fifteen thousand words on american

Fifteen thousand words on American science fiction

I've been commissioned to write a long - in this case 15,000 words -

chapter on American science fiction, for a huge encyclopedic work on

American literature more generally. This is quite a challenging task,

and I'm still struggling with it ... which is unfortunate, since my

deadline passed late last week.

Hopefully, I'll have it wrestled into shape in the next few days.

Part of the problem is that 15,000 words requires almost as much

thought as a book - it requires that a lot of detail be given, with

names to be named, works to be described, fairly involved choices of

relative importance to be made. However, it doesn't allow description

of anything in particular to be at the level of detail that's possible

in an actual book. Another part of the problem lies in the difficulty

of separating out American science fiction from other kinds,

especially British (and, although "American" in this context mean

"US", it's rather arbitrary factoring out the Canadian writers).

The biggest part of the challenge, though, is that the chapter is

supposed to focus as much as possible on contemporary writing, as in

just the last few years. That requires difficult judgments about what

should be included, what should be discussed at length, etc. History

has not yet made any of those judgments. Leave aside the fact that

I've found some embarrassing gaps in my reading (which I will not

reveal in public), to be plugged as best I can.