textiplication.com

I owe a hat tip to the blogroll for pointing me at Jason Stoddard, but I can’t remember who cited him when. Jason’s an SF writer who keeps a marketing head in his day office. That head has been doing some eye-opening research that ought to be, um, embarrassing? [excuse me] for a lot of us SF types.

This one, about SF and Second Life:

Go to Second Life. Do a search on “Science Fiction.” Here’s what you’ll find:

21 total results
2 Star Trek tributes
1 comic book store
0 science fiction authors
0 science fiction magazines
0 science fiction conferences

You get the picture. Ain’t much there. Out of 2.5 million edge-of-the-internet kinda people, this is what we got.

Well, uh, for some reason I never thought about that. Here we are in a time when people are actually living the lifestyle forecast in two of the best SF novels ever written (and a lot more besides), and virtually none of them are SF readers. Hmm. Meaning that none of them are there because they read Neuromancer or Snow Crash.

Actually, I can’t imagine Hiro Protagonist reading anything but a technical reference manual, or Case ever reading anything at all (can you read at all when you’re hopped up on octagons? Doesn’t sound easy – if the dents in the table are jumping out at you, what would printed words do? “Don’t worry, we’ll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.”) I could insert something about how SF readers obviously want to read about people doing things that they don’t want to do themselves.

So if, as Stoddard suggests, SF should be trying to move to where these forward-thinkers, these Second-Lifers, will like us and want to be with us as well — where will we be?

Do Second-Lifers even read?

More about this later.