From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Alternative reality v SF
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:48:59 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ernest Lilley" <elilley at mindspring.com>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 3:04 AM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Alternative reality v SF

> Mike B. Sed: <<I don't think that we should recategorize stories just
> because the future that they were about is now in our past, from a
calendar
> standpoint anyway.>>
>
> Sure. That's only reasonable for anything written before AR got popular.
I'm
> of the opinion that more and more SF will think of itself as AR so as to
> prolong its shelf life.
>
> When I read SF about the near future I wonder about the possibility it
might
> be actually prescient, but when I read retro SF, I wonder if it might
have
> happened if things had been different...which has an AR ring to it.

Pick up a copy of a 1929 or 1930 isasue of AIR WONDER STORIES (which later
in 1930 merged with SCIENCE WONDER STORIES to become just plain WONDER
STORIES) and check out the fantastic aircraft predicted for our future --
which never actually occurred.   I'm not talking about personal helicopters
of rocket back-packs.  I'm talking about airliners with passengers riding
*inside* the wings (with windows in the leading edges), or a dozen engines
w/propellors mounted on each wing -- pointing *up*.  Ocean liners of the
air....

I started collecting such magazines in the early '50s -- only a bit over 20
years after they were published -- but I was already living in a vastly
different "alternative reality" from that depicted in those magazines.  It
stretched my sense of wonder more than a little.

--Ted White