If you want your work to survive (and some science fiction does survive, very successfully) then your work has to capture some quality that lasts. You have to capture something that people will search out over time, even though they have to fight their way upstream against the whole rushing current of obsolescence and innovation.
Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.
Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic courage to recognize your own significance in culture!
Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle.
Working seriously, improving your taste and perception and understanding, knowing what you are and where you came from, not only improves your work in the present, but gives you a chance of influencing the future and links you to the best work of the past. It gives you a place to take a solid stand.
Bruce Sterling, The Wonderful World of Storytelling
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karenmaywrites posted this
