NOTE:This post was written to introduce a new blog which has since been merged into this blog.

My intention with this blog is to demarcate, describe, and discuss an aesthetic that I’m interested in and a producer of: Folk Sci Fi

The impetus for this comes from two places:

My work as a part of the art collective/publishing company/noise band the Gold County Paper Mill, where the term “Folk Sci Fi” originates from, and a discussion that I had with my fellow blogger and good friend Ivan Lozano.

We were talking about whether or not science fiction is pop culture. I think that although pop culture has appropriated geek culture (and how and why that has happened is another blog entirely) to the point where the two are almost synonymous, geek culture is not everything that science fiction is.

Geek culture is Star Wars, its space opera, its fantasy and super heroes. There are themes in science fiction that go beyond these things and take the long view.

This sci fi is a vast inhuman consciousness floating in the emptiness between galaxies.

This sci fi is manufacturing visions of the wind-swept rocks of dead Mars, of the slow collapse of civilizations, of vast unknowable structures.

This sci fi is about sluggish transformations and the future of humanity.

It is trying to portray the inhuman.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot encompass these themes: it’s pop, it’s a bubble, it’s of the moment and totally humanistic.

What I’m trying to catalogue here, with this blog, is when pop culture, or folk, briefly touches these themes. That liminal zone is where folk sci fi dwells.

But this blog is an experiment, a public environment for me to explore my ideas. Feedback is encouraged. Welcome, let’s see how this goes! I’m planning on posting every Tuesday.

We, the People of Space, call to the ears of all artonauts and astrotects:

Your eyes must be closed to the dread revelations of the sciences of space as they show the stars to be nothing more than dreary orbs of dry riverbeds or frozen gases. Open your inner eyes to the nite sky of the mind!

Never visit the all-too-real canals of Venice; rather, return again to the canals of Mars; let monsters climb back into the craters of the Moon; listen to Sun Ra, the only man to truly know Saturn; and remember, all artonauts and astrotects, the planets, those wandering stars, are named after Gods that once walked the world!