Find Philoscifi at www.philoscifi.com

This site is set out simply enough, a bonus for user friendliness, but we will find perhaps it’s a little too bland. The structure is as follows: headings for “Philosophy,” “SF,” “Creativity,” “The Good Stuff,” and some feedback pages and bio pages. The latter is a good read about the struggles of a disenfranchised gamer, imperially-named blog author “Justarius.”

There are some useful blogs under the first four headings. In a blog entitled “3 approaches to writing” filed under the “Creativity” heading, we find a list of narrative types that could inform philosophical science fiction. “SF” runs through such topical material as The Hunger Games. And there are some honest fanzine type observations regarding science fiction and stuff of interest to gamers. “Philosophy” gives us blogs and pages with a self-help feel, but perhaps some of the premises could be examined more. It does defend evolution versus creation in an intelligent enough way, raising the argument that religion need not be obviously incompatible with Darwinism.

But despite all this no actual examples of philosophical science fiction! At first this struck me as most odd. Online science fiction is swimming in submissions. Most online publications only take these in the northern hemisphere’s summer, the editors closing for submission when they are faced with reading too many.  Avenues for publication close down as print mags are increasingly forced online, only to find there is no money there either. So there’s no shortage of material, and yet outside of scanty print matter and some online book club notes, no one (besides Philosofict) catering to specifically philosophical stuff that is out there as well. Philoscfi is too casual to really be a critical resource for those wanting to know what offerings read, so without a few stories something is lacking.

I realised that the way to understand what Justarius is trying to do is by putting the emphasis on the conjunct impled by the name Philoscifi, or better still, reading it as a disjunct. The site gives us discussion on philosophy or sci fi, not on combinations of the two. This explains why the references are to works that are either one or the other, the only exception I could find being to Flowers For Algernon. Flowers… deals with rising and falling intelligence. The headings too should have been more of a clue: “Philosophy” is separate to “SF.”

In part it was because I felt that a gap had been left here, and that was evident in general, that I started Philosofict. I think it is a good idea to add what you find lacking, especially if you think the results can be more thoughtful. I cannot help but feel it is a certain mindlessness which lets public attention wander listlessly from one sustained unresolved crisis to another: nukes, wars, financial diddles, falling wages, the environment. If the great unwashed mass of pulp fiction readers were smartened up rather than dumbed down, things might be different. Justarius sometimes seems to be motivated by this same line of thinking, but he’s reserved. With the very idea of a more thoughtful blog he leads by example, but he does not explicitly encourage using story-telling or anything else to put it all together into (dare I say it!) some kind of grand(er) narrative.  As a result the blog seems aimless, and a certain thoughtlessness winds up pervading it.

E. (ed.)

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