When I released the anthology TOC<\/a>, I included teasers for each story but not for my introduction. Here is its opening:<\/p>\n Athena Andreadis, Dreaming the Dark<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThere was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.\u201d<\/em> \u2013 Monique Wittig, Les Guerill\u00e8res<\/em><\/p>\n Being a voracious bookworm, I came to science fiction very young. My first well-remembered book was the unexpurgated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea<\/em>. By cultural background and temperament, I didn\u2019t like the Leaden \u2026 er, Golden SF Era. I preferred the Silver Age and the New Wave, with their explicit charters to push boundaries and write worlds and characters with more depth and flavor than cardboard. And since my mythology and history haunt my dreams and steps, it\u2019s also not surprising that one SF mode I like is space opera.<\/p>\n Most people conflate opera with Wagner. Likewise, most SF aficionados conflate space opera with galactic empires, messianic anti\/heroes (invariably white men) and gizmos up the wazoo, from death stars to individually customized viruses. And herein lies a tale of an immense, systemic failure of imagination.<\/p>\n Postscript:<\/strong> the authors participating in the anthology have their own takes on it. Two particularly entertaining views are those of Alex Jablokov<\/a> and Sue Lange<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Few people see galleys and galley covers, the crucial but invisible scaffoldings upon which a book is erected. Yet as much thought and care goes into their preparation as into that of the final book, because they’re its early scouts into the world. The cover of The Other Half of the Sky is unfurling, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science-fiction","category-space-exploration","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Other-Half-Wraparound-Galley-1a-FINAL.jpg\" "\\"Other-Half-Wraparound-Galley-1a-FINAL\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n