New Project
Category: Books & Writing...
Posted Friday, December 20, 2002 at 06:39 AM [GMT-6]

December is supposed to be a slow month in my line of work. Websites are generally not high priority items for businesses in this area anyway, and people seem to be reluctant to embark on any new projects in December, what with the vacations and distractions of the season.

Recognizing this fact of life has freed me to focus some time on a personal pet project that I've been kicking around for a while...making the best of the downtime, as it were.

One of my favorite pastimes as an early teen was reading science fiction. This was, of course, back in the "old days" before Star Trek series clones and Dungeons-n-Dragons fantasy came to dominate the "science fiction" section of the book store. Back then, hard sci-fi was still in vogue...fiction that took real technology or real science and applied a subtle (or not-so-subtle) spin on it to amaze and amuse the reader. Plots were plausible and they assumed a modicum of intelligence on the part of the consumer. I miss those days...or at least those stories.

Not that fantasy as a genre was non-existent. Ursula K. Le Guin was writing beautifully about wizards and dragons even back then, for example, but perhaps my imagination wasn't properly attuned. I much preferred the space sagas and rampaging robots and telepathic tyrants and genetic grotesques as concocted by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and Robert Sheckley. Even the weirdness of Harlan Ellison didn't seem like fantasy in the strictest sense of the word.

One of the best sources for such hard SF reading material was a small magazine called "Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact." In fact, it's still in print - here's the website - but I haven't read it in years, for various reasons. But in the late 60s and early 70s, John W. Campbell's little monthly was the créme de la créme of the genre, easily eclipsing the more pulpish competitors like "If" and "Galaxy."

I'm not really sure it was the quality of writing that set Analog apart but it did have a clear edge in one very important department: the cover art. Which brings us to the real topic of this post (you were beginning to wonder, weren't you?). I'm not sure how the Internet has survived this long without a site devoted to memorializing the artwork that graced the Analog covers, but I aim to rectify that shortcoming, and soon. In fact, I've gotten something of a start, here. Of course, I don't expect this to appeal to a wide cross-section of the population...heck, I don't expect it to appeal to anyone else but me, and so I've done it for my own mindless purposes. Still, SF artwork done in a pre-Photoshop world should hold a certain nostalgic fascination, so perhaps from that perspective, it's not a totally wasted effort.

But...now that I've committed to this little project, clients are climbing out of the woodwork. So much for selfless contributions to the Internet community. Duty calls. (What I wouldn't give for a good time/space continuum disruption device right about now.)