...Of course, not very well--but it's pretty easy to compile, say, the Docbook 4.1 DTD in Wordperfect and edit moderately complicated documents. Or import... The limitations are that it uses its own formating system, rather than XSLT; and it uses DTDs instead of schemas, because the technology derives from SGML (which wordperfect also supports).
Arguably, WordPerfect has better support than any of the alternatives within the word processing space (i.e. discounting pure editors such as EMACS).
Okay, I guess I misread the article--including misreading such statements as "our stars are aging and not being replaced". I take it that he means star *fans* and not star *writers*, but that's not clear at all from the context. And it's also entirely untrue; the number of truly amazing new writers out there is exciting.
I disagree about the fan base thing, too. The number of people attending conventions is certainly down--but how many more people now communicate with like-minded fans through the internet? It's a lot cheaper to use chat than to travel to another city and book a hotel room; but has Spider actually done a study of how big the on-line SF fan-base is, and whether it's growing? One thing I constantly notice is how the slashdot community *assumes* science fiction as part of the backdrop of their lives; SF-related postings make the home page of/. all the time, and nobody takes issue with that... The entire technology sector is pervaded with SF culture regardless of whether the people actually identify themselves as fans or not.
The publishing issue is more complex. But while the size of the readership may be shrinking, it is only shrinking back to levels that were high-water marks in the late 70s to mid 80s (or so I've been told). The drying up of the magazine market is the only palpable difference in readership demographic.
Mind you, I'm partly blowing smoke here--but the Locus Magazine readers' poll has just been released, which actually shows the demographics of that slice of the reading public. I haven't got my copy yet, but don't expect any great surprises.
I guess, ultimately, I'd have to say this: my own readership is robust and growing, and the same is true of many other young SF writers I know. We are not suffering from the malaise Spider is bemoaning. For us, science fiction is alive and extremely well.
There's two books coming out of Tor this year, The Hard SF Rennaissance and the Space Opera Rennaissance, which show just how wrong Spider is. In fact, there's a whole new crop of SF writers out there who are doing exciting things: Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Alaister Reynolds, Ken Macleod, Peter Watts, just for instance. My own novel *Permanence* has just won the 2003 Aurora Award, one of Canada's two top honors for SF; and *Permanence* is loaded with new ideas, including an entirely new take on interstellar civilization (around Brown dwarf stars) as well as a new system for interstellar travel, all hard SF based... people seemed to love it, hence the award. There's tons of new areas to explore; I'm using cognitive science, emergent systems (and emergent democracy), General Selection theory and distributed cognition in what I'm writing now. Most of these ideas weren't even on people's radar five years ago, and a lot of them are just gaining ground now. It's a perfect time to be writing SF, there's lots of exciting directions to go in.
Let me hasten to add that fantasy isn't sitting still either. Just try anything by Jasper Fforde or China Mieville if you want to be jolted totally out of your usually tracks.
This lament about the death of SF gets repeated every few years. It's less true now than it ever was.
Slashdot Mirror
...Of course, not very well--but it's pretty easy to compile, say, the Docbook 4.1 DTD in Wordperfect and edit moderately complicated documents. Or import... The limitations are that it uses its own formating system, rather than XSLT; and it uses DTDs instead of schemas, because the technology derives from SGML (which wordperfect also supports). Arguably, WordPerfect has better support than any of the alternatives within the word processing space (i.e. discounting pure editors such as EMACS).
I disagree about the fan base thing, too. The number of people attending conventions is certainly down--but how many more people now communicate with like-minded fans through the internet? It's a lot cheaper to use chat than to travel to another city and book a hotel room; but has Spider actually done a study of how big the on-line SF fan-base is, and whether it's growing? One thing I constantly notice is how the slashdot community *assumes* science fiction as part of the backdrop of their lives; SF-related postings make the home page of /. all the time, and nobody takes issue with that... The entire technology sector is pervaded with SF culture regardless of whether the people actually identify themselves as fans or not.
The publishing issue is more complex. But while the size of the readership may be shrinking, it is only shrinking back to levels that were high-water marks in the late 70s to mid 80s (or so I've been told). The drying up of the magazine market is the only palpable difference in readership demographic.
Mind you, I'm partly blowing smoke here--but the Locus Magazine readers' poll has just been released, which actually shows the demographics of that slice of the reading public. I haven't got my copy yet, but don't expect any great surprises.
I guess, ultimately, I'd have to say this: my own readership is robust and growing, and the same is true of many other young SF writers I know. We are not suffering from the malaise Spider is bemoaning. For us, science fiction is alive and extremely well.
Let me hasten to add that fantasy isn't sitting still either. Just try anything by Jasper Fforde or China Mieville if you want to be jolted totally out of your usually tracks.
This lament about the death of SF gets repeated every few years. It's less true now than it ever was.