the project are not actually in good order, there are three or four notebooks, scraps of paper, odd cuttings, and god knows how many pages of One Note, and I need to wrestle it all into some sort of shape.