Perhaps slightly ironically this posted came up very high when I googled my own name and I very happy to say that as of today Udy by itself now delivers the UYN page as a top hit. Wh00t!

That’ll be getting my music posted by a few bloggers and ending up on the Hype Machine then, sweeeeeet!

(1) There is a lot of great science fiction (great writing!) that is effectively lost; I wanted to bring it out of the used book stores where people could see it in a modern context and read about it.

(2) I have a certain mania for minutiae…

(3) I really do have this feeling I’ve seen [this technology, that event] before, and it’s not some sort of vague deja vu – I really have read about it before. Reading great sf writers has prepared me for the world we live in today. I wanted to credit the efforts of these terrific writers and futurists.

(4) I wanted to bring something unique into being. Around Christmas of 2003 I had this idea; a database of science fiction ideas and “inventions,” or as I call it, technovelgy. After building a database, populating it with articles about 450 items from a hundred books by fifty authors, I built the site, which went online in September of 2004. Technovelgy.com now has about 2,600 articles and stories (“blog posts” to you guys), along with thousands of comment pages and cross-reference pages.

(5) Creating things on the Internet is, for me, a perfect mix of programming and writing. I should confess; Technovelgy.com is really not strictly speaking a “blog,” it’s an application I’ve been building. It has a database architectue; it has lots of features (more coming – yes, I’ve been working on tagging). Back in the day, my SAT score was almost exactly balanced between the math/science and verbal parts; in college, I really couldn’t decide between physics and astronomy on the one hand, and philosophy and history on the other. The Internet gave me the perfect opportunity to balance these things out; making a website is part database architecture, part coding, part design and part writing. And the site itself, of course, is balanced between literature and science, and between what dedicated scientists do in the present and what creative authors dreamed in the past.

I’ve passed the challenge on to five other bloggers via email or notes on their sites.

It’s been an interesting exercise; it was a good time for me to think a bit about what I’m doing. Thanks, Paul.