An Invitation to Discussion

Some say that silence is golden. But when it comes to the Suite101 family, I'd have to say that it's more like lead. There's been a lot of talk recently about how to get readers to post to discussion threads. Getting one or two isn't so hard, but after that the thread sinks into the cyberspace abyss as if that piece of lead were tied to it.

So as an experiment, we here at Science Fiction and Society are going to begin a series of discussion articles centered on James Gunn's The Road to Science Fiction. This series of books is a wonderful collection of SF short stories that takes us from the earliest forms of SF to the present day and beyond. We'll begin with stories that are familiar to us in this century (well, soon to be last century) by working our way through Volume 4, "From Here to Forever."

There are a total of 31 stories in Volume 4, so this little experiment will be ongoing for about a year. We will not necessarily start a new story each week, because there are other areas that I'm planning to cover, and books and movies to review. But every few weeks we'll look at a new short story, and hopefully we'll be able to continuing talking about it and the issues it raises in the discussion area for some time to come.

You don't have to be a SF expert to join in. You don't even have to have read the story. My articles will fill you in on the details that you need to know. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject matter of the story as much as the story itself. For example, in a discussion about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, how do you feel about censorship? How about government control of information as in Orwell's 1984?

Whenever possible I will provide links to story-related material a week or so in advance. This way, if you're interested in participating and don't have or can't find a copy of Gunn's book, you'll still come in with some background. Please keep an eye on the "Bulletins" section of the Science Fiction and Society main page for these links.

Whether or not this discussion experiment will succeed or fail, only time will

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