 |
source
Mayness says: "Meta-blogging?
Now get back to writing." |
Time once more for a round of meta-blogging. Recently I've indulged in reflection and navel gazing in my
2015 year-in-review, after my
125th blog post of the year, my
500th total wikifiction blog post as well as my
1000th tweet. Now, the "special" occasion for this blog post is that Google servers have provided 100,000 page views for this blog.
In
20
15 I had a record number of blog posts,
152. All of these "milestones" took six years to accomplish, so it is obvious that I'm not exactly burning up the interwebs. Still, it intrigues me that about 100 people a day drop by and view a page or 2 on this blog. The wikifiction blog is essentially a self-indulgent diary, my personal playground, and it is a puzzling phenomenon that anyone besides me comes for a visit. I say, "Welcome!" to all fellow nerds.
 |
| I'm 18,455,795th but I try harder. |
 |
| The human family. |
Images
Like most primates, I'm quite visually oriented. I enjoy illustrating my blog posts and I suspect that many people who drop in here for a visit are following an image to its source. Most people arrive here via the Google internet search engine.
The most frequently used search term that brings people to this blog is "denisova hominin". Back in 2010 I posted some
brief comments about the importance of human evolution in
Foundations of Eternity, my fan-fiction sequel to
Isaac Asimov's
Foundation saga.
About the time that I started this blog I ended up with a Google+ account (I didn't even need to ask). Actually, I have 2;
one associated with my YouTube account and one that stems from my Gmail account. Some of the traffic to this blog comes by way of those Google+ accounts.
If Google is to be trusted, almost 3,000,000 people have "viewed" my Google+ accounts and both of them link to this blog, but I've only ever made a handful of "posts" to Google+. I do actively use Google+ to archive some of my images: for example, see the
Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers.
I suspect that the vast majority of the views of my other Google+ account are due to folks who are looking for other people who just happen to share my name. I should perform an experiment and create a new account called "
Denisova hominin" as a publicity stunt!
Science If
From 1952 to 1974,
If magazine published science fiction stories from authors such as
Arthur C. Clarke,
Jack Vance and
Walter M. Miller. The January 1954 issue even included a review of the then recently-published
Childhood's End.
Childhood's End was a book in which Clarke indulged his interest in paranormal phenomena. Sadly, Clarke seemed no better than the rest of us at wielding psychic powers and tuning into the future. Sure, with his technical knowledge he could predict the usefulness of innovations like
communications satellites, but in his personal life he could not predict the future. In 1953
he got married, but in less than a year that was all over. He went off to Sri Lanka.
 |
| cover by David Stevenson |
Not long after Clarke's death,
Frederik Pohl blogged about his collaboration with Clarke to write
The Last Theorem. In that novel we see one last version of Clarke's vision of advanced alien beings, now called the "
Grand Galactics".
As is the case for other Clarke stories, there are intermediaries between the super-advanced Grand Galactics and we bumbling Earthlings. In
The Last Theorem, the "One Point Fives" are sent to Earth by the Grand Galactics and they end up passing a bunch of high tech knowledge on to we primitive Earthlings, allowing us to eventually get on the good side of the Grand Galactics. Whew!
Recently I indulged my fan fiction disease by starting a sequel to
Jack Vance's novel
Trullion. I
quickly realized that I could write both Asimov and Vance into
The League of Yrinna. However, why stop there? I simply had to also invite Clarke to the party (see
here).
Apparently Asimov and Clarke first met in 1953. I'm now imagining a slightly different 1953 in the
Ekcolir Reality.
It is fun to imagine a deep secret that stems from when Asimov and Clarke met in 1953, in the Ekcolir Reality.
The pace of scientific discovery was
slightly faster in the Ekcolir Reality. In 1953, Harold Urey's Exobiology Institute held a conference called "Life in the Universe". Several science fiction writers with advanced degrees in science were invited to the conference, including Asimov (Ph.D. in biochemistry), Clarke (Ph.D. in physics), John Vance (Ph.D. in geochemistry) and
Judith Grossman (Ph.D. in molecular biology).
Judith's research on synthetic agonists for
nicotinic receptors led to self-experimentation and apparently frightening partial access to the
Hierion Domain by way of the
Bimanoid Interface. According to
Gohrlay, Judith had to be extracted from Earth following her publication of sensitive information that she had obtained via the Bimanoid Interface.
Using the Bimanoid Interface, Judith had been able to access information from the previous
Reality, the
Asimov Reality. Here in the
Buld Reality, I find myself in a similar predicament. I've been tasked with telling the secret history of
Deep Time, but it ain't easy.
Related Reading:
Frederik Pohl
Next:
Part 2 of
The League of Yrinna.
 |
| visits to the wikifiction blog |
No comments:
Post a Comment