So here is another thing we said we were not going to do… and as soon as we said it, as soon as the words hit the screen – we did it anyway! Sometimes being a publisher is like herding wet cats. What brought this on, you may ask? I was attempting to retrieve an article from some time ago and was proudly informed that ‘404-page no longer exists’ by the handy error messenger. Frustrated, I went back to all of the other bookmarked pages in this thread to receive the same message. It turns out that the Internet is transitory and much of what we think is carved in stone (or ought to be) is just a collection of magnetic bits and bytes that wink out of existence as soon as someone changes their minds, or decides to move on or… whatever.
This happens to be the case for a number or South African pages relating to, or involved with Literary or Artistic trends or insights which seldom last in the public mind. As over most of Africa, any contribution along these lines is part-time and this impermanence is often leveraged by the West as ‘it does not exist’ and often, this is true enough because it ‘no longer exists’. Journal and topically critical articles that have been published in the past seldom endure long enough to move into canon, or survive in print or in e-format to be able to build and argument for their existence. This state in itself – feeds louder, better funded and more durable conversations. Literally hundreds of posts about the state of Gaming, Science Fiction or Fantasy have just fallen by the wayside – never to have been just because a domain was changed, or a similar reason.
So, what to do? With the current state of Academia falling foul of accusations of inappropriate data manipulation, outright fraudulent claims, curated contextual misrepresentation and simply bad research, where are all the articles that I have put out over decades calling them out? Well… nowhere, that’s where! Locked in a print run twenty years ago in the bottom a a dusty trunk, discarded by any of the 10 people who ever got to see it… If that wasn’t depressing enough, the discussions it generated online now disappeared as the author collapsed their discussion page without ever archiving it and any reference long gone into Internet afterlife.
So… here are new pages to run concurrently with the Fiction pages, and hopefully a dedicated Page to the threads (not just upload posts and ICQ logs – yes, my logon with ICQ still only had 5 digits…) Hopefully these articles will make the wayback machine this time around.