I think other people are confused about science fiction. It is not really all that useful for mere entertainment. It is instruction. The goal is not to be less than it, and consume it, it is to be more than it, and use it as a developmental ‘crampon’, so to speak, a sharp prosthesis used to aid a seasoned climber in direct vertical ascent.

Yes, a crampon. A kallikantzaros, of sorts.

I used ‘sci-fi’ as a young child to invoke waves of selves who surpassed both its authors and its stories as they arrived on the shores of my futures selves in a single lifetime. As children, so did my peers. I do not believe we did this purposefully, we had no idea it was possible. I cannot speak for them. I simply did it. The results were, consistently, explosive. Intellectually, creatively… ecologically… and developmentally.

This did not translate well into the adult world, where science fiction is produced, whored, and admired. Financailly, yes. Relationally, no.

Another result was that people thought I was either … extremely intelligent or insane and dangerous. And they wanted me to write books instead of become more than stories. A lot, too.

The reality is that they were acting like consumers, while I was taking the developmental bait and running with it. I kept trying to demonstrate this game. Only children understood. That, of course, was the important clue. That, right there. When Zelazny wrote about the Kallikanzaros, or Van Vogt wrote about Slan or Goseyn… I knew… that I was more… than all their stories combined.

My friends? I thought they were like me. I always thought that. But again and again they showed that they were not. They became… damaged. Slave minds. Literally. To books and … it was as if looking up to genius made them too small to surpass it. They marveled at what they imagined were distant fantasies without wondering why they found them so exciting… and sagely announced, with much head-nodding and self-convincing parahypnotic stupor: ‘those are fictions, you know like … mind-candy, man’. Really? They found such terrifying visions sweet? Or … maybe… something else was afoot. Something they were losing touch with as their own falsified ‘aboveness’ and ‘maturity about objective reality’ began to… [ insert capping phrase here ala dokusan demonstration ].