5 Long Years

At the end of November 2005, I launched bloginhood. The night was chill and damp and a typical impenetrable West Coast winter fog was oozing over everything in the Lower Mainland and I was reading Bradbury.

Five years later, in the deep of tonight, it's strangely cold (not the dry, skin-blackening, space-between-the-galaxies cold of the Prairies or the drenching, overwhelming, claw-at-your-bones cold of Eastern Canada) and snowflakes are gently but insistently stumbling out of the low-hanging orange sky and I'm reading Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia.

In the time between, I've been babbling about this and that having to do with science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and everything else in between that makes up the grand, creaking, expanding, wonderful genre of SF; hopefully with some degree of consistency. Why? Because it's so much fun! All of the book, TV, and film critiques - the savaging of the bad, the gushing over the good and the grand shoulder-shrugging over the indifferent; the sharing of genre-related news tidbits; the meditations or rants on the genre in general or issues affecting it; the reports from the cons; the side projects like launching a short-lived sister blog or playing a small role on the editorial team of an online critical SF magazine in its dying days; the BSG set photos as the writers' strike forced the series into hiatus; the War of the Worlds rehash; the occasional privilege of taking part in discussions on the very cool SF Signal; the 365 Short Story Challenge; and the lists in all their varying lengths and entirely subjective content... all of it has been such a blast! SF is my first love and it's so great to be able to have a place to come and talk about it.

One of the best parts of the whole experience has been all of you. I'm kind of baffled that people bother coming to this site, but for whatever reason, I'm grateful that you do come because it's cool to know that other fans out there are thinking about some of the same books, shows, films, and issues - even if you're also thinking that I'm totally out to lunch in my assessment of them. Which, admittedly, I probably am. So here's a shout-out to all of you, fellow SF fans, to the folks in London and Dorchester and Manchester and Glasgow, in Madrid and Wiesbaden and Berlin, in Torino and Stockholm and Moscow, in New Delhi and Adelaide and Canberra, in Seoul and Urasoe and Osaka, in Sao Paulo and Bogota and Mexico City, in Seattle and San Francisco and Peoria and the Bronx and Houston, and of course here at home in Edmonton and Saskatoon and Kitchener and Toronto and Nepean and Laval and Halifax and Mount Pearl, and yes Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley and Courtenay and Kelowna and the rest of BC, and all of the very cool places in between. Thank you, one and all, for being part of the last five years.

I hope you'll all join me here for the next few years.