by Roberto Quaglia – roberto.info

Science fiction fans have been suffering, ever since the dawn of this genre of literature, from a rather sad complex: the awareness of living at the margins of the dominant culture, regarded with some snobbery if not full contempt by the habitués of the great literary prizes, not to mention Academy Award or Nobel Prize winners. A sort of “ghetto” complex, the awareness of being destined to stay confined forever in the extreme periphery of the dominant culture. In the SF community in time everybody has at some point complained bitterly about this exclusion, from Isaac Asimov down to the latest arrival in so-called fandom. Great authors like Kurt Vonnegut, who indeed have written science fiction, have repudiated the science-fictionality of their works for fear of being belittled.

And it was fatally inevitable that after decades of enduring humiliations one fine day someone in SF fandom would decide they had enough and that the moment of revenge had come, against a stolid and foolish world. And what better retaliation against an ungrateful world than to destroy it by the way of a nice world war? Continue reading →